Managing Mats and Schedules

Applies to: Event organisers

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Mats (also called tatami, rings, or competition areas) are the physical spaces where matches take place. Assigning brackets to mats lets Hajime schedule matches in parallel across multiple areas, which shortens your total event duration and lets you plan judge coverage per area.

Mats are optional. An event running on a single competition area doesn't need to configure any.

When you need mats

Set up mats whenever your event runs on more than one physical competition area, or when you want to:

• Assign specific judges to a specific area
• Generate a running order per area instead of one big list
• Track video access tokens per area
• See a duration estimate for how long the whole event will take

Creating mats

Manually

1. Open your event and go to Mats.
2. Click Add Mat, give it a label (e.g. "Ring A"), an optional description, and a color used to visually distinguish it on schedule boards.
3. Save. Repeat for each physical competition area.

From a CSV file

1. Click CSV Import on the Mats page.
2. Click Download Template. The template is a single-column CSV with a mat_name header.
3. Fill in one row per mat and upload the file.
4. Review the preview table: each row is marked Create or Update (matching existing mats by name), with any validation errors or warnings shown inline.
5. Click Confirm Import. Import is capped at 100 rows / 1MB per file.

Assigning brackets to mats

Open Assign Brackets on the Mats page. Each bracket can be assigned to exactly one mat; unassigned brackets won't appear on any schedule.

You have three ways to assign:

• Manual, one at a time: pick a mat from the dropdown next to each bracket.
• Group assign: group the bracket list by speciality or gender, then assign an entire group to a mat at once with the "Assign all →" control.
• Auto-assign: let Hajime distribute brackets for you.
  • Balanced (LPT) distributes brackets across mats to minimise total event duration (longest-processing-time algorithm).
  • Speciality-aware keeps brackets from the same speciality together on a mat, then balances load across mats.
  • Click Preview to see the proposed assignment, and any conflicts it would introduce, before applying it.
  • If some brackets are already assigned, Optimize re-runs the same strategies but only fills in the unassigned brackets, leaving your existing assignments untouched.

Use Clear All to unassign every bracket from every mat and start over.

Generating schedules

Once brackets are assigned, each mat needs a schedule: the order in which its matches will run.

• Click Generate on an individual mat card to build (or rebuild) that mat's schedule.
• Click Generate All Schedules at the top of the Mats page to generate every mat's schedule in one go.
• Click View Schedule on a mat card to see the running order, with estimated start/end times per match.
• Click Clear (the refresh icon) on a mat card to wipe its schedule and match order without touching bracket assignments.

Ordering strategy

Each mat has a Strategy selector:

• Round Robin interleaves brackets round by round, so athletes competing in multiple brackets get rest time between their matches.
• Bracket Sequential completes one bracket fully before starting the next.

Call threshold

The Call setting on each mat controls how many matches ahead of their turn an athlete is called. A value of 3, for example, calls the athlete once 3 matches remain before theirs.

Reordering and pulling matches

• On a mat's schedule view, drag pending matches by their handle to manually reorder them. Completed and in-progress matches stay fixed, and matches missing an athlete can't be moved yet.
• Use Pull Match on a mat card to pull a specific pending match from another mat directly onto this one, ahead of its normal position. This is useful when a mat finishes early and needs more work queued up.

Cross-mat conflicts

If the same athlete is scheduled on two different mats at overlapping times, Hajime flags it in a Cross-Mat Scheduling Conflicts panel below the mat list. Resolve conflicts by adjusting mat start times or reassigning one of the conflicting brackets to a different mat.

Duration Estimator

The Duration Estimator (collapsed by default, above the mat list) is a planning tool: pick a hypothetical number of mats and a strategy (Balanced (LPT) or Sequential) to see an estimated total event duration and matches-per-mat breakdown, calculated from your current bracket data.

It's most useful before you've committed to a mat count and generated real schedules. Once your mats are set up and schedules are generated, rely on each mat's actual schedule and estimated match times instead.

Judges per mat

Each mat card has a Judges section. Click Assign to add a judge. They must already be accepted for the event, so invite them from the Manage Judges page first if they aren't listed. You can assign a judge as a regular judge or as the main judge for that mat; the main judge is highlighted with a star badge. Remove a judge from a mat with the × on their badge.

Running on paper

Every mat card has a Paper Entry link for entering results without live scoring, useful as a network-outage fallback. See the companion articles Running an Event on Paper and Restoring Paper Results for the full print-and-reconcile workflow; this page only covers navigating to that screen from a given mat.

Quick setup walkthrough

1. Open your event and go to Mats.
2. Add one mat per physical competition area (manually or via CSV import).
3. Click Assign Brackets and either assign brackets manually, by group, or use Auto-assign for a first pass.
4. Optionally expand the Duration Estimator to sanity-check total event duration for your mat count.
5. Set each mat's Strategy and Call threshold if the defaults don't fit your event.
6. Click Generate All Schedules (or generate mats one at a time).
7. Assign judges to each mat from the Judges section on its card.
8. Resolve any Cross-Mat Scheduling Conflicts shown below the mat list.
9. On event day, use View Schedule to track running order, and Pull Match if a mat needs more work queued up.

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Next in this guide: Readiness & Go-Live

Last updated: July 2026