Basketball Tournament Rules & Regulations

Basketball tournaments are high stakes events that eventually determine a champion of a league. Strict rules and regulations need to be determined before the tournament starts so there are no questions about the legitimacy of the tournament result. The actual game rules do not change from regular season to tournament time, but everything surrounding the games will be different.

  1. General Rules

    • For high school and college basketball tournaments each player will be allowed five fouls. Generally a high school game has four, eight minute quarters and a college game consists of two 20 minute halves. The clock stops on a referee's whistle, or when a basket is scored with under two minutes remaining in the period. There is no set standard number of timeouts in a game, and substitutions are allowed during a stoppage of play. If the score at the end of regulation results in a tie, an overtime period is played to determine a winner.

    Qualifications

    • Basketball tournaments happen throughout the season, though the most important ones come at season's end to determine a champion. Tournaments are filled with the best teams in the individual leagues. During the post-season, the tournament brackets are filled in by determining the best teams in the league. The teams are ranked by how well they performed during the regular season. The best team is matched with the worst team, the second-best team matched with the second-worst team and so on. The team that wins the most games, or the team that eliminates all other teams, wins the championship.

    Format

    • Basketball tournaments have two general formats, a single-elimination tournament or a round-robin tournament where every team plays each other. Single elimination tournaments are used by the NCAA to determine a champion. If a team wins, it advances. Lose, and the team is out of the tournament. Single elimination tournaments are high pressure and offer exciting and unexpected results.

      Round robin tournaments offer each team a chance to play every other team. The team that wins the most games is declared the winner and champion. This style of tournament has slightly less pressure, but results with a better idea of the best team in the tournament. Some tournaments give certain teams a "bye" in the first round. If there are an uneven number of teams, some teams will automatically be moved to the second-round without playing a game. This is often used as a reward for the best teams to enter the tournament.

    Referees

    • Tournaments often pull teams from different conferences or leagues. In order to prevent any bias among the referees, it is important to include officials from all the conferences during the games. Referees should not judge teams from their own conference if the tournament can help it. The officiating crew should also be split up so each referee comes from a different conference. The tournament should determine, if the resources are available, whether there will be instant replay allowed to determine if a shot was taken before time expired on the clock.