Planning a spring tournament, month by month.

This is the month that matters most and the one most often skipped. Contact facilities now for spring availability. Complexes allocate their best spring weekends months ahead, and leagues that own their own fields block their season schedule in the autumn.

Pick your weekend against the local calendar rather than in isolation. What else runs that weekend within two hours, when do school spring breaks fall, and when does the local rec season start - because a rec season that has begun will take teams and umpires out of your pool on the same weekend.

Get the field agreement in writing with the rain policy in it. What happens to your money if the weekend is washed out is a question to settle in October, not in April with a radar image on your phone.

Sanction the event if you are going to, because the listing that comes with it is a distribution channel and it works on a lead time. Teams start looking for spring events in late autumn.

Get the event listed everywhere teams look, which is more places than you think: the sanctioning body's calendar, regional tournament listing sites, the local league and travel-org mailing lists, and the coaches you already know personally. The last of those outperforms all the rest for a first-year event.

Set the entry fee now, which means the budget has to be done now. Cost the format, count the games, divide by the team count you are confident of. Publishing a fee you later have to change is worse than publishing two weeks later.

Registration opens, and it opens with the format, the age groups, the entry fee, the refund policy, and the minimum field size all stated. Teams are budgeting their spring in December and a tournament that is not yet accepting entries is not in the conversation.

Say what happens if the event does not fill. A stated minimum field size with a clean refund is a trust signal, not a weakness - directors who hide it are the ones coaches have been burned by.

Expect the registration curve to be slow and then sudden. Most of your field will commit in the last three weeks before your deadline, which is unnerving the first time and completely normal.

The rules packet is a January job and it is the single highest-leverage document of the whole event. Nearly every dispute that happens on tournament weekend traces back to a sentence that was not in it.

It needs, at minimum: age cutoffs and proof requirements, bat standards, roster and lineup rules, pitching limits and rest, run rules, time limits and drop-dead, what happens to a partial inning, the tiebreaker order in sequence, the forfeit minimum and grace period, and the rain policy.

Publish it before teams pay, not after. A packet that arrives the week of the event is a packet nobody reads.

Chase the teams who registered interest and never entered. A short personal message converts far better than another mass email, and by February you know exactly who is missing.

Confirm the umpire crew against your actual game count now that the field size is close to final. Confirm the facility. Confirm insurance certificates are issued and delivered.

If you are going to be short, this is the month to decide whether to consolidate age groups, shrink the format, or cancel cleanly with refunds. All three are recoverable. Running an underfilled event at a loss and a poor experience is the one that costs you next year.

Publish the schedule two to three weeks before first pitch. Families are booking hotels and taking days off work, and a schedule that lands the Wednesday before is the single most common complaint about otherwise well-run tournaments.

Publish it somewhere that stays current rather than as a PDF that goes stale the first time anything moves - and something will move. Every team needs to know their fields and times, and every family needs the same information without having to ask a coach who is also trying to coach.

Have the rain plan written down before you need it: what reschedules, what gets shortened, what gets cancelled, and how you will tell everyone. Deciding that at 7am in the rain is how a good event unravels.