Return to the office ping pong and pool tournaments

A template to organize your next ping pong or pool tourney with your team.

SiNing Chan

Many companies are starting to ease their employees back to the office.

There are many things we may not miss about returning to the office, such as the commute, locating the conference room for your next meeting, or looking for a free phone booth or room to take a call.

But, for others, it’s the wall full of an endless supply of snacks or the return of pool and ping pong tournaments that get them all giddy to go back.

Our company held a hybrid, hackathon this past week, enjoying the snacks and the catered meals, but our pool and ping pong tables sat empty. It was eerily quite without the familiar sounds of pong balls bouncing or pool balls tapping against each other.

So, we thought we’d spin up a little tournament to get people back into action.

Wanting something more dynamic and self-run, I opted for this doc instead of all the PDF bracket printouts. While I’ve tailored this template for ping pong tourneys, you can always

Copy the doc

⁠

and customize it for pool and teams! Feel free to update the guidelines with your own house rules and processes.

This template includes:

An easy way for everyone to

1. Sign up⁠

for the tournament (each player needs to sign-in to your shared, editable copy of the doc)

A way for people to choose others to challenge to a match (w/optional

Slack⁠

notifications when invited to a match and when someone’s accepted your invite)

A way to schedule your matches without leaving this doc, so you’ll know when the tables are (and aren’t) free (you can always add a

Google Calendar pack⁠

if you want to get fancy)

I’m trying it out to see how it works and plan to iterate on it as I go. Hop into our

Coda Community⁠

to let me know what you think!

Getting started

Start with the

2. Remember to read this⁠

page, then head to

1. Sign up⁠

to add your name. Next, share the doc with others so they can sign up. When everyone’s set, head to

3. Pair up. Play. Keep score.⁠

to invite others to play!

Ready to customize your copy of the template, click here to clear the sample data:

Clear template

⁠

In case you’re feeling a tad bit rusty, here are two fun video refreshers:

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.