From the desk
Season Calendar · file SS-01 · filed September 2026
The year runs on two seasons that barely touch, and a shoulder period that decides both.
Most people outside the sport picture a single basketball season that starts in the autumn and ends in the spring. Inside the amateur game there are really two seasons, run by different organisers, played under slightly different conditions, and separated by a shoulder period that carries more of the year's actual development work than either of them.
The first is the school season. It is the longer of the two, it is the one with a settled schedule published in advance, and it is played almost entirely in front of a local audience. Practice opens in late autumn, the schedule runs through the winter, and the postseason bracket closes it out in late winter or early spring. Because it is a fixed schedule against known opponents, it is the season in which a team identity forms: rotations settle, a defensive scheme gets repeated enough to be automatic, and a player learns what their role looks like over twenty-odd games rather than over a weekend.
Read the full season calendar file
Recruiting Periods · file RD-01 · filed September 2026
Every date in the recruiting year carries one of four labels, and each label restricts a different thing.
College recruiting does not run continuously. The year is divided into labelled periods, and on any given date the label determines what a college coach is permitted to do. There are four designations in common use, and the distinction between them is not how keen anyone is; it is which specific activity is allowed.
A contact period is the least restricted. During one, a college coach may watch a prospect play and may also have recruiting conversations with the prospect and their family away from the college campus. This is the designation that permits the familiar image of a coach visiting a school or a home.
Read the full recruiting periods file
Tournament Formats · file CO-01 · filed September 2026
Almost every weekend event runs the same two-stage shape, and the join between the stages is where it gets interesting.
A weekend event has to produce a winner from a large field in about forty-eight hours, using a fixed number of courts. Almost every organiser solves that with the same two-stage structure: a round-robin group stage, then a single-elimination bracket seeded from the group results.
The group stage divides the field into pools, usually of three or four teams, with every team playing every other team in its pool. Pools of four are tidier, because each team plays three games and the arithmetic of the standings is straightforward. Pools of three are common when the field size does not divide neatly, and they are less satisfactory: two games is a very small sample on which to seed anything, and a single poor quarter can decide a team's whole weekend.
Read the full tournament formats file