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Tournament is one of the top-level entities in Tennis Open Data Standards - this section will introduce its key features and help you to create a simple tournament.


1. What is a tournament?

The Tournament entity is used to represent a tennis tournament. We use Tournament to describe when people get together to play competitive tennis - usually in one place over a day or more. Here are some examples of tournaments:


A Tournament may include any number of tennis disciplines and any number of events.


Note: There are cases where a tournament doesn’t fit the usual definition but can still be represented by a Tournament entity in TODS. Some examples:

  • A tennis ladder at a club - this could take place over a whole season.
  • Davis Cup World Group (to 2018) - matches take place all over the world


2. Tournament Schema

To see a graphical representation of the data model (schema) for the Tournament entity please expand the link below:

3. Creating a Tournament

The minimum information required to create a Tournament entity is an ID and a name.

<Tournament>
  <Updated>2019-12-31</Updated>
  <Ids>
    <Id>Tennis:Tournament:LTA:349C4B46-9EB6-4E52-9486-38C02911FF03</Id>
  </Ids>
  <ProviderTournamentID>349C4B46-9EB6-4E52-9486-38C02911FF03</ProviderTournamentID>
  <TournamentName>Sample Tournament Name</TournamentName>
</Tournament>


{
  "Tournament": {
    "Updated": "2019-12-31",
    "Ids": { "Id": "Tennis:Tournament:LTA:349C4B46-9EB6-4E52-9486-38C02911FF03" },
    "ProviderTournamentID": "349C4B46-9EB6-4E52-9486-38C02911FF03",
    "TournamentName": "Sample Tournament Name"
  }
}


This is a valid Tournament but not very useful for your clients so you will probably wait until you have some more information about the Tournament - for example the start date - before creating a TODS message.

4. ProviderTournamentID

In ProviderTournamentID you must supply your unique identifier for the tournament.

The value of ProviderTournamentID must be unique within your tournaments. To make IDs unique globally TODS uses a URN-style system, so the full globally unique tournament ID is:

Tennis:Tournament:<SourceID>:<ProviderTournamentID>

Note: In ProviderTournamentID you only need to supply your own unique ProviderTournamentID as the other parts are known.

When you’re exchanging information with a client or supplier it is very likely that you both have an id for the Tournament. To make exchange easier TODS allows for any number of additional ids to be included with Tournament. See ‘How to include multiple identifiers’ for more information.


5. Tournament Names

TODS allows for different names for a Tournament to be provided so that clients can use the best one for their situations.

OfficialName: this is for the official name for the tournament agreed with the sanctioning body - for example ‘The Championships, Wimbledon 2019’

PromotionalName: this is for a media-friendly name that is used to promote the tournament, for example ‘Wimbledon 2019’ 

6. Adding more information

Once the minimum information has been supplied you can add additional information if it is available or as it becomes available.

For example when a tournament is first put into the calendar perhaps only the name and date are known. Once a venue is agreed that information can be added to the Tournament. Later a web site address, details on entry timescales and so forth can be added. Please see the full list of available attributes at


TODS defines a set of standard attributes that are widely used within tennis. If you need to supply some extra information that doesn’t fit one of the standard attributes you can use an extension. See ‘How to included additional information using extensions’ for more information.


Related Information


Go back to Tennis Open Data Standards home page.