Fee Rule Presets
Tournament Settings → Fees has a dropdown called Fee Rule Preset, with three options: Standard, NOF, and NOF Champs. It's easy to assume this changes how fees work broadly — it doesn't. It changes exactly one thing: how the Uncovered Judging Fee is calculated on school fee sheets, i.e. the charge applied when a school doesn't bring enough judges to cover its entries.
Everything else on the fee sheet — entry fees, school fee, per-competitor fee, per-judge fee, custom charges, coupons — works identically no matter which preset is selected. Also true across all three: an uncovered judging fee is always billed to the school a judge is judging for, not necessarily the school that registered the judge.
Standard
Standard uses the judging-coverage rules you set up yourself under Setup→Fees→Judging Fee — e.g. "1 judge covers 6 IE entries in Pattern A, otherwise $10 per uncovered entry." Each rule (per pattern, per event type) is checked independently. That means a judge certified in more than one event type counts toward every rule they qualify for at once — they aren't "used up" by covering just one.
NOF
NOF uses the same dollar amounts and coverage ratios from your Judging Fee rows, but pools entries differently before applying them. Instead of scoring per pattern, it combines all Individual Events + Congress entries into one "Speech" bucket and all Debate + World Schools entries into one "Debate" bucket, across every pattern at once.
Judges are then split into speech-only, debate-only, and dual-eligible groups. A dual-eligible judge can only count toward one bucket under NOF (unlike Standard) — but the system automatically tests every way to divide your dual-eligible judges between Speech and Debate and picks whichever split produces the lowest total fee. You don't have to work this out by hand.
NOF Champs
This preset ignores your Judging Fee rows entirely and replaces them with a fixed championship formula:
- Speech entries (IE + Congress) owe at least 5 judged rounds total, or 1 round per entry if there are more than 5 — whichever is greater.
- Debate entries (Debate + World Schools) owe 6 judged rounds per 2 entries, rounded up.
- Each judge scheduled into a matching event-type block supplies 5 speech rounds or 2 debate rounds toward that requirement.
- Any shortfall is billed at $6/round for speech, $25/round for debate.
Whether a judge "counts" for a given schedule block depends on your Judge Schedule Block Availability setting: on, and only blocks a judge was specifically targeted for count; off, and a judge counts for every block on any day they marked themselves available at all.
Which one should I use?
If you write your own judging-coverage rules for a normal tournament, use Standard. If you're running an NOF regular-season event, use NOF. If you're running an NOF championship event, use NOF Champs.
FAQ
Will switching presets change my entry fees, school fee, or per-competitor/judge fees? No — only the Uncovered Judging Fee calculation changes.
If I switch from Standard to NOF Champs, do I lose my Judging Fee setup? No, those rows stay saved; NOF Champs just ignores them while selected. Switch back to Standard and they apply again.
Why does my fee sheet show one combined "Uncovered Judging Fees" row instead of one per pattern? Under NOF and NOF Champs, judging coverage is pooled across patterns (Speech/Debate), so there's no single pattern to attribute the charge to. Under Standard you'll see a separate row per pattern.