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Host overview

Hosting a competition is a season-long project, and MusterSheet walks it in order. Every competition moves through the same pipeline, shown at the top of your management page:

Draft → Announced → Open → Locked → Live → Awards → Complete

Here's the arc, with a guide for each stage:

  1. Create your competition — a draft takes two fields: a name and a date. Everything else comes after. (Hosted last year? Clone it and skip most of the setup.)
  2. Classes, fees & scoring setup — define your competition classes, registration fees, and the judging rubric. While you're in Settings, add your ticket link and weather policy.
  3. Invite your staff — co-host, registrar, announcer, volunteer coordinator.
  4. Set up online payouts — ten minutes with Stripe, and card-paid registration fees land directly in your own account, in full.
  5. Open registration, then manage registrations as bands apply — approve, waitlist, assign classes, log mailed checks.
  6. Invite & manage judges — one judge (or several) per scoring section.
  7. Build the schedule — auto-generate the lineup, then drag, insert breaks, and notify bands.
  8. Set up the fan portal — enable shoutouts and Fan Favorite voting, then print the QR posters fans scan at the gate. Running a Drum Line Battle? Turn it on too.
  9. Competition day — run everything from the live Command Center, with the check-in station and cash station staffed by your volunteers.
  10. Scores, awards & publishing — finalize results privately, run the awards ceremony from the announcer's teleprompter, then hit Publish to unlock public results and every director's judges packet at once.

Your management page

Everything lives in one place: open My Competitions, click your competition, and click Manage. The left sidebar has a tab for each job — Settings, Rubric, Classes & Fees, Awards, Registrations, Schedule, Judges, Staff, Vendors, Payments, Moderation, and Winners. The guides that follow walk each one.

You don't have to do this alone

Nearly everything a host can do, a Co-Host can do too — see Invite your staff. Give your booster president a co-host seat and split the load, especially on the day.