For season two of my Reno Ice Adult League Concept, I have added two competitions. Champions League and the Open Cup. Last week I showed off what the RIAL Champions League will look like. This week I am showing off what the RIAL Open Cup will look like. The RIAL Open Cup is like March Madness during the regular season. It is a single elimination tournament with all of the RIAL concept teams. The RIAL Open Cup is based on the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup and the Football Association Challenge Cup.
The RIAL Open Cup only has one logo. It is in the Reno Ice colors like the league logo and the champions league logo. It’s a circle with the event name, mountains, and the league logo. It was designed after ski patches. The shape was chosen to stand out from the league logo and the champions league logo. The circle represents an O for open cup. The mountains represent all of the mountains in the Reno/Tahoe area. The idea of taking inspiration from skiing patches is that skiing/snowboarding plays a big part in Reno.
This is the RIAL Open Cup trophy. It is a basic design modeled after other soccer trophies. I added some other elements to it to make it less basic.
For this concept, every team in the RIAL automatically qualifies for the RIAL Open Cup. The RIAL Open Cup is a single-elimination tournament that starts the first week of the regular season. The RIAL Open Cup Final is played prior to the start of the postseason.
For season two of my RIAL concept, the first round of the RIAL Open Cup starts with a Play-In round with this season’s four expansion teams from the C-League. Round One adds the winners of the Play-In round, the rest of the C-League, the expansion teams from B-League, and the bottom five teams from te B-League last season based on the overall standings. Round Two adds the winners from Round One plus eight more B-League teams. Round Three adds the Round Two winners, the B-League Championship team, and all of the A-League teams. After that teams are eliminated until there is a winner.
The winners in the Play-In round move on to Round One. The winners of Round One move on to Round Two. The winners of Round Two move on to Round Three. The winners of Round Three move on to the Quarterfinals. The Winners of the Quarterfinals move on to the Semifinals. The winners of the Semifinals meet in the Final. The matchups for each round are chosen at random.
With every team qualifying, the RIAL Open Cup adds at least one additional game to their schedule. That means teams are now guaranteed fifteen games a season. Twelve regular season games, two (or three for some teams) postseason games, and one RIAL Open Cup game. If a team played all possible regular season, postseason, and open cup games, they would play twenty one total games in a single season. If a team played all possible regular season, postseason, open cup, and champions league games, they would play thirty one total games in a single season. The reason it is thirty one and not thirty two games is because teams that qualify for champions league would not play in the Play-In round of the open cup. Thirty one games would be more than double what most of the league would play in a single season.
Zac Electrifly 