Tournaments (312)

People have asked how you run tournaments in volleyball, and my answer is this; it is similar to other sports. You have pool play, then move on to bracket/tournament play. In smaller tournaments, the pools are random, but in bigger tournaments they usually base the pools off of seedings. Seedings are what "rank" your team has before a tournament based on your record so far that season. They arrange the pools so that all of the highest seeded teams, which are "suppose to be" the best teams there, are all in different pools. They do this so that hopefully those good teams will meet up later in bracket play and in the championships. 

Once pool play is done, a certain number of teams move up depending on the size of the tournament. At smaller tournaments, only the #1 team in each pool might move up, but in bigger tournaments with 100 or more teams the 1st and 2nd team and sometimes 3rd teams from each pool move up to gold. 

Once pool play is over, bracket/tournament play starts. You either move to gold, silver, bronze, etc, depending on how you preformed in pool play. In this bracket, you have to keep winning to continue playing, so if you lose, you're done, although sometimes you can lose and still play if a third place team needs to be determined. This would be at tournaments that gave away bids to nationals, or any big tournament that would be a big part of your record and future seedings. So technically the only team that ends a tournament on a win is the champion and the winner of each bracket, if there are several different brackets. But at smaller tournaments, there are not several different brackets; instead there is a consolation bracket, where the lower half of the pools play for a consolation champion.