Divisions and weight classes
How a division preset declares the age categories, grades and weight ladders divisions are built from, and how divisions come into existence as athletes enter them.
A division is the set of people who will fight each other. A division preset is the rulebook they are built from — the age categories, the grade ladder, the weight matrix and how long a contest runs — which you write once and apply to every event you run.
The preset is not a list of divisions. It is the axes divisions are made of, and the divisions themselves appear one at a time as athletes enter them.
The three axes
An athlete registering makes three choices, and those three name one division.
| Axis | What it is | Who decides |
|---|---|---|
| Age category | One of the preset's named bands | The athlete picks; their date of birth decides which are open to them |
| Grade | A belt, a named experience level, or nothing | Their recorded rank, or their own choice — see below |
| Weight | One rung of the ladder for their category | The athlete picks |
Gender is deliberately not one of them. The event decides whether divisions split male from female, and an athlete's recorded gender does the rest. Nobody is asked, because it is a fact about them rather than a claim they make on a form.
Divisions appear as people enter them
This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes an event page readable.
A published event has no divisions at all. The first athlete to choose Male / Adult / Blue / -76kg brings that division into existence; the second one to choose it joins them. Nothing is generated in advance.
Two things follow:
- Every division listed on an event has somebody in it. There is no scrolling past four hundred empty divisions to find yours.
- When the last person withdraws, the division goes with them — until the draws are generated, after which it is part of the record of the day.
The grade axis
Circuits disagree about what a division's second axis even is, so a preset chooses:
Belts
Each grade is a real belt, and an athlete's recorded rank decides what they may enter — they are not offered a choice. This is a gi event.
Named levels
The preset names its own rungs — Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Pro. Nobody holds a certificate in "Advanced", so the athlete declares their own. This is how a no-gi circuit runs experience divisions.
No grade at all
Divisions are age and weight only. A professional card has no belt axis, and asking for one would be asking for a field with no bearing on anything.
Each age category then says which of those grades it runs, which is what stops a six-year-old being offered a purple belt. Leave a category's grade list empty and it offers all of them.
Age categories
Both bounds are inclusive, and either may be left off — 4–5, 18–29, 56 and over. An athlete picks one, and the preset's age rule decides whether they fit it:
- Age on the day — how old they actually are at the event. Most BJJ circuits.
- Age at 31 December — everyone born in the same year competes together. The federations aligned with the Olympic sports.
The difference is real: somebody who turns 18 in November is 17 under the first rule and 18 under the second.
Match times
Each age category carries how long its contests run, and any grade within it may override that. The override exists because a black-belt contest is twice a white-belt one in the same age category — five minutes against ten — which is not a difference of age.
The length is frozen onto each division as it is created, and it is what the mat schedule is actually built from. A day of five-minute white-belt contests and ten-minute black-belt ones is not a day of one average contest, and planning it as though it were is how a mat runs an hour late.
The weight matrix
One row per age category and gender. That is the only granularity that is ever right: a Pee Wee ladder starts around 18kg and an adult male one at 57.5kg, and no federation runs men and women on the same rungs.
A row is four numbers rather than a typed-out list of classes:
- Start — the first limit. Anyone at or under it enters that class.
- Step — how far apart the rungs are.
- Rungs — how many
-classes there are. - Absolute — whether an open-weight division sits on top.
57.5 / 6 / 8 gives -57.5, -63.5, -69.5 … -99.5, and then +99.5 on top. That last class is added for you and cannot be turned off: without it the heaviest athletes have nowhere to enter, which is the mistake this shape exists to prevent.
Both units are always displayed — -63.5kg (-140lbs) — because converting in your head is how people turn up to the wrong division.
The three tiers of preset
Presets exist at three levels, and they behave differently:
Platform presets
Maintained by MatComp administrators as a sane starting point. Visible to everyone, editable by nobody else.
Federation presets
Owned by a federation, and the reference its approved organisers are expected to copy from. They carry the federation's belts and its age rule, and anyone may read one.
Your own presets
Owned by your organiser company. These are the only ones you can edit, and they are reusable across every event you run.
You do not edit somebody else's preset — you duplicate it. Duplicating any visible preset produces a copy filed under your organiser company, which you can then rename and change freely. The original is untouched, and the copy remembers where it came from.
Applying a preset to an event
Applying a preset freezes a copy of it onto that event: the grades, the age categories, the weight ladders and the match times, exactly as they read at that moment. It does not link to it.
That has two consequences worth understanding:
- Editing the preset later — yours, or the federation's — cannot reshape a competition that is already taking entries.
- Last season's results still render under the names people actually competed under, even after a federation renames a belt.