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The last year I played and watched a lot of StarCraft II. Watched more than I played actually. I knew some friends who played too and together we got the idea of organizing a small tournament on our university. So with three men, we set out to make something happen.
At first we had to think what we wanted. Online tourney? A large LAN?
The decision wasn't easy, since we live close together so a LAN was possible. But it's hard to get enough room/players for a LAN. We chose to combine the two. Online preliminaries and offline semi's/finals. That way we only had to get two spaces, one for the viewers of the finals and one for the finalists to be in.
Now that we decided on that, we found another problem. Where did we get sponsorship? We were just three students, who would want to sponsor three students for something that didn't have a lot of potential?
Lucky us, we knew a Starcraft enthusiast that worked with a company for programmers. We asked him to relay our cry for money to the people there and after waiting a few days we got a positive answer. We would get 125 euro's to make this happen. In return they wanted to talk to the crowd a bit before the finals started. We were so happy that our plan could go on 
We planned the dates on which the preliminaries and finals would be played. Then rented the cinema-room in the campus bar (which has room for about 50 people) and made some posters to get people's attention. On the first day that people could write up, we got about 8 people wanting to compete.
But after two weeks, with the ending of the sign-up period, we had 36 sign-ups, more than I had expected.
All the preparations are done now. We just had out first preliminaries, groups existing of 4 people playing bo3's against each other and the top 2 goes on. It was very hectic at the beginning, but once people found their opponents everything went really well.
Next week I'll write part two, where we'll see who makes it through RO18/RO8 to the semi's
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This sounds awesome. I've actually been thinking about doing something similar to this for my high school senior project next year. How will you set up the viewing space? will you have casters?
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The viewing space will be a small cinema-room. Chairs are there already, so that's no concern We will have one or two casters, one of our three will cast.
The gamers can't be in the same room as where we will cast, since we don't have soundproof booths. We decided to just put them in my room, about a 5 minutes walk from the cinema-room. That way they won't be very far away but we're still be sure that they do not here our shoutcasting.
But the finale will be on the ninth of June, so expect another blog after that happened and maybe I can give you some practical tips 
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Wow, that's awesome! I also just organized a tournament, first time I tried so, since high school is now done for me [just a small-ish thing among my friends, expected only maybe ten people, but got 20+ so it's pretty cool, although of course nowhere matching the sweet setup you guys did, we're just having a pizza party for the final at someone's house lol]. Are there gonna be any vods for your tourney? :D
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Small businesses are often very eager to sponsor small things like this. The amount of publicity they can get is often similar to what a single advertisement gives them, and where an advertisement can cost anywhere upwards of several thousand dollars, they can pitch in only a few hundred for a gaming tournament prize pool and everyone praises them for the large prize!
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@mizU, a friend of mine. Not a professional commentator. He's pretty good though, think he'll do fine
@Dhalpir, I'll use that argument the next time we seek sponsors xD. But since this is the first time, I was really glad we actually got something. Next time we have an indication of how many people will participate/come to the finals. Then we'll probably get more moneys
@Llamawhatever, maybe there will, at least we're going to make a hypevideo out of the games played today
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EPT
