Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister’s Best Village Trophy Competition looks, from the outside, like a village fair. It isn’t. Its Folk Presentations section is a judged competition with 40 separate categories across music, dance, literature and drama — and every one of them is entered by a village or community group, not by an individual performer. There are no age groups at all. If you try to set this up the way you’d set up a school kalolsavam or a youth festival, built around age bands and individual candidates, the structure won’t fit — because this competition isn’t organised around age, it’s organised around how many categories a community group chooses to enter.
One open group, no age bands
Every other competition on this site splits participants by age — juniors, seniors, Class I to Class XII, under-18s and over-18s. The Best Village Trophy’s rules print none of that. Entries are community groups, so the official structure uses a single open group covering every age from child to elder, because a Village Chat panel alone needs speakers ranging from teenager to elder, and a 40-category competition isn’t going to run separate age ladders for every one of them. If you’re setting up a community-group competition like this, resist the instinct to invent age brackets just because every other competition has them — an “Open” group with no age restriction is the correct model when the entrant is a group, not a person.
40 categories, four sections — all Team entries
The Folk Presentations section is organised into four parts, and the rules print a named category list for each one (organisers can vary which categories run in a given year):
| Section | Sample categories | Entry type |
|---|---|---|
| Folk Music | Parang, Original Calypso, Folk Song Solo, Pan Solo, Drumology, Tassa, Spiritual Song, Folk Medley | Team (community group) |
| Folk Dance | Limbo, Chutney Dance, Calypso Dance, Soca Dance, Creative Freestyle, Social Dances | Team, minimum 6 dancers, no maximum |
| Literature | Short Story Performance, Poetry/Spoken Word, Village Chat | Team (performed, not just submitted on paper) |
| Dramatic Literature | Four themed Playlets — Anansi, Carnival Character, Ceremonies and Customs, Folk Characters | Team, 6–15 actors, 10-minute limit |
Notice that even the categories named “Solo” — Original Calypso, Folk Song Solo, Pan Solo — are still entered by the village group, not registered as an individual participant. The soloist performs, but the entry itself belongs to the group. That’s an easy detail to get wrong if your software assumes “Solo” in a category name means an individual participant type.
Minimum headcounts, not maximum ones
Most team competitions cap how large a group can be. This one does the opposite in several categories — it sets a floor, not a ceiling: choral entries need at least 6 singers, Parang needs at least 8 (4 of them vocalists), Tassa needs at least 4 performers, Drumology needs at least 6, and every dance presentation needs at least 6 dancers with no maximum printed at all. Software built only to enforce a maximum team size has nothing to check against a rule like this — a minimum-headcount validation is the piece that’s actually needed here.
Scoring every category out of 100 — with deductions layered on top
Each category the rules print a table for is marked out of 100, built from criteria like Content, Presentation, Technique and Impact — weighted differently category by category (a Short Story performance weighs Content at 30 and Costuming at just 5; a dance weighs Content and Presentation at 30 and 25). Two categories carry no printed marking table at all — Local Fusion and African Devotional Song — so organisers running those have to set their own criteria rather than borrow one from elsewhere in the list.
On top of the base rubric, the rules print specific point deductions: 25 points off a Village Chat score for gender imbalance on the panel, and 20 points off Creative Freestyle for using under 50% local music and dance forms. These aren’t separate judged criteria — they’re penalties applied after the rubric score, which is a different mechanic from grading a criterion low; a scoring setup needs a way to subtract a fixed penalty from an otherwise-complete rubric total.
Entry limits and the six-category rule
A single community group can’t enter everything. The rules cap a group at 3 Music + 3 Dance + 2 Instrumental categories, or 3 Literature categories if it’s a group entering under Literature rather than Folk Theatre — and a group needs a minimum of six categories entered across the board to even be eligible for the overall champion title. No placing points are printed in this document at all, so there’s no single leaderboard number to chase; eligibility for the top honour is a participation threshold, not a score comparison. Running a competition like this means tracking how many categories each group has entered against its cap and its eligibility minimum — a different job from ranking scores.
Setting this up correctly
- Use one open age group with no age restriction when the entrant is a community group, not a person — don’t invent age bands the rules don’t have.
- Set a minimum team size per category where the rules call for one (choral, Parang, Tassa, Drumology, dance), not just a maximum.
- Keep “Solo” category names but register the entry as a Team — the performer is named, the entry belongs to the group.
- Score each category on its own rubric and weightings; don’t force every category onto one generic criteria set.
- Apply fixed-point deductions after the rubric score where the rules call for one, instead of folding the penalty into a criterion.
- Track category entries per group against an entry cap and a minimum-categories-to-qualify rule, separately from scoring.
eTalenter supports every piece of this: an age group can be configured with no age restriction for group-entered competitions, each competition item carries its own judging criteria and maximum score independent of every other item, team entries can carry a minimum member count, and coordinators can track how many items each team has entered without that logic being tangled up in the scoring itself.
FAQ
Do individuals compete in the Best Village Folk Presentations, or only groups?
Only community/village groups enter — even categories labelled “Solo” are entered by the group, with the soloist performing as part of that entry.
Are there age categories in this competition?
No age bands are printed in the rules. One open group covers every age, because the entrant is a community group rather than an age-graded individual.
Is there an overall winner decided purely by total score?
No placing points are printed. A group must enter a minimum of six categories to even be eligible for the overall champion title — eligibility is a participation threshold, not a single ranked score.
See it before you set it up
Open a eTalenter live demo and log in as a demo coordinator or judge — no sign-up needed — to see team-entered categories, per-item judging criteria and minimum-member rules configured in the same event. For the wider setup, see our competition management software overview, the judging & tabulation guide, or how another Trinidad government arts competition structures its own judging in our steelpan competition scoring software article. Reach us on WhatsApp at +91 96056 56508 or support@etalenter.com for help setting up your own community competition’s categories and scoring.
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