Enforce Team Scheduling Constraints: There are scheduling constraints parameters defined at the team, division and program levels. They might be set up for regular season games, but may not wish to be used for a weekend Tournament. You can control which constraints you wish to use, Team, Division or Program by checking each box. If a box is not checked, then the scheduling constraints input at those levels are ignored. If not boxes are checked then no Team Constraint at the Team, Division or Program level are used.
Check IF all dates are assumed to be blacked out: This check box has a very specific function. Since team scheduling preferences are just that "preferences" the scheduler does its best to ensure that they are enforced, but may not always give a team its highest preferences or any preferences at all (due to other constraint restrictions). Some schedulers may also have a very complex set of scheduling preferences and blackout constraints that may required significant input. To assist in these situations, the software has the ability to black out all dates for all teams be checking this box. With this box checked, teams can no longer play games on any date/time in the software EXCEPT those days, dates and times set up as Scheduling Preferences.
Consider Previously Scheduled Games: Our scheduling process realizes that you may have to split your schedule creation into separate runs in order to achieve the perfect schedule. Each individual schedule run will ignore all previously generated games. However, by selecting this option, the software will read all previously generated games that are active (i.e. not cancelled or rescheduled) and ensure that the minimum rest and max games per week constraints are adhered to.
Consider Previously Scheduled Practices: Similar to the Games option above, it will include practices (like they were games) and ensure that the parameters entered are met.
Enforce Teams Home and Visiting Preferences: When generating a schedule, you can use the Home/Visiting preferences for fieldslocations entered on the location preference grid on the Playing Locations screen. Checking this box will ensure that the home and visiting preferences are strictly enforced.
If the schedule is one of the weekly frequencies, then home fieldlocation availability is determined, the required home fieldslocations based on the weekly games is generated and the schedule tries to match up required fieldslocations per week with available fieldslocations per week. It will juggle weeks until it tries all combinations and if it can not match a weeks required home games to a week with availability, an error message will be given and the schedule will not be generated. With a daily schedule, no advanced checking takes place, the software will schedule games on each fieldlocation as determined by the other parameters ensuring home fieldlocation preference is adhered to. There may not be enough home fieldlocation availability for some teams and those games will not be scheduled and you can manually schedule those games at a later time.
Since the software first generates all games and the home/visiting match-ups prior to assigning to location calendar slots, there may be cases where the game could be scheduled if the home and visiting teams where reversed or switched. If you check the box to "Use Home/Visiting Swapping Algorithm" then the software will make every attempt to schedule the games as they were first created, but if a game cannot be scheduled and reversing who plays at home will improve the schedule, the software will make that switch. This will lead to some teams playing more home games than others. This software will note all switches and keep a running count of who is playing additional home and away games. As the software continues scheduling games, it will attempt to even out the number of home and away games as it continues to assign games. When the schedule run is completed, the teams grid on the "Generate Slots and Games" tab will show the number of home and away games initially generated and eventually assigned so you can be aware of any uneven home/visiting scheduling.
When you enter playing location preferences you may leave many of the ranking blank and assign all the blank values during the scheduling run. The Home and Visiting Default text boxes are for this purpose. If the teams have no ranking (blank and not zero) then the "Blank Default" field is used as a replacement for all blank rankings. Note that a ranking of zero means that the team will absolutely not be scheduled on that playing location or fieldlocation. Typically, zero or blank is used for the Home Default, and value of one for Visiting Default.
Enforce Travel Time Between FieldsLocations: Mainly for tournament play where a number of games are scheduled during the same day at different locations, teams may require a travel time between locations. On the Playing Locations screen the Location Distances tab has a grid which cross references each playing location or each individual fieldlocation. The column in the grid called travel time is the number of minutes a team or official must wait at the end of a game played on one fieldlocation and the time another game can be scheduled on the another fieldlocation. If you have a number of fieldslocations in one playing location then enter the travel times between playing locations to significantly reduce the amount of data entry.
Many of the parameters on this tab have a weighting dropdown. They all have a similar function and are being discussed here. As you elect to use home/visiting preferences, distribute teams equally amongst fieldslocations and other parameters, the software generates internal values along with your assigned rankings to generate a final score. The higher the score for a game on a particular game slot, the more likely the game will be assigned to that game slot. One noticeable factor when we designed this approach was that there needed to be some user control to gauge which factor was favoured over another...and by how much. If for example home/visiting preferences were absolutely the most important, this parameter should be weighted high and others rated lower. We expect that you will run a number of scheduling runs tweaking these weightings until the schedule is very close to what would be considered a final schedule. Manual changes are also possible. If you weight something a zero, then that is the same as not considering that factor at all, so ensure if you are using home/visiting preferences that a non-zero weighting is used.
The final step is to determine how the games being generated are scheduled. This section is not applicable to practices or Tournaments.
Round Robin: Selecting Round Robin will schedule games like you would see in a Tournament where each team plays each of the other teams once. A Round Robin schedule then starts over again playing the same teams in the same order, with the teams switching which is the home team and visiting team. The scheduler mixes Inter-Division and Inter-Conference games with Divisional games, to create a large round robin schedule. This type of schedule is preferred for many leagues, but if you are trying to optimize fieldlocation usage then it can require very specific time slots. During a Round Robin schedule, the scheduler will ensure that all teams in a particular round of the round robin schedule complete their games before starting the next round. This can lead to many unassigned games if the teams have significant playing constraints. Note that 'Allowing Home and Home Series', 'Days Played Between the Same Team' and 'Max Consecutive Home or Away Games' parameters are not applicable to a Round Robin schedule and are disabled.
Random: The second type of schedule allocation is random. Depending on the frequency you selected (generate slots tab), this allocation has a slightly different implementation. If you chose either of the 2 weekly frequencies, then the software generates a round robin schedule with each complete round of team scheduling being labeled a complete week. In random scheduling, these complete weeks are juggled around to meet the specific parameters available. This is done to ensure in a weekly schedule, that all teams play once a week (with the exception of byes for other team leagues). If you selected a daily schedule, then this limitation is removed. All games are generated and the schedule is created picking the most appropriate games it can find.
Schedule Games Only in Target Week or Leave Unassigned: When generating Round Robin schedules, certain teams may not be able to play a particular day or week that other teams in a particular round of the round robin can. If this option is checked, then the games that cannot be scheduled are marked as unassigned and the software will not attempt to schedule them in up coming weeks. So if a 10 team round robin is to be scheduled and on the first week (depending on other scheduling options) 3 of the 5 games can be scheduled, the software will mark the other two games as unassigned and NOT attempt to schedule them at the next possible time slot in subsequent days or weeks. If these unassigned games are saved, specific notes as to the date that the other games in the same round where scheduled will also be saved for future manual assignment. When this option is not checked, all games in a round are scheduled first prior to scheduling any games in subsequent rounds.
Minimize Travel Distances: This parameter should be used only under the following situation. If teams are playing a game at one fieldlocation and then travelling from that location to the next, this parameter will attempt to minimize how much traveling the teams do. It also has the effect to keep a team at a single location as opposed to moving them around.
Distribute Teams Equally amongst FieldsLocations: If you wish to have teams play games equal on a number of different fieldslocations this parameter will attempt to even officiating on all fieldslocations.
Distribute Teams Equally Amongst Time Categories: The software can attempt to distribute game times equal amongst teams. This function is tied closely to the field 'No. of Time Categories'. The software will take the earliest start time and latest end time amongst all games being scheduled and calculate the total minutes between the two. The software then take the number of time categories and divides those total minutes by the number of categories. For example, if the earliest start time was 7:00pm and the latest end time was 11:00pm then if you decided to use 4 time categories, then the software will attempt to evenly distribute teams between 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 and 10:00pm start times. Be careful. If you selected 3 time categories then the software will evenly distribute games between the categories 7:00-8:19pm, 8:20-9:39pm and 9:40 to 11:00pm (80 minute gaps). The problem is that 7:00 and 8:00pm games are in the first category and the 9:00pm and 10:00pm start times are in the other two categories. Therefore the software will attempt to evenly distribute games and since the 7:00 and 8:00pm games are in the same category, one team may have all their game in the early time category at 7:00pm and another team at 8:00pm. Remember the software distributes even amongst categories and not exact game times.
Days between playing the Same Team: Most schedules like to spread out meetings with the same team. No schedule wants to have the same teams play three of four times early in the season and then not play again. With a random schedule, this is always a possibility. Therefore, this field provides you the opportunity to specify how many days you wish a team to wait before playing an opponent again. This is tied to the previous parameter. If you are allowing home and home series, then this field only applies to games played with the same teams playing at home and away.
Max. Consecutive Home or Away Games: This is the final parameter on the parameters tab. This value will limit the number of consecutive home or away games. Again with a weekly schedule frequency, enforcing available home fieldslocations is first priority, disallowing back to back games is second priority and limiting the number of consecutive home or away games is third.
Disallowing home and home series, days between playing the same team and max consecutive home games are enforced as much as possible with a weekly schedule frequency, but strictly enforced with a daily schedule frequency.
Minimize the Time between Games Played: This parameter is used to help a schedule minimize the gap between the games a team plays. This really only applies to daily schedules where a team can play on different days of the weeks and possibly could go 1-2 weeks without a game while others could play several time in that period due to a better fit of parameters. The software will always try to schedule as many games as possible, but where there is flexibility, the weighting of this parameter will help minimize these gaps between games.
With all these parameters, it is likely the first time you generate your schedule some games may not be scheduled. You may have the tweak the parameters and try again.
Several high level parameters specific to Tournaments have been discussed, this Tournament Parameters section details the rest. The Tournament functionality is extremely flexible and combined with the six different Tournament types, should provide nearly all Tournament functionality you will need. Before jumping into each parameter, a word first about the Tournament methodology is needed.
This software supports large single elimination type formats found in sports like tennis. It also supports multiple game series like those found in baseball, basketball and hockey. This software does not assume that any series will be a single game elimination format. All series can be formatted as the best x out of y games, total points over any number of games or total points over any number of games. The software will default each Tournament round to a single elimination format, that can easily be changed if required.
Tournament Round: This pulldown list allows the selection of different Tournament rounds so that parameters can be changed for each round of each draw of the Tournament.
Enforce Home Preferences: This has significant effects to how Tournaments are scheduled. Since teams have to play at home, the Tournament draw cannot be scheduled all at once. Once series in which both teams are confirmed can be scheduled so that home fieldslocations can be confirmed.
Max Games in Series: The total maximum number of games is entered. If the series is the best 4 out of 7, then 7 is entered. If the series is a two games total points, then 2 is entered.
Winner Determined: This parameters determines how the winner of the series is to be determined. Number of Games won requires a team to win the number of games specified to win the series. Number of Points requires a team to record the stated number of points (based on points for Win/Losses/Ties as specified on the Leagues Screen) to win the series. The last parameter determines the winner based on the total number of points scored across the maximum number of games in the series. If you are running a Tournament where each series is a single game, it is recommended that you use the Total Points method as on the Tournament bracket the score of the game will show up as opposed to the score in games.
Home Team (Home Adv): Determines if the Lowest Seeded team has home fieldlocation advantage or if home advantage is random.
Home/Away Format: This determines how the home and away games are determined for the team with Home Advantage. The number of characters must match the Max Games in Series. Sample of data to be entered into this field would be:HHAAHAH (NHL) or HHAAAHH (MLB).
Game Duration: Different Tournament rounds can have different game durations. The first round may have 60 minute games and the second round may be 90 minute games. You may only schedule games with the same duration at one time. To schedule the 60 minute games, the Game Duration of the Schedule (on the details page) must be set to 60. Only games with 60 minute durations will be scheduled. To then schedule 90 minutes Tournament games, set the duration of the schedule to 90 and generate slots, games etc.
To update Parameters for a Tournament round, make the changes and click Save. Click the Default all Rounds to these Settings to change all Tournament Rounds to the setting entered on the screen.
Generate Draw: Once all Tournament round parameters and number of teams, seeds, etc are finalized, click the Generate Draw button and the Tournament draw will be created. This will take a few moments. When finished, click the Goto Tournament Details to view the draw.
Once the draw is successfully created, you can generate and schedule games like any other schedule through the process outlined on the other tabs.