This feature will take all unassigned players (those players not already assigned to a team) and based on parameters input on the screen, will distribute players to teams.
The top part of the draft screen is for determining what teams players will be drafted to. You must select a league, then either ‘All Teams’ in the league, a particular conference, division or team. Next you can determine what player ages will be used in the draft. You can specify either all ages or an age range that is as of a particular date.
Next you can select the players skill levels for the draft. You may want to draft highly skilled players differently than lower skilled players. Finally there are several check boxes. You can evenly distribute player levels and player positions (as opposed to random). Next, you can determine whether you want to include non-players in the draft. Recall that you can add coaches, managers, assistants through the players screen. If you have both male and female players in your software you can select gender or include both.
Finally you can determine or limit the software in determining the maximum number of players to place on each team. This parameter is used to specify the total number of players that will eventually be on each team. So for example if you have manually placed three players on one team with a coach and another team has no players assigned, if the maximum players parameter was set to 15, then the first team would receive 11 new players the second team 15 players. The draft also will assign the first 4 players to the team with no players so that the number of players remains even during the draft. The software assigns players to those teams with the fewest players first. The order that players are assigned to teams is also structured. First, all teams selected for the draft are gather in a random order. The teams with the fewest players are assigned first. The assignment will start with the first randomly assigned team and continue to the last team. Then the last team is assigned a player and the teams receive players in the reverse order back to the first random team. Then the first team gets another player and on again to the last team repeating the process until all teams reach the maximum number of players or the number of players to be assigned is exhausted.
When you are ready to draft players, click the Draft button. The software will warn you that assigning players during the draft process cannot be undone and that a database backup is recommended. Then based on the parameters, the software will indicate to you the number of players selected to be drafted. Finally, the players are assigned to teams as specified above. When completed the software will provide the number of players actually assigned in the draft. The software will also provide a progress bar of the draft’s status. The software is very efficient and can assign players on a Pentium 500 machine at about the rate of 150 per second. We sampled a league with 6000 players and the software required 40 seconds to draft and assign all players.