Playing Locations scheduling preferences allow you to define home and away playing preferences on the different fieldslocations. The grid below is available at the team level, division level or program level. Any preferences made at the team level override those at both the division or program level. Preferences made at the division level override those at the program level.
When scheduling, you must check the box, "Check if you wish to enforce Teams Home and Visiting fieldlocation preferences" in order to have these preferences used by the Scheduler. In addition, during scheduling you can set a default value for all blank home rankings and all blank visiting rankings.
How are these rankings used? Well if you check the box Check if you wish to enforce Teams Home and Visiting fieldlocation preferences", on the Game Scheduling screen, the software will evaluate each game by looking at the different fieldslocations that a game can be played. The software then computes a score by multiplying the home teams "home ranking" by the visiting teams "visiting ranking". If the score is 0, the game between those two teams will not be scheduled on that fieldlocation. If the score is greater than zero, then the software will attempt to assign the maximum combination of "Home Rankings" and "Visiting Rankings" on each fieldlocation.
The two grids are meant to be mutually exclusive (use one or the other) but you can place entries into both. The software will use the entry for the playing location unless there is an entry for a specific fieldlocation. The grid for each fieldlocation has two entries, home rank and visiting rank. Higher values indicate more likelihood the team with that preference will play home or away games on that fieldlocation. An entry of zero indicates that the team will NOT be scheduled on that fieldlocation. A blank is a default value and can be assigned during the schedule run. During the scheduling run, for each game on each fieldlocation, the home teams home ranking and the visiting teams visiting ranking and multiplied together (ideally, values of less than 50 should be used). If the value is zero then those two teams game will not be scheduled on that fieldlocation. If the value is not zero, the depending on how important you weight location preferences, the game will the highest combined value will be scheduled. Of course all the other scheduling parameters and factors must also be taken into consideration.
A common scenario is that a single team has a single home fieldlocation. To set that up, on each teams location preferences, allocate a value of lets say 20 to that teams Home Ranking for its home fieldlocation. Then leave the rest blank. Do that for each team. When scheduling games on the Game Scheduling screen, on the parameters tab, check the box "Use Home/Visiting Preferences" and select a weighting greater than zero. Then for the home default value enter blank or zero and for the Visiting default value, enter a "1". You should then be good to go.
A similar version is available for officials, with the exception that there is only one ranking as there is no meaning for home/visiting.
In order to use these preferences when scheduling, please ensure that the "Check if you wish to enforce Teams Home and Visiting fieldlocation preferences" checkbox on the Parameters tab of the Game Scheduling screen is checked and that a weighting greater than zero is selected.
A new feature is the ability to print the references you have input into the software. The printing parameters to the right of the gridst, allow you to print preferences from the team, division or program level (or any combination), and group the resulting preferences by team, division or program.