Scheduling Blues

The scheduling committee has been hard at work building the first release of the game schedule and it is a lot of work. It's like trying to solve a very complex problem using fairly crude tools. Having worked on the schedule the last two years, here are a few tidbits that I have learned along the way.

Game Match-ups
Basically, every team in a division (region in SM) and scheduling category (division  in SM) gets matched up against every other team.  So if you have 4 teams, you get 12 match-ups that look like:

Team 1 - Team 1 v Team 2, Team 1 v Team 3, Team 1 v Team 4
Team 2 - Team 2 v Team 1, Team 2 v Team 3, Team 2 v Team 4

Team 3 - Team 3 v Team 1, Team 3 v Team 2, Team 3 v Team 4

Team 4 - Team 4 v Team 1, Team 4 v Team 2, Team 4 v Team 3

The scheduling tool simply picks up the first 8 entries in the list and attempts to drop them into the first 8 available field and time slots for that region/division, alternating home and away.  This is why the towns whose names begin with "A' may never get a game against the towns whose names begin with 'W'.  This issue we exacerbated with the scheduling pools this year since we had a fairly small set of teams in the Advanced and Beginner pools which forced them into a small set of match-ups.

If the slot is filled either by capacity or blackout, the scheduling tool does not try to move the match-up to the opponents field, it simply moves to the next week to attempt to slot the game. If it runs out of time (game dates) then it simply stops scheduling games.  The tool can generate about 85% of the schedule in a couple of hours. Unfortunately, it takes another 20 hours or so to work out the final 15%.

Blackouts 

I have been told that blackouts were a bad thing, but not until this year did I realize how they affect the schedule (especially since we did not allow them last year). Blackouts do not mean that you will get home games on the days that aren't blacked out. In fact, you are more 50%  likely to not get a home game at all on a field.  Blackouts will cause you to have fewer home games.

Odd numbers of teams

The other major complexity to manage is when a region has an odd numbers of teams for a league. The math is simple - you need an even amount of teams to give every team a game. Take the total number of teams and divide by 2. If there is any remainder - then you will have a team without a game.  We want every team to play a minimum of 8 games so we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to schedule these teams.  Our first option is to look at an adjacent region/division and see if they also have an odd number we can pair up.  If that option is not available, then we look to schedule double headers within a region/division. We look to find towns that have more than  one team in a league (ie 2 U13 teams) playing at home, and schedule the extra game against that town so they can form a mixed team and play the extra game.  Most players enjoy the extra games - and remember - without doubleheaders, some teams don't get a game and that team could be yours!

Block scheduling 

This is another complex issue and it got more complicated this year with scheduling pools (divisions) since the blocks now had to match towns that had the same team categories.

For example Town A has an Advanced 7/8 team and an Intermediate 5/6 team.  They could not be block scheduled against a town that had a Beginner 7/8 team and an Intermediate 5/6 team. The numbers of team that could be blocked this year was reduced as a result.

Home/Away splits

Generally speaking the home and away splits tend to even out over a town's slate of games, even though a particular team might have 3/5, another might have 5/3.  Luckily, my wife Lisa graphed the home/away ratios for the league in a bell curve and one can see that 95% (2 std deviations) of the towns have between 40% and 60% home games (3-5). Thank you Lisa!

Solo Games

Finally, solo games are another factor to consider since there are 180 games every weekend and approximately 70 umpires. We try to pair up the games to a minimum of 2 games per umpire (down to 90) or three (down to 60), so obviously we do not have sufficient umpire capacity to have solo game son the schedule.  

When you factor in all of these constraints, it makes a a seemingly simple task more difficult.  Thankfully, we had a dedicated team this year led by Ken Kolhberg, Kim Perry and Marianna Whitson who put in some long hours in order to get the schedule produced.  I pitched in a little bit as well.  Thanks to all!

Now let's get ready to play some lax!