Scheduling Update

Since releasing the schedule last week and getting the feedback from the division meetings, it is clear that we need to improve the process for the scheduling pools with the low numbers of Advanced and Beginner teams in the 5/6 & 7/8 leagues.  Here are 2 options:

1. recruit other teams into the Advanced (and Beginner?) division so there would be a minimum of 8 teams or ideally 8 towns
2. if we could not recruit enough teams to get the minimum, then we should have combined the Advanced division with the Intermediate division to avoid the repeat games.  

We will continue on course to eliminate the repeat games and schedule more cross-division  games between the Advanced and Intermediate divisions. 

In 2010 we spent dozens of volunteer hours attempting to scrub the abnormalities out of the schedule before it was released, but we still received 680 change requests, which is 54% of the 1269 games in the original schedule.  This year, knowing that we were scheduling divisions without many teams and we were going to have to make changes to eliminate the repeat games, we decided to publish the initial draft after making sure every team had the minimum 8 (or 6 for the 1-2 league) games.  We felt it best to release the schedule on-time, get the feedback from the towns, and then implement our change process. We will probably still end up changing a significant amount of games but we hope to be under the 54% change rate from last year.  If you have ever had to reschedule games in SportsManager, then you know this is a manual activity - one game at a time, and can take dozens of hours to complete.

Lastly, it was suggested that we let each SportsManager region (MBGLL division) create their own schedule.  This has the obvious benefit of getting more towns involved.  But unless every town is willing to spend the required time to build a schedule and negotiate all of the conflicts, I am skeptical that it could work.  However, the board would consider regions submitting their own MBGLL division schedule in 2012 as long as they meet the deadlines imposed by the league and work out any cross-division issues.    Any takers?

Ted Kelley
President, MBGLL