Unit 2 Notes:

Round Robin Scheduling

Facility Availability

One of the FIRST items of concern for a recreational sports programmer is to get an idea of the availability of your potential playing site.  Each setting and each organization will have different ways of reserving facility space.  In some organizations, you will have unlimited access to facilities for your programs' use.   In other settings, you will have to request to use certain facilities and you better have a good idea of what you will need, because if you do not utilize the facilities which have been reserved for you, you will undoubtedly be impacting the ability of others to run other programs.  For example, if you are programming an intramural soccer league and you reserve 4 soccer fields for play at 5:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., but you only end up playing games at 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., you will be wasting the game times available to you at 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.  The next time you decide to run a soccer league, you can bet that the facility coordinator will remember that you didn't maximize the use of your facility!  Count on getting less facility availability the next time around!

Example:

Lets go back to our example of the intramural tennis league that we are going to program.  The first thing that you should do is reserve your tennis facility.  Lets say that our facility coordinator has allowed you to play matches Monday through Friday, on 4 courts, between the hours of 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. during a 1 week period of time.  Now you have a decision to make.  Because you only have limited use of your tennis courts, you must consider putting a time limit on each of the matches that will be played.  How long are your tennis matches going to last?  Are you going to play matches on the hour?  If so, you have to modify your tennis rules so that your matches will be complete in one hour.  The decision that you make will have an impact on the number of teams that you will be able to allow to enter into your league.  This is your decision, and is based on a number of factors, including the philosophy of your program, the number of participants you want to allow play, the number of matches you want to give each participant, etc. 

Okay, lets say you've decided to play matches consisting of one set.   The winner of the set will win the match, and you feel confident that participants should be able to play a set in approximately 45 minutes.  Allowing time for injuries, check-in and other possible delays, you decide to schedule matches every 1 hour.  Your next step is to develop a Master Facility Schedule showing the times you have available to play.   Develop your Master Schedule for every day that the league is going to operate.

Monday:

Tuesday

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday

Now that you have your Master Facility Schedule drawn, you can figure out how many total matches are possibly available to you.  In this case, you see that you are able to play 12 matches in a day.  This would allow you to play 60 matches in one week.   Since you have only have 1 week reserved, you can play a total of 60 possible matches.  This information is the starting point to help you begin creating your round robin schedule!