Unit 2 Notes:

Creating the Schedule

Lets recap...we have been working on putting together a round robin schedule for a tennis tournament consisting of 30 teams.  In order to accomplish this feat, we have gone through the following steps:

• Created a Master Facility Schedule based on facility availability

• Determined the total number of possible games available to us to play

• Figured out how many leagues we would offer and how many teams would be in each league

• Determined the number of rounds and number of games played in each round for each of our leagues

• Created a scheduling template for each league, determining the opponents for each round of the tournament

Now its time to place our participants in their appropriate leagues and schedule our tournament. 

Determining which participants are placed in which leagues is totally at the discretion of the programmer.  This is your chance to place participants into leagues based on skill level, time preferences, gender, housing units or other units of participation.  You can obtain this information from your participants when they register for your tournament.  Have the participants note on their registration form the information that you would want in order to place them in a league.  Lets keep our example simple....in our tournament, we have 30 total participants.  We have 15 men and 15 women.  Of the 15 men, 5 are considered "advanced" and 10 are considered "intermediate".  Of the women, 5 are considered "advanced", 5 are considered "intermediate" and 5 are considered "beginners".  We will assume that all participants will be available to play at the times we schedule them...we will not have any participant time conflicts.

Our participants are:
Arnold, Alice, Bob, Barbara, Chuck, Candy, Doug, Darla, Ed, Emily, Frank, Feona, Greg, Glenda, Harry, Helen, Jerry, Jackie, Kurt, Karla, Larry, Laura, Mike, Millie, Nick, Nora, Pete, Paula, Rich, Rachael

Remember, we decided to program six leagues of 5 participants each.

We now need to place our league matches on our Master Facility Schedule.   Lets go ahead and begin with the first round of our tournament.  There are several rules of thumb that we want to use when we are determining our league schedules.   Remember, we want to be fair to everyone.  When possible, try to follow these basic rules:

1.  Try to keep participants' match/game times consistent
2.  Try not to schedule participants to play more than once in a given day
3.  If you have to play more than once per day, try not to schedule back-to-back matches/games
4.  If you have to schedule back-to-back matches, try to schedule the same for everyone

Lets go ahead and start.  We need to first determine how many match slots one of our leagues will occupy in order to complete one round.  We can get this information by looking at the number of games that we will play in each round.   Remember, we can use the formula n-1/2 to figure this out.  In this case, we are playing in 5 team leagues.  Therefore, 5-1 = 4 and 4/2 = 2.  So each league will require us to play 2 matches to complete one round.  This means that each league will require the use of 2 courts to play their first round matches.

Lets use the following abbreviations for our leagues:

Men's Advanced = MA
Men's Intermediate 1 = MI-1
Men's Intermediate 2 = MI-2
Women's Advanced = WA
Women's Intermediate = WI
Women's Beginner = WB

Begin plugging in leagues into available time slots, making sure you use 2 courts for each league.  Where you place the leagues on the schedule is up to you!

Monday:

Remember our scheduling template?  This is going to decide the schedule for Monday's matchups.  In a 5-team league, we determined that our first round would be:

Bye - 5
1 v 4
2 v 3

So our first round matchups in the Men's Advanced League will be:

Court 1 at 4:00 p.m.  Arnold v. Doug
Court 2 at 4:00 p.m.  Bob v. Chuck
(Ed has the Bye!)

Go ahead and repeat this scheduling process for all of your leagues, and you have scheduled the first round of your tournament!

In order to schedule the subsequent rounds of your tournament, repeat this process.  Remember to try and keep match times consistent, when possible.  If the Men's Advanced league is playing at 4:00 p.m. on Mondays, try to have them play at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesdays as well.  Lets try this again:

Tuesday:

Notice that our league times are able to stay the same.  The only thing that will change, here, is going to be our scheduling matchups.  For example, you will now use the scheduling template for round 2 of a 5 team round robin to determine Tuesday's matches. 

Our second round template shows that:

Bye - 4
5 v 3
1 v 2

So our second round matchups in the Men's Advanced league will be:

Court 1 at 4:00 p.m. Ed vs. Chuck
Court 2 at 4:00 p.m. Arnold vs. Bob
(Doug now has the Bye!)

Again, go ahead and repeat this process for all of your leagues, and you will have scheduled the second round of your tournament!  You can also go and repeat all of these steps to finish scheduling your tournament for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday!