A few notes about the scheduling of CSVA seasons

There are 49 teams spread over 16 different gyms. Fortunately 6 of these gyms provide enough time or have only 1 or 2 teams sharing the gym. The remaining 10 gyms involve usage restrictions or limits. Limits include using a one hour slot alternately with two teams; requiring 2 teams to play in consecutive hours; requiring 4 or 5 teams to share 3 hours of availability; and requiring 5 teams to always play home on the same day. In two cases, 16 teams share 2 home gyms, with each gym providing only 1 court and 4 time slots.

An ideal schedule has all teams playing their opponents with 5 week gaps between games. Any pairing could be reversed from week N to week N+5 without affecting the schedule. Similarly, the complete set of 3 games for weeks 1/6 and weeks 2/7, 3/8, 4/9 or 5/10 could be switched without effect. So the scheduling process is to look at the available time slots, consider all limitations and then start assigning teams to a time slot, one division at a time. When one division is complete, progress to the next one. As you move through the divisions the available time slots diminish and more and more manipulation is required. If you reach a point where it becomes impossible to schedule a team, you need to start the process all over again.

There are also some policy decisions to be made initially. Do you schedule the higher divisions first, leaving the lower divisions with less desirable schedules, or vise-versa, giving some preference to older players who have been in the league the longst? Or some mixture of the two, as was the case this session?

Scheduling is a labor-intensive chore that involves many starts and restarts. It is not currently possible to just run a compute program to do the scheduling. It's all done manually.

If you are not satisfied with the schedule, do not complain to Fran Zelinkoff. Complain to Art Smoot because he created the schedule. Art understands that some of the schedules are less than ideal and would welcome the assistance form anyone who would enjoy the challenge.

Future scheduling may necessitate gyms providing more time slots or access to more courts. As CSVA continues to expand, the degree of difficulty in scheduling matches will increase.

For those still interested in the complexities of the scheduling problem, click here.

Art has developed an interactive scheduling mechanism which anyone can use to try and come up with a 'good' schedule for the Winter 2014 session, already underway. If you want to play this as a game, click here.