First, our scheduler supports scheduling of from two to sixteen teams. If you have a division with more than sixteen teams, you have to assign them to flights of 16 teams or less in order to schedule the division.

The Traveling League Scheduler allows you to schedule games each week on specified days. There are two different ways to use these dates.

The first option is to schedule a game for each team on every date you specify. For instance, if you specify that games should be scheduled on Saturday and Sunday, to the extent possible, every team would play on every Saturday AND every Sunday. Of course, with an odd number of teams one team will have a bye each day. Essentially this implies one "round" of play each play date you specify.

The other option is to have each team play a specific number of games each week. If you choose this option and specify one game per week, for example, then the games for each week will be distributed over the days selected. For example, say you have chosen Saturday and Wednesday for a 12 team division. The scheduler will attempt to distribute the 6 games each week evenly between Saturday and Wednesday.

If you have 2 or more games per team per week, then the scheduler will make sure the games in the first round of a week are played before the games in the next round. In this case, games will be distributed appropriately. For example, if you specify two games per week to be scheduled on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the first round of games will be distrubuted between Monday and Tuesday and the second round between Wednesday and Thursday. Of course, the scheduler will always check first to make sure a specific date has not been blacked out.

The Traveling League Scheduler first determines all of the match ups for the season according to the choices you have made. If there are field assignments the scheduler then uses the assignments to determine the field and the time for each game. Any games for which a field assignment is not found will be left TBD for time and field. For example, if all of your games are on Sundays, once the match ups are determined, the scheduler will look for open field assignments that are on Sunday each week.

However, the scheduler will give a higher priority to an available assignment over an even distribution. So if it is important for you to have even distribution over the days of a week, then you need to be sure there are enough assignments available on each day. If one day runs out of available assignments for a given round and the round covers more than one day, the scheduler will continue filling assignments on the other day. If that day then runs out of assignments, the remaining games for the week are left TBD for both time and field.

You can also specify a maximum number of games per team for the season. If you specify a maximum,the scheduler will stop scheduling games for a team that has reached this number. Of course, if you have an odd number of teams and an odd number of rounds, one team may not reach the maximum number. If this field is left blank the scheduler will simply keep scheduling games through the last date specified.

You can also specify a minimum number of games per team for the season. This will override the maximum, if necessary, to make sure every team gets at least that number of games. If you specify a minimum but don't specify enough play dates to meet it, a warning will be displayed after the schedule is created.

Since the scheduler will not schedule any games past the End Date, if the teams do not get the required number of games it is probably because it ran out of dates. To resolve this you can enter a later End Date or specify one or more extra dates. You can always move those games to different dates later using Move Games.

Randomizing the order of match ups is not necessary unless you have a league that pretty much has the same teams from season to season (e.g. an adult league). Then randomizing will mix it up from one season to the next.

NOTE on Starting and Ending Dates: The Traveling League Scheduler will never schedule any games earlier than the Start Date or later than the End Date specified on the Create Schedule page. The scheduler considers a week to start on the first scheduled playdate - that is, the first date on or after the Start Date that you have specified as a day of play. So if, for example, the Start Date is on a Tuesday and the first day of the week specified is Thursday (i.e., neither Tuesday nor Wednesday are selected), the scheduler will schedule the first games the first Thursday following the Tuesday Start Date, and the second week of play will start on the following Thursday. Conversely, if you want your week to run from Saturday through Friday, you should specify the Start Date to be a Saturday.

Similarly, if the End Date specified lands on a Monday with Friday as one of the play days, but neither Saturday, Sunday nor Monday as days to play, the Friday previous to the End Date will be the last day scheduled.

Once a division schedule has been created and saved, when viewing the division, at the bottomn of the page, you have the option to lock the division. For more information, go to Sheduling==>Lock Divisions.

See the examples on the next page to get an idea of what you can do using the Traveling Scheduler.