Question For Custom Tournament Schedule
 

I am wondering if it would be easier to learn how to make my own schedule or if someone here could create something that works for me...I'm willing to try either way.

Let's see if it's even possible first, though.

What I want is a custom schedule for an FA cup style tournament to take place during the regular season of my main league (actually 4 leagues as part of a promotion/relegation association). The current regular schedules always have days off set for the entire league throughout the year. I want to use these days for my tournament games. The exact days are different each year, but maybe I can change that so they are the same? To be "in synch" with a tournament schedule?

The schedule would have to be set for certain positions of each "division" in the tournament, rather than tied to specific teams.


I can give more details if this is possible and someone wants to tackle it, but basically I have one division of 20 teams which would not be scheduled for any games (they have a bye to the playoffs). Then 11 divisions of 2 teams each which play only each other for 3 games. Finally a division of 10 teams which each play every other team in that division one time.


Is this crazy or can it work?

Is there a tutorial on making schedules that someone could point me to?

Thanks

I have been away for a while, so tournaments are new to me. I do not know yet how those can actually get scheduled. I could use a primer on that.

But I can at least perhaps offer advice on how to lay out the games. Let me see if I understand the structure - I interpret it as...

The big question is when should the games occur? Presumably the 10-team division has all its games spread out, one set of matchups at a time, but maybe they should be paired up so that 2 or 3 of the matchups are played at time. Are the 3 games for each of D02-D12 cases all separated or are they in a single chunk of time like 3 straight days?

Here is one possibility with one game at a time with dates pulled out of thin air. The two-team division cases all have 2 at home for T01 and 1 at home for T02. The 10-team division gives each team either 4H/5A or 5H/4A.

Thanks very much for the response gmo. After reading up, doing some research and some trial and error; I've come up with a pretty good schedule on my own. I have tested it in a dummy league and it seems to work quite well.

What I discovered is that my 3 lower tiers of the promo/relegation league share the same basic schedule. Therefore, all teams in those tiers have the same days off during the season
(every 13th day). This works beautifully for my purposes, since these are the only teams that would have games to play during the regular season. To create my custom schedule, I had the game create its own based on a 9 game regular season. I exported the file and then just removed games that I didn't want and changed the days to match off days in the regular leagues.

So, I have the 20 teams from top division with no games...22 teams in the middle that "pair up" and play each other 5 times throughout the year, and the 10 team lowest division play one game each against all other teams. This sends 20+11+1 or 32 teams to a basic tournament playoff bracket.

All "regular season" games are played on days off. The playoff games mostly come as doubleheaders. However, I have made it so they fall after the teams have expanded rosters at the end of the season. This ensures that teams aren't too strapped playing the regular league and worrying about the tournament too. A champion here is crowned well before the regular league playoffs of my top division and also gets finished in time to not interfere with the relegation battles.

I love how it came out and I've attached the tournament schedule I edited along with the regular league schedule if anyone is interested.

Is there any way the game would automatically load my custom schedule every year? It does not match the settings created, and can't based on game being different depending on division. Does that factor kill any chance for automation and force me to remember to re-load custom schedule each preseason?

Wait so I'm just confused how the actual leagues are set up. I saw the post and I really want to try and use it for my own purposes. So the top division has 10 teams? Or how many teams are in each league? The schedule is made for 10, but do the leagues have something different or?

Sorry, just saw this post... my top league has 20 teams and all of them automatically advance to the tournament playoffs/knockout stage. The next two leagues down have 10 teams each and the bottom league has 12. I pair up each of the teams in the middle leagues for the regular season of the tournament plus the two who have recently been demoted to the bottom league. They only play each other throughout the season and the winner of that matchup advances. The bottom league minus those two recently sent to bottom (total of 10) play among themselves during regular season sending just one to the knockout round...making the total in that round/playoffs 32.

I know this is probably complicated and there is manual work involved each year, but it works nicely for me.