Request if Possible

[StanfordBerkely]

Has anyone successfully implemented a schedule where each team plays all 29 other teams (or more in an expanded league), regardless of length? If so, I'd love a link to it.

And if not, what tool(s) would you recommend I use to build a schedule?

[SandMan]

Originally Posted by StanfordBerkely

Has anyone successfully implemented a schedule where each team plays all 29 other teams (or more in an expanded league), regardless of length? If so, I'd love a link to it.

And if not, what tool(s) would you recommend I use to build a schedule?

I just use an excel /open office spreadsheet. It is difficult to explain all the steps but if you wish I can upload a current spreadsheet that I use to build the schedule for you to examine then I will answer any questions you have, if you are interested in learning how to do this yourself. I will upload it when I complete the schedule. I am always happy to get others to see how easy it really is to create good schedules.

[StanfordBerkely]

Originally Posted by SandMan

I just use an excel /open office spreadsheet. It is difficult to explain all the steps but if you wish I can upload a current spreadsheet that I use to build the schedule for you to examine then I will answer any questions you have, if you are interested in learning how to do this yourself. I will upload it when I complete the schedule. I am always happy to get others to see how easy it really is to create good schedules.

I'm in

[SandMan]

Instead of giving the one I am working on now, which is pretty complicated with rotating schedules, I will give you these for now. These are schedules that are doing exactly what you want to do. They have every team playing each team in the league a set number of games (series). These were simple because they did not break at the week just a simple 3 or 4 game series (each schedule had a different requirement). In your case, if you want to use these as a template it would be good to have 32 team league to make it simple.


WARNING This may be confusing. Will help to have the spreadsheet open while reading this mess.......
I will explain the file a bit here:

When I noticed that both leagues were multiples of 4 and an even number of groupings I decided to break the teams into groups A1-A4, B1-B4 etc... I had a base schedule of playing each team in your group and then a predetermine matchups with groups. All I did was to paste a group on the grid. I then pasted them so that no team played more than 3 series in a row. The first week and last week have all games played in "group" and then in the middle of the schedule I placed the series that were not played in the first few series in the first and last week of the season. After that I just put groupings based on who I wanted to have the home series. A group would play all games at home vs a group. So in the 24 team schedule there were 6 groups of 4, so I may play G1-G2, G3-G4, G5-G6 This would give me a group of games where A1-A4 would play B1-B4 (there would be 4 group series) and so forth. I then simply placed them on the grid as you can see in the file. After all was done I did not want 1 to play 2, 3 to play 4 etc in each group. So I pasted the schedule generated into the work area and using find and replace I gave each team a1-f4 a random number from 1-24. Since it did not matter who played who as long as I had no long home or away trips. This worked perfectly. After giving them a number I just pasted col a and b (day and first team home games) and put them in the d, a, h column then I sorted by a (away) and in col 3 put home team number from the top of row 1, col 2. I cut the columns with day in the three columns (d-a-h info). I pasted this in the ootp sched sheet and then deleted the column 2 from the sheet to make the next team become the col 2. did this to all teams and then sorted the ootp worksheet by the d-h column. The text for the schedule is automatically created when you add the 3 fields to the ootp sched. You simply copy the records created and paste them into the games section of any lsdl file. (erase the games that were in the file first. All you have to do is edit the header records and rename the file. You now have a schedule. This process sounds like it is a lot but it is actually harder to explain than to do. Oh, 1 last process. I keep a test league on my machine and test the file. Your test league must match the schedule attributes. Test and make sure you have no errors. Do not use your game league to test this out when creating and testing your schedule first.

The two schedules posted actually took me less than 4 hours total time to complete because of the method of grouping that I used. Would have been much longer if I had to write matchups with 16 or 24 teams. Also by assigning different random numbers to the teams in the groupings I get a totally different schedule each time I run the program.

I will also post a more complicated schedule with odd number of teams in a division and rotating schedules. If you want to see how you can create more complicated schedules. The important part is preparation will be about 75% of your time and creating the schedule is not as time consuming.

Sorry so long just look at what I have in the workbooks and ask away...

Schedules have comments on the configuration of the league.

[SandMan]

Originally Posted by StanfordBerkely

Has anyone successfully implemented a schedule where each team plays all 29 other teams (or more in an expanded league), regardless of length? If so, I'd love a link to it.

And if not, what tool(s) would you recommend I use to build a schedule?

Using the template as an example. If you were to create a 32 team league with each team playing each other a set number of games. You could have a 126 game schedule by having each team playing 2H/2A against each team for a 126 schedule, 3H/3A would be a 186 game schedule.

If you are a bit overwhelmed at the spreadsheet let me know and I could whip out a quick 32 game schedule for you. I do have 3 schedules I am working on now so it would be a little wait - (7-10 days maybe...) It would be a bit longer to do a 30 team because the template needs multiples of 4 to work.

I haven't kept any of my schedule worksheets in the past but I will start keeping them and will distribute them to anyone wanting them. They do get a bit complicated but once you see what I was doing it gets easier.