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Advanced Scheduling Process

  • Updated

Introduction

Advanced Scheduling is for larger organizations or those that are scheduling "inter-league" or "cross club" play.  In these situations the association of home teams to home fields needs to be comprehended so the scheduling system puts team home games on the home field for each team. 

Advanced Scheduling functionality includes, but is not limited to:

  • Auto-assigning of teams to fields
  • Field characteristics like age group and field availability
  • Easy game locking and game swapping
  • Multi team coach situations.

From a high level, there are three data groups that work in sync with each other:

  • Associated Organizations (Clubs, Leagues, Towns, Cities or other orgs owning fields)
  • Locations (which are linked to Associated Organizations)
  • Teams (which are also linked to Associated Organizations)

How To Setup Advanced Scheduling

This section of the article explains the steps to follow to setup organization, location and team data for Advanced Scheduling.  Note: Advanced Scheduling is not in TeamSideline Sites by default.  A Site needs to be configured for Advanced Scheduling in order to have this process enabled.

1) - Add Associated Organization Data To Your Site

From the Administration "Associated Organizations" page, use the Add Organizations button to add the "child organizations" (Leagues or Clubs) that are within your "parent organization".

2) - Add Location Data To Your Site

You can load in location from the TeamSideline pages in your Site, or, complete the attached Location Details Import file and send it to TeamSideline to load into your Site. 

2.A) To Add Locations to your Site, from the Schedules "Locations" page, use the Add button to add your Locations. 

2.B) To edit Org, Game Spacing and Age, from the Schedules "Locations" page, click the Pencil/Edit icon to edit the location.  Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see Org, Game Spacing and Age.

  1. Organization aka Association Organization.
  2. Game Spacing - Click Save when done.
  3. Age Group - Click Add.

Organization:The Organization list on the Location Edit page is created at "Administration > Associated Organizations".

Game Spacing: must be equal to or greater than the Game Spacing on the 1 Configuration > Scheduling page for each division using the location.  For example, if the 1 Configuration game spacing is 1 hour, and the Location game spacing is only 50 minutes, then when you try to create a schedule, the system will not be able to find a location to put the 60 minute games into because the locations game spacing is less than 60 minutes.

Age Group: must be equal the Age Group for the Schedule Division(s) you are going to be creating game schedules for this location.  (From "Leagues & Divisions" when you click "Add Division" Age Group is one of the selections.  That Division Age Group must equal the Age Group for your Location(s).  If you do not need Age Group then just make all of your Locations Age Groups and your Scheduling Age Groups the same -- for example, "Youth - Other".

3) - Add Location Availability Data To Your Site

You can load in location availability data from the TeamSideline pages in your Site, or, complete the attached Location Availability Import file and load it yourself under Administration > Import Data and click on Location Availability Import. 

To use the pages in your Site, go to Schedules > Locations > Manage Locations and click the green Availability icon to get to the Availability page for a specific location.

4) Update Multiple Locations Button

After your Location data has been loaded into your Site, you can make "mass" updates to location data by clicking the "Update Multiple Locations" button from the Schedules > Locations page.

5) Add Leagues & Divisions

From the Schedules "Current Leagues & Divisions" page, use the Add League button to add a League.  Use the Add Division button to add your Divisions.

Tip: For larger organizations, we recommend you add Leagues by Age Group and Gender, and the Divisions under them.  For example, add a League of U6 Boys/Lincoln to denote a specific Club, or just U6 Boys if the League is League wide.  Then add Divisions of colors, numbers, or letters within that League.

6) Add Teams

You can add team data from an Import file process, or from the TeamSideline 2 Teams page in each Division.

If you manually add Teams on the "2 Teams" page of each Division, then select the Associated Organization during this Process so the Team is aligned to the proper "child organization" (This process is done automatically during the Team Data Load file process.)

To use the import process, complete the Team Data Load file (attached and available on the Administration Import page) and use the Team Import File to load in the file.  You can load Teams directly into Divisions you have created, or, use the Pre-Season Assignment page to assign Teams to Divisions.

7) Scheduling

When the above steps are done, you are ready to schedule. 

  1. Go to the Schedules > Leagues & Divisions page.
  2. Click the Edit (pencil) icon for a Division.
  3. Complete the "1 Configuration" page and click Save.
  4. Review the "2 Teams" page and add, edit or delete teams.
  5. From the "3 Time Slots" page, click "Enable Auto Assign" to have the Site automatically schedule games into a day of games during the week.  Select a "Day", and determine if you want to select "Earliest Availability" to have the games scheduled at the beginning of your availability periods.
  6. After completing the Time Slots page, go to "4 Create Schedule" and click Create.
  • Review for any "TBD" locations.  This indicates a team is associated to an organization that does not have a location with availability during the week this team is scheduled to have a home game.  You can change Location Availability (Schedules > Locations > Availability icon) or click the Swap button (blue horizontal arrows) to change where the game will be.
  • There are many edit features on the Create Schedule page that you can use to edit, move, add or delete games.  Use the tables of Statistics at the bottom of the page to help you know the number of home and away games by team, opponent distribution, location and time distribution.

Troubleshooting

This section contains tips regarding what to look for when the system does not seem to be working as well as it should regarding Advanced Scheduling.

When you click the Create button on the 4 Create Schedule page, the result will be one of the following:

  1. All games are assigned correctly where teams are playing home games at their home fields.
  2. Most games are assigned but there are some "TBD" games where no time slot has been selected.
  3. All games have "TBD" instead of a time slot.

1. All games have "TBD" instead of a time slot.

Regarding 3: This means there is a configuration setup wrong, or, you have zero location availability which is unlikely.  Go through the Setup items one by one and make sure everything is setup correctly:

  1. Confirm you have set the availability correctly for your locations.
  2. Confirm the game spacing on your Division "1 Configuration" page is either A) equal to the game spacing set for each location or B) lower than the game spacing set for each location.  If the Division "1 Configuration" page game spacing is greater than the game spacing set for a location then the system will not be able to place a game into that location -- just like you can't put a 4 inch wide fence post (the 1 configuration game spacing) into a 2 inch wide hole (the location game spacing).
  3. Confirm your Teams are associated to organizations.
  4. Confirm the Age Groups for Locations match the Division Age Groups.

If you can not determine the issue then email support@teamsideline.com so we can both help you and update this article.

2. Most games are assigned but there are some "TBD" games where no time slot has been selected.

Regarding 2: This means the system could not find availability for some games so you will need to use the Swap button feature to find a time slot for these "TBD" games.

3. XU vs UX Age Groups

Make sure your Locations are not setup for XU and your Divisions are setup for UX -- or vice-a-versa.  Both must be XU or UX (for example 12U or U12).

4. Create Button Does Not Display

Try going to the 1 Configuration/Scheduling page, changing the Games per Week/Team to a different configuration, saving the page, then changing it back to what you want, and saving it again.

5. Multi Location Calendar Games are not starting at the time I defined on the 3 Time Slots page

The start time for the "Start Window" field needs to match the "Start Time" defined for the location at Schedules > Locations > Manage Locations.  A location's Time Slots are defined by the availability and game spacing configured for the location.  A Division's Time Slot configuration just narrows the availability window but does not change the Time Slots of the location (ex. if you want the games to start at 3:45, set both the location and the division's 3 Time Slot page to 3:45.  Do not set the location to 3:00 and the division to 3:45 or the games will start at 4:00).

6. Templates

If you have a particular type of schedule (# of Teams, days, times) that you need to create consistently the TeamSideline Support Team can create a Support ticket for our Support Team to make schedule Templates for you.  Then our Technical Team can "mark" these Templates as being "Advanced Scheduling" templates.  Once this is done these templates can be invoked from the 3 Time Slots page "Template" drop down which will display once the templates have been added to your Site.  Note: Advanced templates are presently only available for 1 game per week schedules.