Schedule Builder Overview & Quickstart Guide

Featured

The MSTW Schedule Builder builds ‘balanced’ single round robin schedules for leagues and tournaments for up to six teams. Future releases will handle double round robin (home-and-home) schedules for up to thirty-two teams. NOTE: This plugin REQUIRES the MSTW LEAGUE MANAGER PLUGIN (version 2.5 for higher) to handle the creation of leagues, seasons, and teams.

Depending on the size of the league or tournament, the number of permutations and combinations of teams, time slots, dates, and locations can be huge. The simple (old) method of always having a single team always playing in the same time slot or position is not always the way to go. It can, and does, create problems with players, coaches, and fans because it can be inherently unfair. The issue is the quality of the first position time slot. If the time, location, and/or quality of the facility is desirable, then the team that’s always scheduled there will be advantaged, and the other teams will not share equal playing time at the desirable facility. If another time and location is less desirable (i.e., inconvenient time, long distance, poor quality of facility, etc.), then a team that is always scheduled to play there will be disadvantaged.

These issues and the inherent inequity are minimized by balanced schedules. Round robin scheduling includes a date, time, location, home and visitor teams, and game ID for each game. A quality schedule should distribute and balance the dates/days, times, locations, home and visiting teams of its games as equitably as possible.

GETTING STARTED

The following steps will get Schedule Builder up and running quickly. View a quick tutorial on these steps here – COMING SOON!

  1. Teams & Leagues. MSTW League Manager (release 2.5 or later) MUST be installed and active before installing, activating and using MSTW Schedule builder. Begin by creating a league and adding teams to it in League Manager. For a tournament, create a league for it and add the teams. Remember that teams can be added to multiple leagues, so you won’t always have to create new teams.
  2. Schedule Builder Main Screen. Set the parameters for your tournament or league schedule, then create the games.
  3. Update Games Screen. If necessary, use the Update Games screen to adjust game times, dates, and locations.
  4. Use the MSTW League Manager shortcodes to create the desired front end displays for your site.