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Scheduling and Coaching at the All Nations 2015 Volleyball Tournament
All Nations is a great tournament that encapsulates many things for me. It is the epicentre to meet and reconnect with people who plays the sport I am deeply passionate about.
Scheduling
The organiser of the tournament, Gary, asked me if I wanted to schedule the tournament this year. I said why not. It suited my mentality, i.e. think logically and hunched over an excel spreadsheet. I thought it should be a fairly simple process but like a lot of things, especially if doing it for the first time, some things was a lot more difficult than it looked.
One of the difficult encounters was doing the schedule so there was no clashes. The main clash to avoid is scheduling a team to play twice at the same twice. This was relatively simple to avoid. The other clash is when you have a person who is playing for one team and coaching another or a person who are coaching two different teams. When I worked out the initial schedule, it was beautiful but delicate. One little change and the house of cards could fall down. So when I started to shift matches around to avoid player/ coach or coach/ coach clashes, then it started to get ugly. I would only swap matches that was either directly before or after to each other. This was because once you start swapping that are two or three match slots apart or across different courts or even across the days, then you start to get clashes of two teams playing at the same time or a crazy schedule where a team is playing three times in a row. When I swapped matches, I would insert a comment so I knew that match had to stay because of this player/coach. When I completed it initially, it all looked good but then Gary informed me that a men’s team has dropped out. So that house of cards just crumpled and I went on to do the whole thing again.
The other difficult thing was the last minute scheduling for week two. The tournament format was put the teams into divisions (1,2 or 3) based on week one, another smaller pool and then knock out phase. We kept to nine match slots per court. This meant all pool matches could be played after eight match slots on the Saturday so the schedule the ninth match slot for the men’s and women’s division 1 quarter finals. I kept two match slots free the next day if the some matches overrun and the some quarter finals could not be played. I left early on the Saturday to attend my niece’s birthday party. I later found out that none of the quarter finals matches were played! This meant on Saturday night, I had to do some last minute scheduling amendments. A couple of things that was different to week one was we only had six courts (four courts was combined to have two show courts), which squeezed up the number of matches we could have. Also, we had a team drop out on the Saturday, which meant three matches did not have to be played on the Sunday. In the end, we decided to keep to eight courts and only have the show courts for the division 1 semifinals and finals. This freed up more match slots and I was able to redo the schedule so all the matches could be played and finished at the same time.
I definitely learnt that certainly for the second week, more time had to be allocated to complete the matches.
Excel Formulas
Two helpful formulas I created help me a lot. The first was I wanted to create a team’s individual playing and refereeing schedule so their schedule wasn’t too hard and that they weren’t refereeing a match before playing a match (slows down the timing before if that match they are refereeing overruns, they can’t start their playing match on time). So I created a formula as seen below:
The “Y$4” refers to the team name and the other cells refer to the match slots. If the team name was in the match slot for that time, it was put in the team team (i.e. whatever that was in “Y$4″), otherwise it would leave it blank (” “). I originally put “Y$4” as “Italy White” but I soon realised I would have to manually change “Italy White” to another team for every team’s schedule. For example, change “Italy White” for “Greece”. By having it as “Y$4”, I could copy and paste for the rest of the teams. I can already see that Italy White is both playing and refereeing at the same time. When I investigated, it is actually Italy White men are that refereeing so that’s okay. I should have labelled the team as Italy White
to avoid this. I could do the same thing with the player/coach and coach/coach situations. This was useful because I can see what the schedule is like for each team and if it was too hard, shift some matches around to make it easier.
The other things that was useful that I learnt for week two schedule was when compiling the list of matches to be played. I learnt this a kid; all you do is the team in the A1 spot stays and you just rotate the rest of the teams until it goes back to its originally position. I originally did it manually but I eventually found a better way.
The first set of matches I had to insert manually. The second of matches you can see that cell D31 equals to cell D27 but cell F31 equals to cell D28. Cell F32 would equal to F27 and so on. So basically Europe stayed the same while the other five spots rotated. Once you did that, you can just copy and paste the second set of matches to get the rest of the matches. That saved a lot of time when I worked that out for weekend two’s schedule
Coaching
I coached Asia Women this year and it was the best Asia team I have coached in four years coaching Asia. In weekend one, we had a 5-2 record (won five, lost two). I’m not sure if I won that many matches in the previous three years combined! We only lost to the top two teams in our pool and we finished third.
In weekend two, it was always going to be tougher matches and it reflected in our 1-2 record. This meant we got third in our pool and in the Division 2 knock outs. We won our quarter finals against France but lost out to Russia. This meant we finished joint 11th overall which is awesome for Asia (last year we finished second from bottom).
We did have a higher level Asia team than in previous years so I did employ more tactics to gain an edge. When it was carried out, I felt it worked but a lot of the times, it wasn’t carried out.
Finals Match Videos
I filmed the men’s and women’s Division 1 Finals. See below:
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