Scheduling the All Nations 2018 Tournament

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All Nations 2018

This was my fourth year scheduling the All Nations 2018 Tournament (see my reflections in 2017, 2016 and 2015).  It has gotten to the point now where systems are in place where I can do it with relative ease.  However, there were still some things I learnt this year.

Scheduling Reflection

I actually forgotten that I created an All Nations 2018 spreadsheet last year with some notes about what to do this year.  One note I made was making populating the pools on the second Saturday, based on the results in the first weekend, a bit easier.  Previously, I would manually input the teams in the pools myself (highlighted in orange below).  So for pool D, I had to look to see who was first in pool A, who was third in pool B and C and who was the best sixth placed team.  I streamlined this procedure by creating space for the pool standings so I can just input the pool standings (in yellow) and the pools and schedule are automatically generated (see the blue arrows).  I also did the same thing for the second set of pools (D to I) so I don’t need to manually input which teams plays in which quarter final.  I have already created another spreadsheet with different notes for next year.

.  I was happy I already did this last year.  There were a few adjustments I had to make for this year since the tournament format was different for the men and women.  For example, the women’s tournament was actually played out to every position so I had to create space for the losers bracket.

.  With the new tournament format graphic, I tried to match the styling to the actual schedule graphic.  Some of the changes was the curved coloured boxes, adding the tournament format and splitting the weekend one schedule over two pages.  I think it looks a lot better compared to previous schedule versions.

.  Despite allocating the most time for matches this year, this year was actually the worst for overrun matches and matches needing to be rescheduled for the next tournament day.  Adding an extra game (or nine as what happened on the second Saturday) for the next day is not that easy.  You need to fit in the matches in an already fully packed schedule, be mindful that certain matches need to be played first before another match can be played, e.g. quarterfinals before semifinals, and how this affects the referee schedule.  Simply put, it requires redoing the whole schedule from scratch.  This continual schedule overhauling means doing the extra work in a time crunch and teams do not know when they are playing until very late.  To help avoid overrun matches next year, I will strongly insist that matches are played to 21, 21, 15 (or 11), as we did last year to catch up on matches.  I’ve already made a note of this in next year’s spreadsheet.

All Nations 2019

I look forward to putting all this into practice for next year’s schedule.