The benefit of aligning start times

August 19, 2023 By Lori@Universal

Most tournaments try to accommodate up to 3 teams per coach. Let's take an example of a tournament where games start at top of the hour, and a coach has 3 teams playing in the tournaments. Each team plays 2 games per day. No team should be playing back to back games. These teams are different ages, so they play on separate fields but they're all on the same location.

As you can see below, handling 3 teams for a coach is pretty straightforward in this scenario. You have plenty of flexibility to accommodate coaching conflicts for the opponents, and if you wanted to you could easily fit a 4^th team as well. And a 5^th.

	8am	9am	10am	11am	12pm	2pm
Field 1	#1		#3
Field 2		#2		#4
Field 3					#5	#6

Or you could do something more compact like this:

	8am	9am	10am	11am	12pm	1pm
Field 1	#1			#3
Field 2		#2			#4
Field 3			#5			#6

Let's look at the same scenario but with one minor change. Games start every 60 minutes, 65 minutes and 70 minutes for the three age groups. What happened? Not only the flexibility is gone, but you're not even done by 6pm!

	8am	10am	11am	1pm	2pm	4pm
Field 1	#1	#3
Field 2			#2	#4
Field 3					#5	#6

Now, you could get a little creative and do something like this. It's a little more compact, but look at the teams' experience. Everyone is waiting 3 hours between their games. And if any of these fields was in a different location, it only gets worse.

	8am	9am	10am	12pm	1pm	2pm
Field 1	#1			#3
Field 2		#2			#4
Field 3			#5			#6

Of course, aligning start times is not a free lunch. To achieve that you would probably need to reduce the number of games the youngest age group could play in a day. However, when you're looking to get as many coaches be with their teams in the tournament as possible, aligned start times can be a powerful ally.

PS: Most tournaments we work with don't actually align the start times. It requires more fields (i.e. higher costs), and the referees don't like the extra waiting between games (less money for the same time spent on the fields). Besides if less than 50% of the teams share a coach, you can usually resolve all conflicts without aligning start times.