Which games should you schedule first?

Once you have all the games created for your tournament, you have to schedule them (put them on the calendar). Say you have 250 games to schedule on Saturday, where do you start? Anyone who has never scheduled a tournament before, might think it doesn't really matter. And how wrong would they be.

The answer to that question comes from part science, and part experience. Theoretically, you could take a few different approaches. Start with the teams that are the most difficult to schedule, or the coaches. Schedule all their games, and then move to the next one.

In our experience, we have found that the best strategy is to schedule one division at a time. And the order that you pick the division is based on the complexity of scheduling that division. That complexity could come from a variety of factors (based on your own judgement). For example, we believe bigger divisions (say 8 teams) are generally harder to schedule than smaller divisions (say 4 teams). Similarly, divisions with more coaches that coach multiple teams are harder to schedule. Or divisions that have time requests you want to honor (say high school kids taking SATs on Saturday morning) are harder.

No matter your criteria, we recommend (and practice ourselves) that you schedule one division at a time. Otherwise it can get very hard to keep track of the amount of break time between games for a team, or basic sanity checks like - playoffs come after group games.