scheduling for next season

[kladis]

To simplify the scheduling of conference games for next season and the future, I wanted to throw out this idea. I think that if we gave it a shot next season, it could be build on to prevent scheduling from being such a pain and allow teams to know further in advance what to expect so they can budget and plan OOC games accordingly.

Basically, each team simply submits to the league specific weekends which they can host conference games. (An example of this would be something like the 2nd and 4th weekend of April etc.) From my experience, I've figured out that each institution pretty much keep the same academic calandar in terms of weeks-of course the days and dates change, but usually the _ weekend of _month is the same event. This way, things such as finals, spring break, and all those other events would already be avioded by the schedule.

Then, these weekends are used every single year for the league to fit in two conference games. Of course there would have to be a minimum number of weekends each team would host, but once these weekends are selected, every team would know the weekends that they would be playing home conference games and what weekends they would be playing away conference games. Then, they could schedule OOC games and additional games such as cross-division games well in advance of even the annual meeting. Not to mention that each team would be able to reserve fields at their schools well in advance since they already would know the dates and even the times could be set with respect to the situation with the school facility availability.

I hope the board considers this and gives it a shot because I think that there is a much better use of time for many people than to sit on the computer and phone every year trying to scramble together games and fields and budgets etc. With this, teams wouldn't have anything to deal with for the conference and could do as little or as much as they wanted as far as ooc games.

[Kyle Berggren]

Rick, I'm open to anything, and maybe I'm missing something here, but we're already pretty close to that. We currently submit the dates we can start playing games on, then the dates we're blacked out on as well. In the A's, with fewer teams, dates we can host could work very well. . . but the B ruins it for you. We only have so many officials each weekend, and with many B games each weekend, an A team saying we can only host games on such and such weekends could dramatically impact the schedules/travel budgets of many other teams. . . and most likely teams with smaller budgets.

I like the system we have now. I know who we're playing next year, as do you, and I assume the easiest way to do it will be to flip flop the home/away from '06 to '07 whenever possible. Did I explain any of that very well at all?