2012-366 Day 264 – Softball Schedule

I swear, softball will be down to once or twice a week soon. I just get a little excited, that’s all. We had our draft last night and I checked all my boxes from yesterday, minus optional number 3 (power hitter). In an amazing feat, we managed to draft incredibly balanced (in our estimation) the first time through according to our numbers, with four teams having the exact same score and the fifth team off by .038 points to the positive. Not bad at all.

We’re trying something new with our schedule this year after last year’s successful playoffs out at the S-Turns park in Simi. We’re going to have the playoffs there again, but also have two additional days out there so we can fit more games in. I was tasked with creating a schedule for the season, but had one major complication staring at me when I started.

That complication was the fact that we only had enough signups for five teams, which we’ve done before, but last season we had six (which was so much easier). I hate BYEs, because that means one less week playing softball (and they are finite already). I solved this problem once in the past (two years ago, actually) by having one team a week play double headers. With the addition of our desire to play at the S turns parks (where we can run two games at a time) twice, I had a surplus of games but had to figure out how to fit five teams into them.

This was when the idea struck me. If we were willing to play two games in a day, why not three on one day. Not everyone, nor everyday, that would be crazy. No, rather, why not have each team play one triple-header? It was genius, it had to work.

But it didn’t. Five teams and two days at the park that could accommodate all those games, there was still an odd man out. Ah, but there was one other factor in play. Since we pushed the season back a week due to an all church event, I was now dealing with nine weeks instead of ten. Subtract one weekend at the end for playoffs, and that left an eight week regular season. With two of those weeks played in the Simi Park and featuring the triple headers, now we had six weeks and five teams which each had to play one double header. Six minus five left one week unaccounted for, so what if I had the odd team out of the triple header sweepstakes play an extra double header?

And here is where I began the tried-and-true strategy of firing up Excel and plugging stuff in. I noted which team had the double header each week and which two teams were playing the triple headers on each of the Simi Weeks. I then randomly picked a team to play the second double header and plugged in the assignments.

Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. Each team played 12 games. A little bit of shuffling ensured that each team played each other the same number of times (12/4 is 3, of course). Then I set up a formula which counted the home and away numbers, which were actually remarkable close. A little bit of tweaking there got everyone 6 home and 6 away games. The only thing I wasn’t able to balance was the game times, but I came fairly close.

You can behold my handiwork here: http://www.mworland.com/rps/Sball2012, I’m pretty proud of it (hence the blog post).

Weight: 227 Loss: 13 lbs – Running Yearly Mileage: 297.7 miles
Fitocracy Level: 25 ID: disciplev1