THE GAME
BEFORE
THE GAME.
Somebody decides who plays whom.
When. Where. And who gets the rough end of it.
Let’s get better at that.
A schedule is more than a list of games.
It is how a league distributes opportunity, inconvenience, and trust.
PUT YOUR OWN TEAMS ON THE BOARD.
Build a 4–12 team matrix or bracket. Take the result straight to Excel.
GOOD QUESTIONS.
NO EASY ANSWERS.
Six ways into the science. All assumptions on the table.
The average schedule does not exist.
Why equal totals can conceal a very unequal season—and what to measure instead.
AVERY NORTH · 4 min readRead note ↗A requirement, a preference, or a habit?
A practical way to separate what cannot move from what merely needs a conversation.
AVERY NORTH · 4 min readRead note ↗Fairness happens between games, too.
Reading the research on rest differences—and translating the question into a league audit.
AVERY NORTH · 3 min readRead note ↗How do we compare two “good” schedules?
RobinX and the case for shared problems, explicit constraints, and reproducible comparisons.
AVERY NORTH · 3 min readRead note ↗You have enough hours. Do you have the right hours?
A proposed study of usable venue capacity, demand windows, and hidden bottlenecks.
AVERY NORTH · 4 min readRead note ↗One moved game. How many people move with it?
A study design for measuring the real disruption of rescheduling after publication.
AVERY NORTH · 4 min readRead note ↗No notes match. Try “rest”, “fairness”, or another category.
SAME AVERAGE.
DIFFERENT
REALITY.
Who gets the late slots? Change the allocation and see what an average can hide.
INTERACTIVE · SYNTHETIC EXAMPLEA teaching model, not a schedule optimizer. One allocation equals one team's appearance in a late game; each game needs two appearances.
PULL AT
THE THREADS.
Better questions belong to everyone.
So should the lessons we learn from them.
- 01
When does “equal” stop being fair?
Equal totals can hide unequal timing, travel, and recovery.
- 02
What is the true cost of a change?
Count affected people and downstream work, not just moved games.
- 03
Can we compare schedules honestly?
Shared inputs, disclosed constraints, and reproducible measures.
NO TOOL
OWNS
THE GAME.
Scheduling Sports is a free, non-commercial educational publication about the science and practice of sports scheduling. Its intended audience includes league administrators, academics, software builders, and competitors alike.
Edited by Avery North, a pen name. The editor works in sports scheduling. The publication reflects that practitioner perspective, with opinions informed by product information and operational experience. No credentials or institutional affiliations are implied by the alias.
Our editorial standard: distinguish evidence from opinion, link to original research, disclose study assumptions, and welcome corrections. The original examples here are educational notes; we have not conducted the proposed field studies. The project is not presented as a registered nonprofit or charity.
Editorial standards & contributions
Future contributions should include the question, input data provenance, constraints, evaluation measures, limitations, and any relevant commercial interests. Anonymize personal and customer information and obtain permission before sharing data. Vendor comparisons should use common public benchmarks and disclose affiliations. Providers and readers can submit updates, corrections, or another perspective.