You have enough hours. Do you have the right hours?

A proposed study of usable venue capacity, demand windows, and hidden bottlenecks.

Question

Does a time-window view of venue capacity reveal shortages that a total-hours view misses? A league might have enough hours in aggregate but too few that are usable by a particular division.

Data to collect

For each available block, record the venue, local date, start and end time, surface suitability, and confirmed availability. For each division, record required games, game duration including changeover, eligible windows, and any venue restrictions. Distinguish contracted time from speculative availability.

Proposed method

First compare total required hours with total available hours. Then group demand and capacity by the windows and venue types that teams can actually use. Finally, check joint feasibility: a block eligible for two divisions can be assigned only once. Summing each division’s eligible capacity independently would double-count shared supply.

A synthetic illustration: forty Saturday-only games needing one-hour blocks cannot fit into thirty compatible Saturday hours, even if the league owns a hundred other hours on weeknights. The missing capacity is specific, not global.

Measures and limits

Report demand-to-capacity ratios, uncovered games, unused blocks, and assumptions about sharing. Test sensitivity to changing one eligibility rule or acquiring one additional block. Do not claim that changing eligibility is acceptable simply because it makes the calculation feasible.

The study should record cancelled blocks and late availability changes separately. A retrospective result from one season may not predict next season’s supply. Publish the anonymized inputs only with permission; otherwise provide synthetic examples that preserve the structure of the bottleneck.