Scheduling the tournament!

We are occasionally asked about how the schedule is developed.  Scheduling a DI tournament is fairly difficult.    Here are some of the things we have to consider when putting together the schedule.

The typical tournament arrangement is to have one Instant Challenge site for each Team Challenge site.    When we only have one Team Challenge site for a particular challenge this means that we have three competition levels going through the same IC room.  Just as TC appraisers need to see every team at a certain competition level one right after the other, IC appraisers also need to see every team at a certain competition level one right after the other.  Typically, you would expect better IC solutions from a SL team than from an EL team.  If a SL team was put into the middle of a group of EL teams in IC the EL teams following the SL teams might tend to get lower scores because the appraisers have seen a more advanced solution to the challenge.  We want our IC appraisers to be able to get into a mindset for each age level and stay there.  Since we generally have only a few SL teams we tend to have large span of time between SL teams TC and IC times because if the SL team has TC in the morning then we must wait until all the EL (and possibly ML) teams have finished IC before we can schedule the SL teams IC times.

The Improv challenge is generally the most difficult challenge to schedule.  Improv teams have 3 blocks of time we have to address:  Studio Time, Team Challenge and Instant Challenge.

Our goal for scheduling IC and TC is to have the time span between them no less than 1 hour and no more than 4 hours.  We are not always able to accommodate this because of the other scheduling conflicts we always have to do with.  We have an order of precedence when scheduling teams with conflicts.  We process conflicts in this order.

1. Team members who are on multiple teams
2. Team Managers who are managing multiple teams
3. Team Managers who have children on other teams
4. Team Members with other school conflicts such as UIL competitions
5. Team members who would like to watch siblings teams presentations

After this we try to address other scheduling requests but generally by the time we get this far down the list there is very little that we can do to accommodate those requests.

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Mid Cities News ] [ Sponsors ] [ How to Join! ] [ Contacts ] [ Tournaments ] [ Training and Workshops ] [ Calendar ] [ Team Forms ] [ Team Manager Resources ] [ Volunteer Opportunities ] [ Magellan Award ] [ Mid-Cities Scholarship ] [ Archives ] [ Board of Directors ] [ Mid-Cities @ GF ]

Last modified: 11/05/08
Send mail to Webmaster  with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2007  Mid Cities CPSO, Inc.