Schedule and court assignment

The slot is the unit of measurement

A tournament schedule is not written in hours and minutes: it is written in slots. A slot is the standard duration assigned to a match on a court, including the team changeover. All matches occupy one slot, even those that finish in half an hour: if you let short matches start the next round early, after three rounds nobody knows when they are playing anymore.

How to size a slot: average match duration in the chosen format, plus five minutes. Two sets out of three to 21 points becomes a 50-minute slot; a single set to 25 becomes 30 minutes. It is better to have a generous slot and finish early than an optimistic slot and play catch-up until evening.

The number of available slots is the tournament's real budget:

total slots = courts × (available hours × 60 / slot duration)

With three courts from 9 to 18 (nine hours) and 50-minute slots: 3 × 10 = 30 slots. If your formula requires 34 matches, the formula is wrong, not the schedule.

The three constraints to respect

1. No team plays two matches in the same slot. Obvious, and the number one source of error when writing a schedule by hand with multiple pools.
2. No team plays two consecutive slots, if possible. A rest round between two matches is not a kindness: it is the difference between playing a second set and suffering through a second set.
3. No court remains empty while there are matches to be played. An idle court for one slot out of twenty means 5% of the time is wasted.

The third constraint conflicts with the second as soon as the number of teams is not a convenient multiple of the number of courts. In that case, you sacrifice the rest of the teams that can be eliminated and protect the rest of those playing in the next round.

Pools in parallel or in sequence

With two pools and two courts, the choice is between two setups:

• One pool per court. Pool A always plays on court 1, Pool B on court 2. Advantages: very clear for the players, no confusion. Disadvantage: if one pool has an extra team, one court falls behind.
• Mixed pools across courts. The schedule fills the courts regardless of the pool. Advantage: no idle courts. Disadvantage: you need to communicate well, because nobody knows \"where my pool is playing\".

For an amateur tournament, the first is almost always the right choice: clarity is worth more than efficiency. The second becomes necessary with pools of different sizes or with more than three courts.

Court rotation

If the courts are not equivalent — and in a sports hall they almost never are: lighting, surface, distance from the walls, presence of spectators — it is worth distributing them. The criterion is simple: in the pool stage, each team must play at least once on each court, or as close as possible to this condition. In the final stage, however, everything is concentrated on the best court: the semi-finals and the final are played where the view is best.

A note on outdoor courts: if one is exposed to the sun and the other is in the shade, rotation is not a matter of aesthetic fairness but of results. Alternate, and schedule the worst times during the pool stage.

Final stage: matchups are written beforehand

The most delicate moment of a tournament day is the transition from the pools to the final stage, because that is when you realise you have not decided something. To be written in the schedule before starting:

• the matchups: first of Pool A against second of Pool B, first of Pool B against second of Pool A. Never first against first;
• how the best third-placed teams are handled, if the bracket includes them, and by what criteria teams from different pools are compared (usually points, then set quotient, considering only matches against the top two in the pool if the pools have different sizes);
• the start time of the final stage, with the warning that it begins when the last pool has finished;
• the third-fourth place play-off: is it played or not? If yes, it is on the schedule and occupies a slot.

The buffer

A tournament of twenty matches accumulates delays: always. The countermeasures that work, in order of effectiveness:

1. An empty slot in the middle of the day. It seems like a waste and turns out to be the best investment in the schedule: it absorbs half an hour of delay without changing anything.
2. The lunch break as a buffer. If the break is one hour, communicate it as 45 minutes: the fifteen minutes recover the morning delays.
3. Declared warm-up. \"Five minutes of warm-up on court, then we start\" avoids the spontaneous twenty minutes of passing.
4. A written plan B. If at 16 you are an hour behind, what do you cut? The third-place finals, a set from the semi-finals, the length of the sets. Deciding this beforehand means deciding with a clear head.

The visible schedule board

The schedule exists to be read by the players, not the organiser. You need a version that is visible at all times, showing the court, time, and teams for each match, and updated when delays shift the programme. The sheet taped to the wall only works if someone rewrites it; a public tournament page accessible from a phone, with matches and standings updating as points are scored, eliminates the queue of people asking \"what time do we play?\".