County league event stages - what happens when

The county league organiser creates an event every season, and the event follows the typical workflow process as all MMM events do, moving from Pending->Open->In preparation->In play->Completed->Archived.

Here we summarise what tasks and activities take place at each stage

Stage: Pending

Only the league organiser has visibility of the event at this stage. The key task at this stage is to ensure that all clubs are represented under the Clubs tab and that their details are present and up to date; specifically this means the club's official email address and phone number.

Whilst clubs do not see this year's leagues, they can still nominate their overall club captain. This is applied at the series level and so persists from year to year. The club captain would generally be the one nominating the club's teams. The club captain must be a club official.

The organiser may add teams as well at this stage, though the clubs cannot. Note that teams are brought forward from the previous year when the event is moved to Open stage, so unless you know there is a brand new team, best to leave team entry until Open stage. From year two onward, this should be a sanity-check stage only.

Key points: Clubs present with contact details

Stage: Open

The main activity is establishing all the teams that clubs are entering into the leagues. This is best delegated to the clubs who will find that they can choose the event in the Fixtures tab of Hosted events where they will be able to nominate or check their team entries. Club captains may also indicate their expected division, but obviously the league organiser has the final say in setting those.

Similar to the Pending stage, from year two onward club captains and teams are carried over, so the main task is allocating the team's divisions where they have been relegated or promoted.

Key points: Club captains nominated, Teams nominated and allocated to a division

Stage: In preparation

There are 3 sub tasks that need to be completed whilst "In preparation":

1. Build the league tables
2. Configure scheduling criteria
3. Schedule the fixtures

Normally, only the organiser interacts with an event when in preparation. But for county leagues we expect the clubs and team captains to help out in the second sub-task: Configure scheduling criteria. Apart from that, this is mostly the organisers domain.

Once the league tables are confirmed, they can't really be changed so this process should only start once there is a very firm, committed set of nominated teams from clubs.

It's only after the league tables have been built that scheduling criteria can be set as we then have confirmed the divisions; Each division may set its own scheduling criteria. The organiser would typically set event and divisional level criteria first and then announce to all club and team captains to add theirs at club and team level.

Once all scheduling criteria has been confirmed, the league organiser can complete the last task which is to get the system to schedule all fixtures. This may require some manual setting, but the organiser should quickly reach the situation where all fixtures are satisfactorily scheduled, at which point fixture dates are "locked".

Locked fixture dates simply means that they are now visible to club and team captains who may engage in their own negotiations to reschedule where necessary.

With respect to court bookings, the key take away is that they are pretty much entirely automatic and they can be made at any point once the fixture schedule has been locked. If a club elects to have bookings fully automated, then there's very little to do. If they do not, then all that needs to be done is to press a button to initiate a booking "run". Of course, for any individual fixture, courts booked may be adjusted and any bookings that could not be made (due to lack of court availability) are highlighted  so that court clearance action can be taken so that a subsequent booking attempt will succeed.

Key points: Build leagues, Set schedule criteria, Schedule and lock fixture dates, Automatic court booking

Stage: In play

Like all MMM events, the county league event should only be moved into In play on the commencement date of the event. Unlike other MMM events, clubs and teams will have visibility on the divisions, the teams and the fixtures even while the event is in preparation. This is because they are actually involved in the league preparation - particularly when it comes to adjusting some of the fixture schedules as, despite best efforts, their scheduling criteria is bound to have been incomplete or clashes will become apparent later rather than sooner.

Importantly, fixture rescheduling can continue to happen at any time when the event is In play.

Team captains can set up their squads, though they will also be able to do that whilst In preparation. They can also set the player line-ups for any fixture, though typically this would be done shortly before the date of the fixture.

With the line-ups set for a fixture the individual matches can be scored and the results accumulate into the standings automatically.

Apart from In play essentially enabling the leagues to "run", the standings and team/player statistics pages leap into action and become available to all.

Key points: Build squads, set line-ups, score matches, review standings and stats