How do I review, create or change a court set?

Court sets are created in the Court sets tab in Manage Courts. Click the New button and first give it a name. For each court set you can choose to see how it is used in Usage or review and change the court slots defined using either a condensed format or an expanded format. The condensed format presents you with the time slots of all courts laid out for one week period (Monday to Sunday). Your task is then to choose the slots that make up the court set.

In the title of this section you have a set of green buttons indicating the courts you wish to include. By default they are all "on" meaning that when you choose a slot it will assume it applies to all courts that coincide with that slot. You can click these court choice buttons on or off in order to indicate which courts you want your selections to apply.

Then click in the body of the table to select any slot. This could be quite tedious if you want to choose many courts, so there are blue quick-set buttons for each row and column so you can select all times for a particular week day (column) or all week-days for a particular time slot (rows). Note: these quick-set buttons actually invert the selection - i.e. if the selection was on then it will turn it off and vice versa. See below for more detail on how this works as it's not immediately obvious.

A selected slot will show in green. However, if you had selected a slot for, say, just one court and then you switched the other courts on for selection then that particular selection will show in orange indicating that it does not apply to all the courts you currently have selected.

You can also choose to select an existing court set giving you the option to make changes. You can also rename it by clicking the Rename button.

Court sets are used in three circumstances:

1. On Products and subscriptions so that you can set court availability and pricing to those who buy it
2. On events so you can set restrictions on court usage and pricing for single events
3. On  groups or teams to be specific about what courts to book for each group or team session

For any existing court set this screen shows you which products and events the court set is being referred to.

You can Remove a court set only if it is not used in any product or event.

Lastly, if you wish to create a court set that includes all courts and all times you should not select all the buttons to green. Instead leave them all unselecting. ManageMyMatch assumes a court set that has no court slots selected to mean all - as having one with none has no meaning.

Detail on defining and reviewing a court set

It's not intuitive to visualise a court set on a two dimensional screen when we are trying to present and define something that is essentially multi dimensional, these being:

• Day of week
• Start time of slot
• Duration of slot
• Court

You may prefer the expanded format screen that buys clarity for tediousness. Here's an expose on using the condensed format.

The dimension that "suffers" most is court. The first two, day of week (X-axis) and time of day (Y-axis) are easier. In many cases all a club's courts have the same slots and so each square in the grid represents the choice for all courts. If some courts have different times you'll find that every slot (across all courts) that differs in either start time or duration is listed as a separate row. Then, a square on that row represents the state of any or all courts that support that particular slot start date and duration.

In order to "see" what courts are set for any particular slot, we need to fiddle with the court selection buttons near the top. With all of them selected you see in the grid (in terms of what the currently selected court set is):

• Green buttons meaning that all courts that support that time/duration are set
• Orange buttons meaning that some, but not all, courts that support that time/duration are set
• Grey buttons meaning that no courts that support that time/duration are set

So if you have orange buttons you know that your court set is excluding at least one of the courts. Which one? The way you find that out is be clicking off the court selections at the top until the grid button goes green. Essentially, when you deselect a court button at the top you are saying you do not want to see whether your court set includes that court. If nothing changes in the grid when you click off a court at the top, then you know that court is completely excluded from your court set.

By clicking off a court selection button, you are telling the system that when you click a court grid button, you are choosing to exclude that court. Put another way, you only include selected courts when clicking the grid buttons.

When a club has a simple set up with all courts having the same slots it's more intuitive. But the more differences in times and durations between the various courts the more fragmented becomes the picture. But the rule to keep in mind is this:

The grid button states tell you what the court set represents only for the courts selected at the top. If you deselect them all, then no grid buttons will show green or orange - it's like asking the system to show you the courts selected in a universe of no courts; the answer is no courts.

It is thus important to understand that the state of the court selection buttons are not part of the definition of the court set, they are merely a tool for you to mask or unmask what courts you want to visualise when presenting the state of the court set; as well as a tool to indicate what courts to include when setting (or unsetting) slots in the court set (by clicking in the grid square buttons).

Let's take an example. You want a court set that specifies certain times over the week for one court only. Deselect all the court at the top except for that one and then click in the grid to set the slots. Exit the screen and come back in and select your court set. All courts at the top are selected. Why? because they have nothing to do with the state of your court set. They are instruction buttons. They are saying, tell me what my court set looks like assuming I want to include all court in that consideration. Most likely you are going to get a bunch of orange buttons in the grid. Each orange button is saying "You court set includes at least one of the courts you have chosen above - but not all". To find out which court you have to turn off some court selections until the buttons go green. If the first court you turned off was the one you'd selected before all the buttons would go grey - a sure sign that that must be the court that the orange button was referring to.

Think of this example but having specified 2 courts (say court 1 & 2 out of 4 courts). You come back tomorrow and select the court set. The buttons show orange (you have all the courts selected at the top). Lets do a grid for all the possible display permutations for our 4 courts:

Where we have green grid buttons, we are saying "Your court set includes at least all the courts you've selected". "At least" is important - it's not saying "Your court set includes only the courts you've selected". That's why it's green when we've only selected to show for court 1 - our court set includes courts 1 & 2 so it's green.

Yes, it's complicated. But the upside is there is no limit to how you can configure a court set. You could have courts 1 & 2 between 5pm & 7pm on Sunday, Court 4 all Friday afternoon, except at 4pm where you have court 3 as well. Then courts 2,3 & 4 on Monday & Tuesday morning. Not that this is a likely scenario, but at least we know we can cater for any eventuality - so long as you can get your head around this tool!