How can I schedule matches for a tournament?

As a tournament organiser, you can pre-book any and all matches involved. This is one of the final (optional) tasks of preparing a tournament and must be done after you have confirmed all draws in Manage draws - but best you do this before you move the event into the  in-play stage - though you'll still be able to rebook matches once in-play as well. Match scheduling has its own dedicated screen and functions that can be found in Hosted events > Pre-book.

In Pre-book, you always do your booking in the context of a date - so choose the date on which you want to start booking courts first. For a knock out tournament you might want to start at either end - perhaps booking in the finals first at the end of the tournament and work backwards or, alternatively, booking round 1 matches first and working up to the finals. The choice is yours.

You'll only be able to schedule matches for events (tournaments) that you organise and where the date chosen is within the start and end dates set for the event. If that's more than one event you get to choose which one. If the event could be hosted by multiple clubs you get to choose which club.

Once an event and club are selected, the screen shows you the booking schedule for the day on the right and a list of all matches on the left. For unbooked matches it's a simple matter of choosing the court and time to book it and for booked matches you can quickly remove the booking if needs be. The court schedule for that day will immediately reflect bookings you make giving full details of the match booked.

If you are managing a large club tournament with several draws (most of which will probably be segregated under different events), you can easily swap from one event to another as you build up the schedule.

Note also you can filter the match listing by round (e.g. "semi finals" for a knock out tournament) and booked status.

For knock out tournaments, the system knows which matches depend on which - so you will not be able to schedule a match before another that must precede it. And you'll not be able to schedule a match after another that depends on it.

Using blocked out courts

In the case of a single event...

In Pre-book you can normally only book a match on an unused court. But you will be allowed to over-book a court that was previously booked out in the name of the event (i.e. not for a specific match). Bookings in the name of an event are made under the Courts tab of Manage events. When you remove a booking it gets rebooked as one of these generic event bookings.

If you wish to block out a set of courts for your event early - preventing members from using them and before you've created the matches - then block them out as event bookings and then use those to book your matches once the draw(s) are confirmed.

In the case of scheduling multiple simultaneous events...

Typically for a large tournament the club would need to block out many courts on a number of days early on - perhaps before the events have even been created. So well before we could schedule the matches. This would have been done under the Reservations tab of Manage courts. Crucially, the reservation category used for this would have the May be used for event scheduling option ticked (in the Details window).

In Pre-book you can normally only book a match on an unused court or on a court block booked in the name of the event. But if you have many "events" (different draws) where bookings are intermingled, you'll find this too restrictive - you'll not be able to book a match in event A on a court that was pre-booked in the name of event B. But you can invoke an exception to this rule to over-book courts booked as a club reservation as per the above. To do so you must choose the reservation category that you intend to over-book. You'll find a drop down of eligible reservation categories right above the match listing. Choose one of these and you'll find that you can book a match to replace a court that is already booked in the name of the reservation selected. If there are no eligible reservation categories available the drop down does not appear and the option is thus unavailable.

Conveniently, when you remove a booking it is replaced with this club reservation - allowing you to book another match from another event on top of it whilst ensuring the slot never becomes free for club members to use for other purposes. With no reservation category selected, removing a booking will replace it with a generic booking under the name of the event (and thus can only be re-used by another match in the same event).

Fixed vs Floating bookings

In Fixed mode you book courts into the standard member booking slots. In Floating mode, you have far more flexibility for each match - exact start times and custom durations.

In Floating mode you can only schedule matches on top of blocked out courts as above. So you should always block out the courts this way to prevent others from using them. Floating mode gives you some  extra configuration options as follows:

• Refine the booking boundary in terms of time and courts. You might have blocked out a large region of courts. You can set these boundaries to temporarily limit your options as to where you can schedule each match. This is particularly useful if you use the auto-schedule feature (see below) to ensure that the process is constrained as desired.
• Choose increment of changes. This sets the granularity of how exact you want to set your scheduling. For example, 5 minutes would mean you can schedule a match to the nearest 5 minute boundary. It would also mean that when you move or adjust the duration of a match schedule it moves in 5 minute increments.
• Choose booking duration. Set the default duration of each match booking

You'll find you can then schedule your matches within the constraints set above at any time. You can also click on the orange adjust button on each booking presented in the grid which gives you arrow keys to move or resize the booking in any way you wish. Note, however, that this may result in other bookings being shunted up and down accordingly - especially in order to keep their existing durations and to maintain integrity so far as dependencies are concerned.

Finally, the auto-schedule feature: At the top of the matches listed on the left, you have a green Book and red Remove button. These act on all the matches listed - so you could remove a whole set of matches at once or schedule a whole set of matches at once.

Important points

• Float-booked matches cannot be changed or rescheduled by the players - in fact they can only be changed or removed on this pre-booking screen.
• The underlying block bookings must remain in place - if you remove them, members will be able to book courts in the usual way that could clash with the floating booked matches.