Creating the season

From the Select Schedule screen, click on the appropriate League. Most of the time it will be Nebraska Senior Softball. The list of available schedules is listed under Schedules. These are usually the year and the season. If the required season exists, click on it and click on Setup. If the required season does not exist, click on Schedules then Add to create a new schedule. The only required and suggested entry is the Schedule Name.

Basic set up for each schedule

From the Select Schedule screen, select the required schedule entry (e.g., 2022 NSS Summer) then click on the Setup button

Add Locations

From the Setup Schedule screen, click on Locations. While NSS uses the LaVista fields, the Locations should already be defined. However, use the Add, Change, Delete buttons as necessary to change the available locations. Click on fields to be used for the schedule. Click on Close when finished.

Add Teams

From the Setup Schedule – Teams screen, click on Add, Change, or Delete to set the needed teams. Note that the scheduler may or may not help schedule games for the Friday Morning League (FML) or the Tuesday Morning League (TML). If so, team names may be the same for each of the leagues, however, they must be distinct within the software.

Add Divisions

By default Divisions are not defined for a new season. From the Setup Schedule – Teams screen, click on Add, Change, or Delete under Divisions to enter each required division.

Assign Teams to Divisions

From the Setup Schedule – Teams screen, click on a Division then click on a team, one at a time, and click on the ===> button to assign the team to that Division. After all the teams are assigned to Divisions, cross check your work to make sure that each Division has the correct teams. Having an American League team on a National League list, and vice versa, would be subject for major ridicule of the scheduler. You can use Change Number, as desired, for each team. This seems to possibly, maybe? change the initial schedule generation, OR it may be completely irrelevant. There is no need for the Exceptions (E) button at this time. Click on Close when finished.

Add a Start Date

From the Setup Schedule screen, click on Start Date and enter the first day of regular season games.

Add Game Times

There are multiple ways to add game times for a schedule. This seems to be the most efficient way, but use whatever way works best for you.

1. Click on a field
2. Set the date and time (e.g., Mon 6:15 pm) then Add Game Time
3. Click on a field then Add Game Time. This is because it is easier to add to a field than to change the day/time. Repeat this step for the given day/time.
4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 as needed

Sun, Sun, Sun (angles)

Sun angle affects field availability throughout all seasons. As a general rule, fields are usable as listed below. There will always be exceptions, but these are the recommendations. There is no perfect solution!!

La Vista Field 2

• 6:15 after Memorial Day and before August 1st
• 7:30 before Memorial Day and on or after August 1st
• 8:45 all year

La Vista Field 3

• 6:15, 7:30, and 8:45 all summer and fall

La Vista Field 4

• 6:15, 7:30, and 8:45 all summer and fall
• This field is briefly affected, for 1st base only, for various times of the year

Date entry

Return to the main Select Schedule screen. You may have everything created, but you are starting a new season schedule. Make sure you select the schedule to be modified and click on Setup. From this screen, you will be entering the Start Date, and Exceptions (e.g., holidays, youth tournaments) to days played. Click on Start Date and enter the season’s first play date. Click OK when finished. Click on Exceptions then Add to add or remove Game Times that are exceptions to the schedule generation. Examples would be day of, day before, or day after major holidays and days where fields are reserved for city use. Most likely the scheduling director will be Adding All Locations and with All Day for the options of each exception date. Adding exceptions for Field 2 sun angle issues would also occur here. Click OK to return to the previous screen. The selected date is marked in Red. Dates with at least one Exception are marked in teal.

Options

There are multiple options available to create the league’s schedule. An option that has worked thus far is to select:

• Times teams play each other inside division = 2; outside division = 1
• Maximum games per day = 1
• Maximum games per week = 99
• Minimum days off between games = 0
• Compute Method 1
• Check Do not schedule games that conflict with Any Schedules

The dates being played will be shown in teal in the Setup Schedule screen. Press OK when ready, but beware that any existing schedule for the selected “league” will be overwritten.

Bye Games

Any and all Bye games need to be entered with “Bye” as the HomeTeamName and a game time that is not one of the valid game times, such as 10:00 PM. In addition to being clear on the schedule, it is needed to allow the Replacement Player system to correct work. Note that EVERY TEAM must be in the schedule. If two teams do not play then there needs to be one line for each team not playing.

Conflicts

The software has a feature to check for conflicts. From the menu bar Tools->Check for Conflicts. For this league, there should be few, if any, conflicts. However, as the schedule is built and tweaked, there could be conflicts that need to be resolved.

Initial Audit

The software provides a sanity check to “audit” the schedule that you created. To do so, click in the menu bar Reports->Audit. Review the report.

• Does every team play the same number of times?
• Do all teams play as Home the same number of times?
• Do all teams play as Visitor the same number of times?
• Is there an even spread of times played?
• An even spread of fields played is likely not important, however, is there an even spread of fields for each team?

If all are answered Yes then you might have the elusive “perfect” schedule. However, the perfect schedule is probably not possible, so doing your best is about all you can get. An audit tool within an Excel spreadsheet is described further down. This spreadsheet allows you to easily see these metrics, but also to adjust the schedule and in real-time see the effects of your changes in the metrics.

Tweaking the schedule

The software provides a feature to tweak the schedule. The schedule can be changed from within the software, but it can also be exported as a csv, modified, and imported. Select from the menu bar Update->Edit Schedule. Any day that has at least one game will be highlighted in teal. Any selected day is highlighted in red. The games for the selected day are listed on the right side.

Add a game

Click Add then select the Visiting and Home teams, the location and time to be played.

Change a game

Click Change then select the Visiting and Home teams, the location and time to be played.

Delete a game

Select the game to be deleted and click Delete. A safety question will ask if you are sure you want to delete the game.

Swap a game

Click Swap then put a check mark next to the games that you want to swap.

So you think you are finished!? Export the schedule

Whether you are really finished or not, the schedule needs to be exported. To do that, from the menu bar Tools->Export Schedule… to create the export. Ensure that the destination folder and filename are in the Export File Name. Select the schedule to export. While four export formats are provided, only use the Comma Delimited (CSV) option. The csv export is needed for the spreadsheet audit described later, but also for import into the website, also described later.

Backup, backup, backup

As a good practice, backing up your work is a good idea. The software provides you the capability to do this. From the menu bar File->Back Up Database… which lets you navigate to where you want to back up the database. In addition to creating your own backup, the schedule should also be saved back to the thumb drive. Hopefully this makes the next Scheduling Director’s job a little easier.

Auditing with the spreadsheet

A league schedule audit tool was developed as an Excel spreadsheet to help cross check each team’s distribution of time played against other teams, as well as time of play.

• When ready, export the schedule to a csv file, as detailed above.
• Open the csv in Excel, as well as the spreadsheet.
• Copy the csv data into the spreadsheet’s League Scheduler Export worksheet.

<more to come here on how to use it>

Get it to the website!

The webmaster needs a list of all teams and each manager and assistant manager. This is an easy process and while it does not require the spreadsheet, it will make it easier.

• Open the spreadsheet and then the Team Names and Mgrs worksheet.
• Enter the team names in the Name column. The Division column will be automatically populated based on the entered team name and using the MLB worksheet. If NSS chooses not to use MLB team names, add team names to column A and whatever the division name is for each team to column B.
• Enter the manager names in the Manager column
• Enter the assistant manager names in the Assistant column
• Click File->Save to save the entire spreadsheet
• Click File->Save As to save just the team/manager/assistant information
• Browse to where you want to save the team/manager/assistant information
• Select CSV (MS-DOS) as the file type.
• Select Save
• Click OK when notified with “The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets.” Note that the entire spreadsheet changes name at this point.
• Click File->Close
• Email the csv file to the NSS Webmaster.

Note that the website import functionality requires the listed columns, as a csv file.

Upload the schedule

After the schedule is completely ready and the teams have been populated for the season, it is time to upload the schedule. There is no expected file name, but as a suggestion naming the exported csv something like 2021 Summer.csv might be helpful. Also, save to USB thumb drive. Once the regular season schedule is ready for upload as a csv, go to http://www.neseniorsoftball.com/process-schedule/ then click Choose File, navigate to the file, then press Submit. Each line in the schedule will produce multiple debug lines, showing success or failure of each insert. This is also a good time to create a new database backup and saving to the USB thumb drive, as listed under Backup, Backup, Backup above.