Hill wrote:
I would be curious to hear how you "tried to accomplish this". As far as I can tell there isn't any particularly good reason why the Int A games couldn't be played back-to-back.
Well sense you're curious and obviously not very intuitive in this type of thing because you couldn't think of ANY good reasons
, and they don't take rocket science. Let me give you a few major ones, because there isn't really any one reason, more like a series of them (some more obvious then others), which tend to happen when you're scheduling a day for about 350 people in two different cities all with different needs. But we'll focus on the 170ish in Lincoln so not to strain any brain muscles, we all know they're easier to damage on a cold day like today with hard work. Here are the factors effecting the Lincoln playoffs, because I'm a guy who hates to be curious about things I can't figure out, and wouldn't wish that on somebody else . . .
1. Time needs-some teams wanted to play earlier, some later, some work, go to church and although its playoffs and teams eventually just have to show up this week, I'm kind of a sucker for catering to peoples needs sooooo, I try to spend the extra time making everything work out for everyone. This mostly effects when I could start the rounds of the playoffs for which teams and created the windows to work within to get everything set up.
2. Most of the refs play in the league. And a lot of refs were still playing on day 2, so my flexibility with scheduling was limited as to what teams could play at what times to ensure that good refs were available to ref the whole day. I even chipped in and reffed all day, which I typically don't like to do. But hey, we pay much cheaper ref fees then if we had professional refs that cost about $35 per game and although I wouldn't mind the extra cost for my team, the majority of teams I've talked to wouldn't want that switch, we would lose a ton of teams with that cost and I want the league to be accessible for as many people as possible.
3. Daylight Savings- the fall back was a beast as we lost an hour of daylight in the playoffs that we had all regular season. So now with the sun setting a little after 5:00 we only really have time for 7 hours of games in the light. 7 hours, with 8 rounds of playoffs to be played. This is a huge one because you may have noticed that 8 is larger then 7, so that means that two full rounds have to be played at the same time, which we did, and had the B and A ships at the same time as the later rounds are the smaller rounds.
So there you have it, now you can sleep easy. (although maybe you could sleep easy already, people who are intellectually curious find it hard to sleep sometimes when the more obvious answers evade us, and you might not be that way). Either way, you're welcome.
