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#176916 08/04/19 11:45 PM
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Is there a better way to do club scheduling besides what we had to endure today? They mentioned today that they are going to try to do it online but is that possible? It would be hard to schedule around the "I'm a college coach too and can only play on Sundays" or the "This is my 4th team and I'm only playing one game a day" coaches.

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My one and only time doing it for Coastal League was about 5 years ago or so and it was just awful so sounds like it hasn't changed. I'm sure if you do it year in and year out you get the hang of it and work the system. I also think they did Coastal as an online a couple years back and heard it was no better.

Unless you can work it into set weekends of play for every team at a particular location I don't think it will ever improve. Even then you'll have coaching conflicts, but at least then it is just what time of that particular day conflicts.

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With coaches being allowed to coach 3+ teams and enter an excessive amount of tournaments, then no.

And that would only be the first of many fixes that need to occur

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Oh, undoubtedly, I have been the biggest critic of this extremely archaic system. You might as well play Pin the Tail on the Donkey while you are there. In fact, while the D License was being held in Columbia, SCYS should have strolled those participants over to the Scheduling Meeting as an indoctrination of club soccer in S.C.

Why, in 2019, do we require folks from Gaffney, Walhalla, Due West, Savannah, or Myrtle Beach to convene in the Capital City for 90 minutes to put together a schedule that could be done in 15 minutes via a Google Docs spreadsheet and email? Or better yet, how about SCYS coming off the hip and purchasing a simple scheduling software to coordinate these efforts?

And while I am addressing the matter, no club or entity should be able to "hog" Referees during the season - either schedule a preseason or postseason tournament. I don't care who pulls the strings in the Upstate, Midlands, or Lowcountry, but it is ridiculous to have "black out dates" due to tourneys (or the antiquated ODP by the same token).

Instead of creating a culture of chaos, SCYS should be bridging its gaps with the existing membership to make life as easy as possible for those loyalties.

Finally, to the club coach that has multiple teams - get over yourselves and accept your fate when it comes to being in 3-4 places at one time. I, personally, try to make it convenient for all parties but when Johnny Soccer informs me that he has a tournament that weekend with two of his other teams then all bets are off.

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And the reason that most of the larger clubs have abandoned SCYS. Many states, with much larger team pools, have been using a computer program to do this for years. But, this is the way we have always done it, so this is the way we will continue to do it. Sound familiar???

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The biggest issue is the coaches that have multiple teams, tons of tournaments, and don’t wanna travel more than 7 miles or only want to play 1 game every 3 weeks.

There should be a way to do it online & not go to Cola to argue & bicker & get all agitated. As much as I like catching up with coaches, I’d rather do it in a much different environment. But I agree with you all on here. There’s gotta be a better way


Misael Garzon
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I generally liked having the schedule in my hand and done with no mystery. The issue though was that 1/3 of the schedule would always end up being rescheduled as coaches with an overload of commitments would realize they couldn't make it to games they committed to. (the bigger issue with coaches was with coaches who coached several teams with huge age group gaps, so they would coach U10, U14, U18 with each team in a completely separate league).

The other problem (with the old coastal) was the teams who repeatedly placed themselves in divisions they did not belong in and no one ever said a thing. The complete lack of oversight or accountability was an issue.

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Sometimes on the first Sunday of August, I feel like everything that happens after that is anticlimactic, because the scheduling meeting seems like the biggest contest of the year. Coming away with a schedule that works for everyone involved, doesn't create a travel hardship for any of the coaches and teams or place every game too far away for Grandma to come watch her favorites play seems like a major victory, and everything that comes after that is icing on the cake. Adding to that, within that same scheduling structure you have three different levels of play, with parents and players having very different expectations (and tolerance) of travel and investment--those who sign up for Challenge League often have a different mindset on that than many who sign up for Open League or PMSL.

I'm not sure what the best solution is. I was involved in the online experiment with Coastal League, and it honestly didn't seem like it was any better; in some ways it was worse. The advantage was no need for coaches to travel to the meeting, but that came at a cost; when you're trying to coordinate schedules that work for everyone, especially setting up partnerships for double-headers to minimize travel, it definitely helps to have everyone sitting at the same table. With the online system, the handicap was basically the delay in communication; some coaches were more responsive than others and some were downright elusive. This game will work with Team A, if we can make this work with with Team B. However, by the time Coach B gets around to responding, Coach A has gotten tired of waiting and made an agreement with Coach C, who's a quick responder, so now the original plan won't work and we're back to square one. It's much easier to get a quick answer--and much harder to ignore or put someone off--when you're eyeballing each other across a table.

There are a whole lot of factors that we have to work around; I totally agree with Kyle about the frustration with the tournament situation. Not only do we have to schedule around our own tournaments, but also tournaments we're not even involved in, simply because they exist. The Columbia area is the prescribed, fairly ideal compromise for Upstate and Lowcountry teams to meet--which constitutes a significant portion of games. Finding a weekend that works for both teams only to see the entire weekend blocked out in the entire Columbia area due to a tournament neither of us is attending is pretty frustrating. Ditto on ODP; we're locked out of dates for an event that so many of us don't have any players participating in, simply because it exists.

Again, I don't know what the best official, prescribed, organizational solution is. The best HUMAN solution, though, relies on us as coaches to think and act as a team, and not just about our own ideal situations. It takes our better nature and a willingness to go with it. I've been that coach who's frustrated with someone who has multiple teams and can "only" play on Sunday mornings at 9:00. I've been that coach scheduling for and coaching two teams simply because there was nobody else to do it, and I've had to appeal to other coaches to help me make it work for all the kids involved. Some people have multiple teams because of a genuine need, and they're willing to stretch their limits to make things happen for young people who want to play soccer. Others have multiple teams because they like multiple paychecks. Sometimes it takes a good look to determine which one is sitting across the table from you.

The bottom line is, nobody should walk in with the expectation of getting their ideal schedule at the expense of everyone else, and nobody should walk in resigned to being raked over the coals because others are inflexible. When you find yourself in a tight situation, it's much easier to ASK for help when you've proven yourself willing to GIVE help when you're able. And if you've accepted responsibility for coaching 3-4 teams, maybe you just have to accept that you can't do everything with each those 3-4 teams that you would with only one--tournaments, for example--because you realize you have to be just as respectful of others' scheduling needs as you are of your own. Come in with an ideal plan--yes. Try to see if you can make that ideal plan work within what works for everyone else--yes. But be willing to bend from that ideal plan when necessary, even as you ask everyone else to bend from theirs. That's the human way to make this chaos work, and all the rules and meetings and scheduling software in the world can't replace or improve on that. Good human solutions can make a bad situation work; poor human behavior can make the best organization fail.

I feel very fortunate this year. I scheduled for our U19 and U17 PMSL girls; in both groups, we were the only Lowcountry team in a division of otherwise Upstate and Midlands teams; there were no other local clubs/teams to schedule games with or to partner with to bring other teams our way. It could have been a very long season on the road for both teams, except for the fact that we had a group of coaches who were willing to work with and around each other's schedules and travel to come up with a solution that was as fair to everyone as possible, under non-ideal circumstances. I appreciate all those who were willing to balance their own team's needs with the needs of the other person's teams and to find solutions that were workable to both...give a little, get a little, that's how it should work, and I want to thank everyone who helped make that happen. If everyone could do that, we wouldn't have nearly so much frustration, no matter what the scheduling format.


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On a positive note, the three errors on my U14B schedule were corrected just one day after I submitted the changes via the SCYSA Form. I appreciate that efficiency!

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Agreed...fast and efficient, despite being accidentally scheduled to play our first U17 match in Salt Lake City, Utah... grin


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