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.
