The manly, or womanly, art of team creation. You will either be praised for your oracle-like knowledge and abilities in team balancing, or scorned for your gross incompetence, lack of effort, and endless critiques of should haves…
First off, I won’t lie to you. Nothing is full proof. I’ve been putting the teams together for the spring program for 2 years now. I’m not coaching, and my kids aren’t even playing so I have no obligations to anyone! But inevitably, I might hear from another league official, “Jerry!!! What are you doing, that <INSERT COLOR HERE!> Team is STACKED!!!” It happens. This past spring it happened, and it was the RED team! Last year, it may have been the WHITE team!
Well, taking in that information and looking back, I can see a couple things I missed. First, when I put the teams together for the spring, in one division I had 6 teams with 4 ranked players on a team of 12. The remaining 8 were not ranked. Now that’s hard to do, and it illuminates the need for all coaches to rank! I was a little lax last spring getting the coaches to rank and there’s the result. Another thing I noticed was that the ranks help, but they need to be viewed not just as a number but also in the context of if that player is new or returning to that age bracket. Players who were ranked a 4 last season maybe a really strong 4 or 5 if they are returning to the same bracket next year (and now are seniors of the division). The same thing goes for players who were ranked a 5, but are the new players (youngest) in the next division.
Prior to this coming Spring 2010, I’ve put together teams by exporting ranking data out of the database and loading into Excel. I then create a “Team” column and move players around until teams seemed balanced. Initially, I would arbitrarily assign players, ordered by rank, to teams in a snake like fashion, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 until all players were assigned. I would then swap players between teams to handle coaching needs, players requests (if approved), and other needs. Not a bad system, but very manual, and usually by the end of it I was talking to myself. It did work out on several occasions, this past fall my division started off with 5-6 ties for 4 teams. Last year, the league took over a division, and the season ended for my son’s team 5-5-5.
Anyway, starting this year, I have put together a few systems to create teams (and can’t wait to see what happens in the spring!):
Once I get things hashed out with “business flow” of the system, I’m looking to provide this to the commissioners. The concerns I have is when to lock-down the adjustments to teams. You wouldn’t want commissioners changing teams after ranks have been made, or changing teams for a prior season. So, I still have the components available to export data out of the system and then rank that can be given to the commissioners. I know that not everyone is computer-savvy and may find the automated systems daunting to use, so they may prefer a manual method.
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