Tennis Doubles Scheduler

[DonEB]

I've been trying to come up with a way to dynamically develop a quarterly Tennis Doubles Schedule based on the following criteria:
1. Quarterly schedule (either January 1 - March 31, April 1 - June 30, July 1 - September 30, October 1 - December 31)
2. Play one day a week
3. # of Courts available (league may use either 1, 2 or 3 courts depending on number of players involved)
4. # of Players
5. There are no official pairings. Four members can be assigned to a court and play.
(Ex: Week # 1 Court 1: Don, John, Bob, Bill Court 2: Jack, Jane, Jerry, Jim)
Week # 2 Court 1: Don, Bob, Jack, Jerry Court 2: John, Bill, Jane, Jim)
6. Pairing need to be mixed every week to maximize play time with each other.
7. Players may also identify dates on which they may not be available (i.e., they would be excluded from play on any date they identify)

I currently use Excel to manual create the quarterly schedule. While developing a Tennis Doubles Scheduler based on all the above criteria would be a huge achievement, I would be ecstatic if a program/macro could be created to do the following:
1. Using a list of players, identify a new combination of 4 players to compete with/against each other each week for the the number of courts available. (Each day the players play three sets. After each set, players rotate partners to ensure they play with/against everyone).
2. To keep it simple, lets say there are 8 players and 2 courts to play on
3. The Schedule would be for the quarter of January 1 - March 31 and would play every Friday. Or... a total of 13 weeks.

List of Players:
1. Don
2. John
3. Bob
4. Bill
5. Jack
6. Jane
7. Jerry
8. Jim

Does anyone think this is at all possible? Any ideas/suggestions?

 

[Joe4]

Is it possible, sure!
Do you know enough about VBA to do a lot of it yourself?

What you have is a pretty ambitious/involved project. The purpose of this site is to help people with projects they have to do, but really not do the whole thing for them, especially if it is a big and/or complex project. That would be a bit much to expect from a free site, for a project that you would normally have to hire a consultant to do.

So if you don't really want to do this yourself (with a little help with specific tasks from forums like ours), but rather are looking for someone to do this whole project for you, I would recommend contacting the Consulting Department at MrExcel at: MrExcel.com | Excel Resources | Excel Seminars | Excel Products

 

[DonEB]

Is it possible, sure!
Do you know enough about VBA to do a lot of it yourself?

What you have is a pretty ambitious/involved project. The purpose of this site is to help people with projects they have to do, but really not do the whole thing for them, especially if it is a big and/or complex project. That would be a bit much to expect from a free site, for a project that you would normally have to hire a consultant to do.

So if you don't really want to do this yourself (with a little help with specific tasks from forums like ours), but rather are looking for someone to do this whole project for you, I would recommend contacting the Consulting Department at MrExcel at: MrExcel.com | Excel Resources | Excel Seminars | Excel Products

Unfortunately, I don't know much about VBA. I have created... what I like to think are... various complex macros when developing a golf handicap spreadsheet to manage numerous players and when creating a spreadsheet to establish a rating system for Tennis Players both with the help of wonderful individuals from this forum. It was not my intent nor would I ever ask or expect anyone from this forum to develop this for me. I enjoy working on these issues/projects myself and was simply hoping for some direction or ideas (or as I said... suggestions) which might get me headed in the right direction and allow me to further explore the wonders and capabilities of Excel. But I understand how this may be a little to complex of an issue for this Forum at this time.

I'm still open to anyone providing me some direction or ideas as to how to proceed with just the basic idea of how to (1) randomly select a group of 4 people out of larger group and then (2) repeat this random selection process while evenly distributing play time between players. However, short of any ideas coming my way... I'll attempt to do some more research to see what functionality is available that might help me accomplish my tasks. Then... if I have some specific issues... I am sure the many experts within this Forum will help resolve any problems I may come up against.

Thanks for your response and your recommendation.

 

[HenryP]

DonEB - are you still working on this project? I have similar requirements and would love to compare notes. I am using a spreadsheet that does most of what you have listed above, but which is fairly time intensive.

Henry P

 

[AhoyNC]

This isn't Excel, but this golf pairing program (should be able to use for tennis pairings) may be of help to generate pairing lists.

http://golfsoftware.com/tools/schedule/golf-pairings-generator.html