VRC Div 3 News: 2016.09.27

SportyHQ: Schedule & Availability Feature

I would like to point out a few things regarding the VDSL on SportyHQ. Primarily, variations in the display of the league schedule and potential issues with the "Your availability…" feature.

Schedule

If you use the "Division 3 schedule" button from the main VDSL page, or the "View Schedule" button from the Division 3 page you will not see any match for Los Burritos on October 19. There is in fact a match scheduled for that day. It has been moved from Wednesday, April 5, 2017 (scroll down to check). Similarly, if you don't look carefully, you might think Los Burritos have a match on November 2nd. Not so, moved to November 9th. There are a few other similar cases. Including a Los Burritos match moved from April 12, 2017 to December 21, 2016 (hope everyone is willing to play that day).

However, if you go to the Los Burritos team page and scroll down to the schedule section, you will see all our match dates in the order of play. The schedules mentioned above show the matches according to the round robin cycles. Not so helpful in the case of VDSL because of the moving of matches to accomodate the lack of court time.

So, I strongly recommend you use the team page when checking for up-coming matches.

Availability Feature

On the team page, if you continue scrolling down below the schedule, you will see a section lablelled "Your availability…". The idea is all the players can indicate their availability for each week of the season in one place. Thereby making it easier for captains to see whose available when trying to select the pairings for any given week. Perhaps even some warning when hunting for spares will be necessary for furture weeks. All very helpful stuff.

Except for the fact that this feature also uses the round robin cycles to display matches. For Los Burritos, you will notice you can't currently show your availability to play October 19th. I will check to see who's said they're available using this feature of SportyHQ, but I can't currently depend on it. So, for the time being I will continue to send out a weekly e-mail, typically Thursday, to all core players and spares asking who's available for the coming Wednesday.

Core and Spare

The league asked that each team designate a core group of 6 or so players. This group should reflect the players most likely to play each week if available. Everyone else is to be treated as a spare. If listed as a core player in any division, you are not allowed to spare for a lower division. And, any spare that plays more than a few (will try to clarify that number) games in any division, can not after that spare in a lower division.

In the case of VRC, the 2 Division 3 teams have decided to "share spares". That is, if available they can be recruited by either Los Burritos or Team Pytus any given week. As a result, in the case of Los Burritos my e-mails will be sent to all core and spare players. I expect, the spares may also be getting e-mails from the captains of Team Pytus. In the event that an excess of core players is available any given week for either of the 2 teams, the other team can recruit them as well.

Questions/Comments

Got some unanswered questions or comments, please let me know.

For your captains,
Rick Kochanski