FAQs on scheduling Anomalies
Why don't we play more games at our home rink? We try to place your home games at a rink at or close to your home arena, however, for certain divisions we need to use specific rinks due to equipment or officials available.
Why are we playing teams from the West CDP league (why are we playing at George Bell or other Western rinks)? two main reasons, with the limited number of teams in each tier, playing CDP gives more variety and allows for better use of the ice we have given all the restrictions in availability for teams. Some tiers only have 3 teams in each league, so these teams will play more cross-over games to ensure better competition and better availability. We try to schedule cross-over games on Saturdays and Sundays whenever possible to allow for more travel time to these games.
Why is Forrest Hill playing Leaside at Don Montgomery? As you may know getting suitable ice is always a challenge and teams may only be available to play each other on certain days and times. We only have enough ice at a Home arena for some teams to play closest to home on certain days. We obviously try to avoid this and rotate which teams encounter this situation over the course of the season. I remember when my kids played in another league, we would be scheduled to play at the furthest arena from our home arena, while teams that live closest to that furthest arena would play at our home arena at the exact same time, for no obvious reason as they were in the exact same division. We only do that if the equipment requirements can only be met in that case.
Why do I play one team so many times? this often happens when there are limited teams in your tier and your availability aligns best with this team. Having competitive games against the same team is more fun and productive then playing a team that is not close to your caliber. For these teams we may schedule more cross-over games than other teams to increase variety at the expense of longer travel times to some games.
Why do we have less games than other teams? As we build out each batch of the schedule we first tackle the teams with the least games. Teams will NOT get the exact same number of games, given how many constraints in the scheduling process, teams will get +/- 1 game from the average by division. Teams with the best availability and competitive range with other teams will likely get the most games as they are available more often to be scheduled for the last few slots remaining when we build the schedule. What the teams don't know is whether other teams games were cancelled due to forfeit, weather, power outage, arena closure, etc. So comparing to an old schedule will make them think other teams ALL played more games than them, as they don't know which games of the other teams were cancelled.
