Rod’s Replay Insider #4: Organizing and scheduling your replay

Schedule (1)Figure on a full month to organize a replay. Organized preparation will save you lots of time and greatly enhance your replay when you actually start rolling.

Let’s focus on what you will need to do to organize your replay. Basically, you can break a replay down into three parts:

  1. Organizing the replay.
  2. Playing the games.
  3. Summarizing what happened.

Step 1: Determine the magnitude of your replay.

How many teams will be in your replay?  How many games will each team play?  And what kind of structure will you organize in your replay?

Will there be one league? More than one division? Will there be playoffs and a Wild Card?  Will there be a balanced schedule or unbalanced schedule?

Step 2: Create a schedule

Your schedule will depend entirely on how you have organized your replay structure. So, how do you create a schedule?

Some re-players like to follow a particular real-life season’s schedule on a day-by-day basis. Others, including myself, organize their own schedules in a fashion that will allow complete series to be played in a bloc, saving time and making it easier to keep track of what each team is doing.

· Take an 8 ½ x 11 inch yellow legal pad (see the attached illustration, which is a typed version of what I had previously prepared on a legal pad for a 1911 American League replay). And hang onto those legal pads with the schedules, because they are going to be very handy as your replay season gets underway

· Create a schedule page for each month (April, May, etc.).

· List each individual month dates on the lift side and list the teams and their individual games, in pencil on the pad, four teams to each page.

Check carefully to ensure you have the teams playing the required number of games against one another and have a balanced home and away record (the same number of games at home and away).

Next: How to keep stats?

Read all of Rod’s Replay Insider articles!

7 Comments:

  1. Hi Rod,

    I think people really underestimate the importance of scheduling I had to stop my 1905 replay for almost a week to fix an issue where some teams not playing enough games.

  2. Critical point, indeed. And if you find yourself off-track more than a third of the way through … oy.

    If you aren’t going to use a real-life schedule, I’d suggest spending a few bucks on a computer version of the game (could be APBA, doesn’t have to be) and letting the automated schedule maker crank one for you.

  3. Kenneth Hibbard

    Rod
    Will the computer game generate a customized league schedule?
    I’ve never seen able to write a realistic one…
    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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