I first took on the task of Fixtures and Results Secretary a few years ago and soon realised that preparing fixtures was not for the faint-hearted! I was provided with a 'Key' which contained a lot of numbers representing which team played which other team in each week of the season. This looked something like this (for 16 teams):
Fixture Key:
Week 1:
1 v 2, 15 v 3, 14 v 4, 13 v 5, 12 v 6, 11 v 7, 10 v 8, 16 v 9
Week 2:
3 v 1, 2 v 16, 4 v 15, 5 v 14, 6 v 13, 7 v 12, 8 v 11, 9 v 10
ETC.
So, if Team 1 was Clinton SC A and team 2 was Penponds, then Week 1, Fixture 1 would read:
September 14th Clinton SC A v Penponds etc.
You can imagine that to write out all the fixtures for four Divisions (at that time) you have 30 weeks times 16 teams times 4 Divisions, which comes out at 1920 teams, plus the dates for each week's matches! This all had to be written out long-hand on 24 sheets of A4 paper, just so that they could then be typed! (well, we like it to look nice)
Another problem with fixturing
is that some clubs have more than one team and only one snooker table, so
you must then ensure that one team is at home and one team is away each
week. Therefore, each number on the Key has an opposite on the
list. For instance, number 1 has number 9 as its opposite,
so whenever team 1 is at home, team 9 is away. It is
almost impossible to fixture two different divisions on the same night
unless there are the same number of teams in each, because the 'opposites'
are not the same for each Division. So, if a club has teams in each
Division, it can mean a lot of hard work!
If I'm boring you, by the way, you'll never make it as Fixtures
Secretary, but perhaps you don't want to! If you want to move, just press
the tabs or read on below:
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After a while
doing fixtures manually, I decided there must be an easier way, so I set
to work to program the computer to do it for me. I could program in BBC
Basic, and in fact had already started fixturing on the BBC B and Master
computers, so I quickly picked up the PC's QBasic program, and, after
about six months I had programmed the computer to print all the fixtures
directly onto paper. Sound easy? Well, it wasn't, but greater detail can
be found in my book with, of course, a variety of other
chapters. Click below for details.