Saturday, September 29, 2012

Hockey Scheduling

The whole hockey scheduling thing has been a bit crazy, and the learning curve a bit steep. It seems like I spent the entire month of September trying to learn the drill. The previous scheduler did a great job and wanted to continue, but because of personal and political reasons, it wasn’t meant to be, so I was given the task. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, and in the end, didn’t want to do it, but DF seemed to think I was the man for the job, and I want to help where I can. This, of course, gets me into trouble all the time.

It didn’t help that we were going away on vacation to a far off land. In fact, we were supposed to take off around 4:00PM on Saturday, when the phone rang around noon. It was the scheduler for Rutland, and he said he was ready to schedule some games. My first thought was, “No way, man, I’m leaving in a couple of hours!” Then I realized that I had a little time, and this was a program that we wanted to get some games against.

but that didn’t seem to be such a huge deal. I was able to continue scheduling while I was in Italy and Croatia, if you can believe that. The beauty of the internet, I don’t think the people I was communicating with had any idea about my situation, which is kind of cool. It didn’t take a huge amount of time on any given day, just about half an hour in the morning and I was done, but I did have to communicate fairly regularly. In the end, I got a lot done while I was over there, so the schedule was fairly complete by the time the big meeting came around, for which I could not attend because I was away. I couldn’t pull that one off on the computer.

I’ve been told that as the season progresses, the schedule will have to modified and things will not work out and will need to be amended, which can be a pain because that means changing things on the fly, but such is the life of a hockey scheduler. I’m not sure why DF thought I was the man for the job, but I’d prefer not to let the guy down.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to rossMania for the pic.

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