Can we reschedule a Bye?

Despite our best efforts we have two divisions that have a bye this season.

A question that comes up regularly is can we have our bye in another week when we may have to forfeit. A reasonable question that is unfortunately complicated to answer, noting that we use dribl to do our scheduling. Dribl literally creates and schedules matches, so we can either change master data and force it to do it differently or move matches around manually afterwards.

1.     Manual intervention - Swapping a bye

It seems like it should be easy, just swap the byes in Round 2 and 3. Dribl has scheduled the 2046 Strikers to have a bye in R2 and Concord Roar in R3.

If the 2046 Strikers requested their bye move to R3  they now have a bye in R3, but they still have their scheduled match against Soccer Rockers. I can’t move that to R2, the Soccer Rockers already have a match with the Sparkle Squad. In fact every other U7 team already has a match at that time.

So we have to negotiate with Soccer Rockers when/if they are available to play the R3 game.  So the better solution, is to leave the bye and  post in the whatsapp that you are having trouble fielding a team for R3 match against Soccer Rockers and can this be moved. If the other team is available/amenable and Stav can find you some space we’ll move the match.

2.     Changing Sequences in dribl

Sequences are not something you need or possibly even want to understand, but we did look into it as an option as this is the mechanism in dribl that dictates who gets the bye each week. This would only work for matches not yet published, at the time of writing it is theoretically possible for R5 and beyond.

 As each team is added to the league it is given a sequence number. The sequence numbers for the U7 League are the first pic below.

As an example here is the R1 and R2 match sequence that dribl uses. (Pic 2 below) Because there are an uneven number of teams in this league the bye is given to whoever vs the 10th team each week.

The sequence numbers 1-9 dictate who is versing who which you can see in R1 was 2v9, 3v8 etc with 1 getting the bye. Pic 3 below is the list of matches in dribl.

The bad news is that sequence numbers  can be changed, but not once the competition has started, as it messes with the future rounds as per the warning in  the dribl printscreen above. After playing 4 rounds, if you change sequence numbers you may end up playing one team twice and missing out on playing another. So again the better solution is to see if we can negotiate to move the game you cannot make rather than trying to manipulate the algorithm to move the bye.