Case Studies

Case Study #1

Opportunity: the subject league has data that indicates home games, which occur on non-consecutive weekends, generate revenues that are 6% higher than those home games which occur on a consecutive weekend (ie. the second half of back-to-back weekends at home).

Challenge: create a game schedule that limits the occurrences of consecutive home games while simultaneously maintaining other important elements of the schedule (ie. competitive balance) and honouring restrictions (ie. venue availabilities, television requirements)

From 2010 to 2016, the league’s game schedules averaged over 19 occurrences of home games on consecutive weekends:

From 2022 to 2024, using logic developed and implemented by Sport Schedule Solutions, this league’s game schedules achieved a low of only 4 occurrences of home games on consecutive weekends:

This solution has created more than $540,000 in annual incremental game day sales.

Case Study #2

Opportunity: limiting inefficient travel between cities has the potential to reduce this league’s travel expenses by over $100,000.

Challenge: create a schedule that limits the number of occurrences that a team travels to a non-proximate location for one game, and instead maximize the number of two-game road trips to these non-proximate locations.

Sport Schedule Solutions was able to attain a 20% reduction in single-game road trips vs. the previous scheduler, resulting in a corresponding savings in travel costs, all while maintaining or improving other important metrics within the game schedule.

Case Study #3

Opportunity: in football, the scheduling of bye weeks is a sensitive matter. Football operators never look forward to the notion of playing its opponent coming off a bye week. This opponent has extra time to rest its players and strategize its game plan. Indeed, this league’s metrics indicate that playing an opponent coming off a bye is a competitive disadvantage.

Challenge: in a league with an odd number of teams, the occurrence of playing an opponent off a bye week is inevitable. The challenge is to ensure, as best as possible, that these occurrences are equal in number across teams in each season.

Prior to Sport Schedule Solutions implementing logic to solve this challenge, the subject league saw an average variance of 1.36 (where “0” indicates no variance among Clubs, and where a relatively low number is better than a relatively high number):

Since 2016, when Sport Schedule Solutions began attacking this issue, the average deviation in playing an opponent coming off a bye week has been reduced to an average of .66. In other words, the competitive balance of this league’s schedules, using this metric, has improved more than 2x:

How can we help you turn your opportunities into results?