A Sea Of Red

For context: I work for a nationwide youth soccer league. I'm looking to set up a new way to do our game scheduling system. Currently we generate a 4000 game schedule by hand, then email it to each of our clubs. They meet once at the beginning of the year to hash out any changes on paper; then one of our employees makes all the changes listed on their (paper copy) schedule. Games that aren't verified by both clubs on their paper copy have to be addressed, leading to hundreds of emails. It's way too inefficient.

I've been told Google Docs would be able to help me simplify the process. I'm basically looking to create the games, post them online, give a username/password to each of the clubs, and allow them to make changes to certain cells on the worksheet. I'd also want to be able to track which clubs made what changes and when, and there would be cells I'd wish to lock completely.

If anyone knows if this is even remotely possible on Docs or elsewhere, please let me know.

Thanks!

My company uses google docs for just about every worksheet that we want to share. It can be really amazing. Your issue is going to be that only gmail members can share google docs. So, you're going to have to get everyone to sign up for gmail and then give you their gmail address. Once that is complete, you simply go to google docs, create your document and click "share" at the top. It should bring up a list of emails that you want to share it with, insert all of the emails and then click "done!"

Google Docs is amazing....I'm not sure its the answer for what you need though. There's bound to be a website that could generate the league for you though. I would start googling "league schedule software" although I'm quite certain there's going to be a website that will allow you to enter in all the fields and it'll create it for you...however that could be done by a good excel template as well.

One way to do it would be to set up a dummy gmail account for anyone to use. The problem there is that you've got to make sure nobody changes any info outside of their own. I don't know of a way you can show that both teams have agreed. It seems like it's just a little too complex for Google Docs right now.

One thing I like about docs is the ability to restrict worksheets to specific users. We're going to basically set up a master schedule sheet that cannot be edited, but have the proposed dates link to the "team schedule" sheets, where one club can propose changes to the schedule. This gives them a real-time look at their current schedule, but allows us to maintain control over adjusting the games.

With the unique travel needs for each club, an auto generating schedule software would actually cause more problems than answers. Our problem isnt the actual building of the schedule; it revolves around the teams planning blind & the inefficiency of our current setup.

Share the template when you're done...I wanna see what you guys come up with!

you cannot lockdown or only allow certain cells within a doc. i believe you can lock down individual sheets.

RubberMallet wrote:you cannot lockdown or only allow certain cells within a doc. i believe you can lock down individual sheets.

Yeah. Kinda ghey. That's what I'm going to work with

You could create an excel spreadsheet and save it in dropbox in a public file. Excel has more security features available than gdocs, so it may be easier to restrict it like you want to.

Just bumping this to see if it's done, and if so, how did it turn out.

With the amount of work we've had over the past couple weeks, I haven't had any time to work on it.....plus we wouldn't install anything like this until next year.

I'll build a flamefans specific one so you & HMO can check it out. Don't expect it for another month or so.

What about using Google Calendar? Each team has an account, the games shiw upol for everyone, but restrict who can make changes.

So,

I'm just about finished with what I'm looking to do with this. Instructions are the next task, since most soccer people aren't going to pick this up so quickly.

If you're interested in viewing the file or test driving it, I can make a Flamefans specific file to mess around with.

Here's how the file works:

As a club, you have one sheet dedicated to your club. You are restricted to working on your sheet only. The sheet displays your schedule, including dates, times and fields in the first section. This info is auto updated and you can't actually edit the stuff in there(Docs now has protected ranges).

There's a second section on the sheet called SUGGEST. Here you can put a single or range of dates & times that would work for your team. The third section is called REVIEW - here you can see all the entries other clubs placed in their SUGGEST section that apply to your matches.

Once you've agreed on a new date, and your SUGGEST DATE and your opponent's SUGGEST DATE columns match, you'll be able to track the status of the change as the LEAGUE makes the change. The league 1) is notified whenever both teams have the same date for a game and 2) can change the dates, times and venues of all matches using one protected spreadsheet. Once the change is made by the league, clubs can immediately see the new date put in place on their worksheet.