How is the schedule put together?

Scheduling a DI Tournament is extremely difficult.

Each challenge has it's own special requirements.  For instance, the structure challenge requires that teams check in their structure 1 hour before their team performance.  At times the Improv challenge requires that teams check in an hour before their performance to go into a StuDIo and prepare their performance. 

It is also necessary at times that different competition levels present at the same site and it is very important that all of the teams in one competition level are grouped together.  This is so that our appraisal teams have the best opportunity to score all the teams in one level in a consistent manner.  While our appraisers do an excellent job of remaining consistent, it would be very difficult for them to score an EL team consistently with other EL teams if the team had to present in between two SL presentations.  The same issue exists in Instant Challenge.  

In addition to scheduling the Team's Team Challenge presentation, we also have to schedule Instant Challenge which requires that a team be checked in about 20 minutes before their IC time. 

We also try to schedule teams such that every team in a given challenge has a relatively consistent time between Instant Challenge and Team Challenge.  This is NOT always possible, particularly for team managers of multiple teams. 

Scheduling SL teams also presents a a challenge because the number of SL teams in each challenge is limited.  If SL teams present their TC in the morning in a challenge that is sharing a site with an EL team then the SL teams IC cannot be scheduled until the end of the day after all of the EL team's have completed their IC.  Since we rarely have more than 3 or 4 SL teams in any given challenge, there is very little flexibility in the schedule since all of the SL teams must be scheduled for IC in the last 3 or 4 time slots at the end of the day.

When you add situations such as Team Members on multiple teams, teams doing multiple challenges, team managers managing more than one team, etc. it becomes a daunting task.

We use this priority for addressing schedule issues.

1. Teams doing multiple challenge and/or Team Members on multiple teams.
2. Team Managers of multiple teams
3. Team Managers with children on other teams
4. School related scheduling requests (UIL, etc.)
5. Maintaining consistent times between TC and IC and avoiding times in excess of 3 hours between TC and IC.  Note that because of the limited number of SL teams that most SL teams will have early morning IC teams and afternoon TC times or vice versa.
6. Families with children on multiple teams
7. Other scheduling requests

We do our best to try an accomodate all of these issues but in many cases we are not able to accomodate all scheduling issues.  Generally  by the time we have addressed the first 4 priorities it becomes almost impossible to accomodate additional schedule requests. 

When a Team Manager is managing more than 2 teams it is not possible to put together a schedule so that the Team Manager can be at all of their teams instant challenges and team challenges.  In this case, we give priority to scheduling to get the Team Manager so that they can be at every team challenge presentation.

It is also extremely difficult to schedule a team with team members that have other activities on tournament day (i.e. band, uil, etc.) such that both Team Challenge and Instant Challenge or before or after a specified time.  In this case we will attempt to schedule the team such that the team member(s) can participate in Team Challenge.