Venues and pitches
A venue is a site. A pitch is one playing surface at that site — the thing that can host exactly one match at a time. FairGame adjusts the facility terminology to the selected sport.
The default view groups pitches under their venues and shows their actual opening hours. Empty venues offer Assign pitches to venue and Create pitches; unassigned pitches have Assign venue. All pitches opens the sortable table. Open a pitch to edit its details or availability and follow its match count to the filtered match list. Its Matches list shows every match on the pitch, day by day, with the kickoff, the category and group, and the score once it has been played; select a match to open it.
Assign pitches to venue lets you choose pitches already in this tournament. Pitches without a venue appear first; selecting a pitch from another venue moves it here. If only pitches at other venues are available, that list opens automatically. If none are available, the panel explains this and offers Create pitches for the selected venue.
Availability changes use their own editing panel. You can apply a window to all pitches, repeat it across tournament days, or replace existing windows. Review the scheduled-match and published-match warnings before changing or deleting a window. A venue cannot be deleted while it has pitches. A pitch with matches scheduled on it can be deleted: the confirmation says how many matches are on it, and deleting it unschedules them — they keep their teams, lose their pitch and kickoff, and come back as unscheduled for you to place again. A pitch where a match has started or been played cannot be deleted. The venue map also supports individual pins and a grid layout with spacing, rotation and movement; save map changes explicitly.
Setting them up
Create a venue first, then add existing pitches or create new ones. You can finish without pitches; closing this second step does not delete the saved venue. New pitches show a name preview and count (1–30). The default window is 08:00–17:00 on the first tournament day only; without a tournament day, no window is added. Location and map details are optional disclosures.
Assignment changes only the venue; existing matches keep their pitch and time. Partial creation shows which pitches were saved and which availability windows still need work. Retry reuses acknowledged pitch IDs. If creation could not be confirmed, review the venue before trying again to avoid duplicates.
Name pitches the way people on the day will say them. Hall A and Hall B beat Pitch 1 and Pitch 2 when a coach is asking a volunteer where to go, and the names appear on match cards, the public schedule and the venue map.
Availability is the real constraint
Pitch availability is what makes a schedule possible or impossible. It is per pitch, per day:
- A school hall that opens at 09:00 on Saturday but 10:00 on Sunday.
- An outdoor pitch you lose at 16:00 when the lights go off.
- A hall booked by someone else between 12:00 and 13:00.
Describe each of these once, on the pitch, and every scheduling decision respects it. The alternative — remembering it while reading a generated schedule — is where tournaments go wrong.
Pitches × usable hours ÷ slot length is the number of matches your tournament can physically hold. A slot is the playing time plus the break between matches, and usable hours are about 80% of the day's window, because real days never run back-to-back. FairGame shows this arithmetic next to its pitch suggestion on the Venues step during setup — counting the matches it will actually generate for your teams and format — and it is the honest answer to "can we take four more teams?" — much more useful than finding out after the draw.
Multiple venues
A tournament can run across several sites. Two things change when it does:
- Travel between sites is real. If teams have to move between venues, keep a category at one venue where possible, or leave enough gap between a team's matches that the journey fits. The team rest rule is how you express that.
- Group-to-pitch restrictions become useful. You can require that the teams in particular groups play only on particular pitches — the standard way to keep an age group at the venue its parents were told to drive to.
- The Schedule board groups pitches by venue. Each venue's pitches sit side by side, with the venue name above each pitch name, so two sites that both number their pitches from 1 never read as the same pitch. The venue chips above the board hide or show a venue's pitches. See editing the schedule by hand.
The venue map
Tournaments can publish a map so visitors can find the pitch. It appears on the public tournament site alongside the schedule; the more precisely your pitch names match what is signposted on site, the fewer people ask.
Changing a pitch mid-tournament
Losing a pitch on the day is a scheduling problem, not a data problem: shorten its availability for the day and re-solve the affected day. FairGame keeps the matches that are already played and re-places the rest. Deleting a window that still holds scheduled matches is refused unless you choose to unschedule them with it, and a pitch that has already hosted a match cannot be deleted at all. See reviewing and publishing for how to review the change before it reaches the public site.