Skip to main content

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 says pitch whatever your sport calls it.

Setting them up​

Manage → Venues holds the venue groups linked into the tournament. Each venue has its pitches; each pitch has a name and its own availability.

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.

Count your capacity before you accept entries

Pitches × available hours ÷ match length is the number of matches your tournament can physically hold. FairGame shows this during setup, 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 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: mark it unavailable and re-solve the affected day. FairGame keeps the matches that are already played and re-places the rest. See reviewing and publishing for how to review the change before it reaches the public site.