Hi Gary - please elaborate! It's tough to respond to something so general of a grievance.

I thought you had received some feedback so had been thinking about this already. The limits on number of players at various times are keeping people out when they want to play. The number of courts available vary at different times do not meet the needs even though other courts are sometimes available. Since time slots fill up on limited courts players feel like they must sign up in advance even if they do not know if they will be able to play. Late drops are much more common now. A better match of demand at each level to match availability. There are times when people are frozen out of a group even though courts are available. It would be nice to see available courts on the site. Another concern is having 24 players on four courts, it is crowded and a lot of sitting. With increased demand scheduling can be a challenge but I think we can do better.

I believe one example of the "overcrowding" may occur at the Advanced time slot on MWF, 10:15-12:15. 3 courts are available and 1 is not. Based on recent sign ups for the Advanced group, it seems that all 4 courts should be assigned to the Advanced group for that time slot. There are long wait times which might be alleviated if all 4 courts were available.

Thanks for the specifics, Gary and Thumper. With 475 players on our Player Lineup account we are definitely experiencing a supply and demand phenomenon! 4 courts to serve the entire central VT will never be able to offer everyone playing time whenever they want it, with minimal waiting, and no need to book your sessions in advance. While that is the dream, adding another 4 courts to our facility is simply not an option at this time. So we all do have to make some compromises and recognize that if we each get 3 sessions a week at a minimum, and don't have to sit more than 30 minutes during a 2 hour session then we're doing OK!

I watch our Player Lineup numbers every day to see how we are doing with our load balancing and have not seen exactly the same issues you describe. In looking back at November and December numbers, the MWF 10:15 Advanced has only been at capacity once, and the 4th court at that time has consistently had 5 or 6 players. I measure the success of our schedule based on these types of observations and when I see underattended games I will reallocate courts. The problem with adding a 4th court to that 10:15 MWF Advanced game is that it also removes a time slot from another level. This year we have expanded our Player Lineup schedule into the afternoons, so I would encourage you to explore some of those options if you find the 10:15 times too busy.

As for the early reservation and late drop issue, I am not sure how to manage that since people are planning their weeks ahead of time. That makes sense to me, and we have the same phenomenon in our pool where the resource is in demand through the winter months. We definitely should expect people to drop as SOON as they know they can't make it, so thanks for calling attention to that as a good practice for all of our players.

I do appreciate the challenges we all have as players sharing this finite resource. I hope that everyone can find enough flexibility to meet their needs as pickleball players without too much effort. I will continue to observe and tweak the schedule as best I can. I ask that everyone accepts their own responsibilities to be good citizens of our community and manage their schedules and reservations in a manner that respects the fact that we are a big group of pickleball-loving people with only so much court time to go around!

Nick

Thanks Nick, I appreciate your willingness to observe the data and address concerns. That is what I was hoping for.

Nick, there are two things that would be nice to have, but may not be easily done in playerlineup. It would be ideal to be able to see the whole court schedule in one place. Currently, some courts are spoken for in playerlineup and others are only visible on the member portal on the gmcf website. It makes it a little challenging sometimes to know if an extra court not appearing to be occupied on playerlineup is actually open or not. I've noticed this on Saturdays, for example.

Secondly, it would be ideal if there were a waiting list for people wanting to play in a section that is full. I'm not aware that playerlineup has that capability???? I use playerlineup for a volleyball group i organize. The work around we use is to allow more people to sign up than the stated limit. That creates a virtual waitlist that let's people play in the order they signed up if someone drops. The tradeoff is you need to trust that those on the virtual waitlist don't show up expecting to play unless they move up and are within the player limit by gametime. So far, it has worked well for us, but we do have a smaller group.

Thanks for herding all us cats!

Dan - I too wish that PL was more robust and could handle these requests. We do have to manage two schedules since PL offers the group sign-ups and Club Automation manages our court reservations - Not ideal. It would be possible to manage both with Club Automation so it could all be visible in one place, but I am afraid the workflow would be really clunky. While a one-trick pony, PL does its one trick pretty well.