Redesigning Belgian Youth Field Hockey Competitions Using an Incomplete Round-Robin Tournament

Finding a schedule such that the resulting travel time for the teams is limited is an important consideration of any tournament organizer. This is especially relevant for youth competitions, where extensive travel has been recognized as a contributing factor to dropout rates. Hence, instead of partitioning the teams into separate leagues with each league organized as a double round-robin, we propose to redesign the Belgian field hockey youth competition as an incomplete round-robin tournament. We construct a fix-and-optimize matheuristic that finds high-quality schedules for the incomplete round-robin design. We also develop an equity model designed to align individual teams’ travel times more closely with their ideal travel times. We show that our approach reduces the total travel time up to 25% compared with the official schedule. When we enforce that no individual team is disadvantaged too much, there is still a decrease of 20% in total travel time. The results convinced the Belgian Royal Hockey Association to adopt this design, and we have been constructing schedules for them since the second half of the season 2023/2024.

History: This paper was refereed.

Funding: This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Grant S005521N].