Greencourt Software GamePlan sports and recreation software

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GamePlan software
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Changes occurring in 2014: Details here

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Also, see the GamePlan software user manual.

I installed the software, and entered the serial number, but the program still runs in demo mode.

Please be sure that you entered an eight-character serial number, four digits followed by four letters. You can install the serial number by running any of the GamePlan programs; click Help, then click About, then click Install Serial Number. After installing the serial number, you may have to restart the program for it to take effect.

You can verify whether the serial number has been properly installed. Click Help / About. The window should show the serial number that you have installed.

In some "corporate" computing environments, individual users don't have permission to put in the serial number, so it doesn't store it correctly. In these situations, a system administrator has to put in the serial number.

What are the hardware requirements (e.g. disk space, RAM, processing speed) to run the GamePlan programs? 

The hardware requirements are fairly modest, and should not be a problem on most PCs. The software requires less than 2 MB of disk space. Memory requirements depend on the size of the data, but one or two megabytes is adequate. For typical size data, processing is fairly quick; I have run the programs on 90 MHz and 133 MHz Pentium processor machines.

How much data can the programs handle? 

The following number of players, etc., are supported: 
 
GamePlanDemo VersionRegular Version
Match Scheduling
number of courts10255
number of rounds1099
number of players314096
Challenge Ladder
number of players31800
number of results401500
Tournament Draw
number of players31800

For singles round robin schedules, the Match Scheduling program can create a schedule for up to 100 players or teams (if it's a doubles event where each pair stays together for the entire event, you would treat each pair as a "team.")  For a doubles round robin plan, in which each player partners with each other player exactly once, and opposes each other player exactly twice, the software creates schedules for 4 to 24 players.

How can I create a schedule for eight players sharing one court for 30 weeks? (Each week, four players are on and four players are off.)

You can use a "mixer" assignment as follows. Use 30 rounds and one court. Un-check the "skill level disparity" option, because you are not concerned about different skill levels. You will get more mixing. When I tried this, everybody got to meet everybody else about six or seven times during the 30 rounds of play. Everybody gets 15 rounds of play.

*** OR ***

Create a schedule with seven rounds of play and two courts. Instead of "mixer," use "doubles round robin." This will create a schedule where everybody partners exactly once and opposes all others exactly twice. The schedule will show activity for seven rounds of play. But since you have only one court, you would spread it out over 14 weeks. First week, play the match in round 1, court 1. Second week, use round 1, court 2. Third week, use round 2, court 1. Etc. After 14 weeks, repeat from the top.

How can I schedule an event with three players per court?

The user's scenario was described as follows: 

I recently purchased your Gameplan software. It does a beautiful job on the 2 man round robins.  My problem is getting 3 to a court.  I am the statistician for our local horseshoe club. What I have is this:  30 people, 10 courts.   I am trying to figure a round robin with 3 people per court, 2 games each night where each player only pitches the other players once.

Example: Player 1, 2, 3 are on court 1, They stay there all night, Players 1and 2 pitch their game while player 3 keeps score. Then player 1 and 3 pitch their game while player 2 score keeps, after that game player 2 and 3 pitch while 1 score keeps.

Is the Gameplan program capable of doing this arrangement?

There is no direct way to do this; the program normally handles games involving two or four players.  However, I was able to craft something using some manual intervention.   Here is a plan  for 30 players on 10 courts, for 4 rounds.  (To download this file, you can click on the link with the right mouse button, then select "save as...".  The file can be opened with the GamePlan Match Scheduling program.) 

I assume you intended to schedule more rounds, but this will give you the general idea.  (Note that you can't get a "perfect" round robin schedule, because each player needs to meet 29 others, but they meet two at a time.  Thus, 14 rounds is not enough, but 15 rounds would start duplicating.  I don't know how close to perfect you can get.) 

Here is how the plan was created; you may want to download and look at the plan as you read this description.  First, create a plan for 40 players, 10 courts, for some number of rounds using automatic assignment.  Options are turned off for skill level, 100% threshold, and 1 for schedule diversity.  Then I looked at each round.  Whenever there was a match with more than one DUMMY player (numbers 31 to 40), I removed all but one dummy player, and traded them with real players, so that I ultimately had three real players and one dummy player per match.  Then I repeated for each round.  Starting with the second round, I checked the warnings (under the Tools menu) to make sure duplications didn't occur.  Sometimes I had to rearrange players until there were no duplications.  Note that it doesn't matter if a real player meets a DUMMY player more than once, so those warnings can just be ignored. 

Obviously, the more rounds you do, the harder it will be to avoid duplications. 

How can I schedule a triangular tournament over a period of  two days? We have two tennis teams coming to visit -- approximately 50 visitors plus another 25 from our club. 

I have a couple of ideas for you.  You might set up a tournament where pairs of players from the three teams meet in a round-robin style tournament.  For example, if the three teams are A, B, and C, set up matches like: 
    A1 vs B1    A2 vs C2    B3 vs C3 
    A1 vs C1    C2 vs B2    A3 vs B3 
    B1 vs C1    A2 vs B2    C3 vs A3 
where A1 is the first doubles on team A, A2 is second doubles, etc. 

As an alternative, you might try a mixer where you throw everybody together as one large group, and just create a bunch of doubles matches for everyone.  In either case, the Match Scheduling software can help you set up matches. 

I need help sending GamePlan reports by e-mail.

Please read more about the e-mail feature here.

I'm having problems entering fractional values for certain parameters in the Challenge Ladder points system.

If you are using Windows outside of the United States, your system may be localized for your location; for example, it may be set to use the comma rather than the decimal point to indicate fractional values. The GamePlan software may not handle this correctly, depending on your settings, but there is an easy way to work around this issue. Please note that the details of this solution may depend on your Windows version.

  1. Go to the Windows Control Panel (for example, click Start / Settings / Control Panel).
  2. Double-click "Regional and Language Options".
  3. Select the "Keyboards and Languages" tab.
  4. Click "Change keyboards".
  5. Click Add, and select "English (United States)". Click OK.
  6. Select the "Language Bar" tab.
  7. Select "Docked in the taskbar". Click OK.
  8. Click OK.

In the Windows Task Bar, you will now see that you can switch input modes between "English (United States)" and your default setting.

Use the "English" mode for entering the fractional values in the GamePlan program. Then you can switch back to your default mode.

Installation issues

Prior to release 2.3, a few customers reported installation problems, receiving an error message such as "The system file is not suitable...." More information is available here. This problem should no longer occur in release 2.3.



















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