Mixed Doubles Match, 2 Teams, Rotating Partners

[gavspav]

Hi all,

I'm just realizing this scheduling is harder than it appears! And that's without factoring in no shows and surprise extras!

So I'm organizing a friendly doubles match. Hopefully there will be 10 players on each team. Let's assume there is an equal gender split. All matches will take place over a morning and could be just a few games each.

So I'd like each player to play with every other player of the opposite sex on their team.
And ideally every player gets to play everyone on the opponents team.

I think I found this spreadsheet which will work for this scenario. Am I correct?

Any ideas for contingency plans is there are a couple more or less players?

Thanks

[Ian Wakeling]

Google does not give me access to the spreadsheet that you linked to.  But I wonder if it might be similar to the spreadsheet I posted in this thread?  This does solve the mixed doubles problem that you propose, as you just need to assign the two sub-groups to be men and women.

Suprise extras are a real problem here as there is no flexibility.  Nice schedules can only exist if the total number of players is a multiple of 4, so two teams of the same size, and each team half male and half female.  The spreadsheet I have mentioned starts at 20 players (the minimum) and goes upto 72.  There are a couple of exceptions, no solution where all your requirements are met, exists for 24 or 40 players.

[Ian Wakeling]

It just occured to me that the schedules I mentioned above have the property that players are exactly once on each court.  As you have not asked for this, then the minimum is actually 16 players.  For example, if women team members are 1 to 4, and men 5 to 8, then you could play as follows:

(A1 A5 B1 B5) (A4 A8 B4 B6) (A2 A6 B2 B7) (A3 A7 B3 B8)
(A4 A7 B2 B5) (A1 A6 B3 B6) (A3 A8 B1 B7) (A2 A5 B4 B8)
(A2 A8 B3 B5) (A3 A5 B2 B6) (A1 A7 B4 B7) (A4 A6 B1 B8)
(A3 A6 B4 B5) (A2 A7 B1 B6) (A4 A5 B3 B7) (A1 A8 B2 B8)