Scheduling sports competitions is a difficult task because it is often very difficult to construct schedules that are considered fair by all competitors. In addition, the schedules should also satisfy a considerably large number of additional requirements and constraints. Most of the sports scheduling problems that have been tackled in the literature refer to competitions in which a venue is as...

The Traveling Tournament Problem is a sports timetabling problem requiring production of a minimum distance double round robin tournament for a group of n teams. Even small instances of this problem seem to be very difficult to solve. In this paper, we present the first provably optimal solution for an instance of 8 teams. The solution methodology is a parallel implementation of a branch and pr...

Integrating the literature on faultlines, conflict, and pay, we drew on the basic principles of multilevel theory and differentiated between group- and organizational-level faultlines to introduce a novel multilevel perspective on faultlines. Using multisource, multilevel data on 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, we found that group-level faultlines were negatively associated with group per...

Suppose that we have a timetable of a round-robin tournament with a number of teams, and distances among their homes. The home-away assignment problem is to find a home-away assignment that minimizes the total traveling distance of the teams. We propose a formulation of the home-away assignment problem as an integer program, and a rounding algorithm based on Bertsimas, Teo and Vohra’s dependent...

All of life is based on decisions, and one can’t make decisions without ranking alternatives. Human beings generally make decisions in an ad hoc, subconscious way, but for many purposes it’s better to have an explicit algorithm for making objective decisions. This issue comes up in many fields, from medicine to entertainment. Methods of paired comparisons have been particularly prominent in the...

In many professional sports leagues, teams from opposing leagues/conferences compete against one another, playing inter-league games. This is an example of a bipartite tournament. In this paper, we consider the problem of reducing the total travel distance of bipartite tournaments, by analyzing inter-league scheduling from the perspective of discrete optimization. This research has natural appl...

INTRODUCTION Several intrinsic risk factors for lower extremity injuries have been proposed, including lack of proper knee and body control during landings and cutting manoeuvres, low muscular strength, reduced balance and increased ligament laxity, but there are still many unanswered questions. The overall aim of this research project is to investigate anatomical, biomechanical, neuromuscular,...

Sports leagues consist of conferences subdivided into divisions. Teams play a number of games within their divisions and fewer games against teams in different divisions and conferences. Usually, a league structure remains stable from one season to the next. However, structures change when growth or contraction occurs, and realignment of the four major professional sports leagues in North Ameri...

A focus on low body weight and body fat content, combined with regulations in some weight-sensitive sports, are considered risk factors for extreme dieting, eating disorders (EDs) and related health consequences among athletes. At present there are, from a health perspective, no generally accepted optimum values for body weight or percentage of fat mass in different sports and there is no 'gold...

A common credo in modern sports is that athletic competition transcends human social difference; within the arena of competitive sport, a person’s performance is the only thing that matters. But at the same time, in many sports, participants are placed into separate classes that are prevented from mixing in competition. Adult males do not compete against young boys in weightlifting contests; hi...