Each week, it may be necessary for one or more teams to have a “bye”, i.e, not play a fixture. This may be because you have an odd number of teams in a division, or because you do not have enough playing areas and time slots to cater for all the teams in a division etc. In these instances, you can create a “Bye” in Spawtz and thereby indicate to the team in question that they do not have a fixture that week.
You can create “Byes” in four ways:
1) On the calendar. Click the “Show Byes” link and a list of all the teams in any leagues associated to the selected venue with byes that week will be displayed. From there, you can add, edit and delete byes
2) On the duty report. Byes for any teams in any leagues associated to the selected venue will be shown in a list at the bottom of the duty report. From there you can add, edit and delete byes.
3) On any fixture list (either the list of all the fixtures in a league, or the list of all the fixtures for a team). Add byes by clicking the “Add Bye” button below the list, edit them by clicking the edit button next to the bye, or delete them by checking the checkbox next to them and clicking “Delete”.
4) By generating fixtures using a template that contains byes. For more information on how to create or modify fixture generation templates to include byes, please see this KB article
Reminders
By default, teams receive fixture reminders about the next fixture they are due to play in. If their next fixture is actually a “Bye”, they will receive a different email, or a different SMS about that bye. The contents of the bye reminder can be modified by editing the “Bye Reminder Email” or “Bye Reminder SMS” autotext items.
Bye Requirements
Because teams will be reminded about byes in a different fashion than how they are reminded about fixtures, it is necessary that teams do not have both a bye and a fixture on the same date. If you try to create a bye on a date when the team already has a fixture, or if you try to move a bye to a date on which the team already has a fixture, you will receive a validation error message. You must change the date to one on which the team does not already have a fixture.
Similarly, teams can only have one bye on any one date, so you cannot create multiple byes on the same date for a team.
Standings
By default, byes do not count towards standings, and they are not displayed in the standings tables. However, you can make byes appear in the standings tables by adding the configuration setting “ShowByesOnStandings” with a value of “True” to the configuration settings section. If that setting is true, byes will be displayed in the standings, and you can specify a number of points that teams should receive for each bye they have, and the number of “goals” (or runs, tries etc) that they should be allocated for each bye they have.
If teams are allocated points for byes, it means that byes count towards standings, and that byes may therefore affect a team’s position in the ladder. This has knock on effects for automatically calculated standings – ie, standings where the participants are automatically calculated as the team in position x vs the team in position y. In this instance, the participants of that fixture will only be calculated once all the standard fixtures have been played AND once all the byes are in the past. So for example, 6 teams have a fixture on the 1st of January and 1 team has a bye on the 1st of January, and those are the last standard fixtures in the season, the participants of automatically calculated fixtures will only be calculated on the 2nd of January. This automatic calculation will happen just before the fixture reminder emails for the day are sent out.
This situation (where byes count towards standings) also means that you may be unable to delete or modify byes once the results of an automatically calculated fixture have been entered, as modifying the byes may modify the standings for the league, which would cause the fixture participants to be wrong. So once standings based automatically calculated fixtures have been completed, you will be unable to edit or add byes if byes count towards standings.
External Display
Byes will be displayed in the fixture lists for leagues and for teams on the external side of the site.