How to Create and Manage Schedules

A good schedule keeps the day short, minimizes dead time, and avoids conflicts between judges and contestants. Twirlmate's schedule builder helps you structure your day, assign judges to lanes, and automatically populate contestants — but the decisions about how to organize things are yours.

Most contests need two or three schedules for the entire day:

1. Individual events — one schedule covering all individual disciplines (modeling, strut, solo, novelty, etc.), organized into blocks

2. Full-floor events — a separate schedule for individual and team performances that use the entire floor

3. Optionally, a third schedule if you're splitting full-floor events further (e.g., individuals vs teams)

Multi-day contests should have separate individual and/or team schedules per day.

The key principle: put all individual events for a day into one schedule, organized into blocks. Don't create a separate schedule for each portion (block) of the day. A single schedule means fewer clicks for you when printing scoresheets, and a cleaner experience for attendees viewing the day-of portal.

The setup wizard walks you through four steps:

Step 1: Basics

Name your schedule, set the start date and time, and decide whether to display set numbers (row numbers that help contestants find their performance time). We recommend showing the set number even if you're not following the set system to help with readability.

Step 2: Rooms and lanes

Select or create the room you're using, then set up lanes. The number of lanes determines how many judging stations run simultaneously. Most individual event schedules use 6+ lanes; full-floor events typically use two, sometimes adding 2+ judges to each lane.

Step 3: Judge assignments

Assign judges and clerks to each lane. Here you can add more than one judge to a lane. When building the schedule, Twirlmate will do its best to avoid coach-contestant conflicts based on these assignments.

Step 4: Order of events (the important part)

This is where you define your event blocks and choose which disciplines go in each one.

Blocks are groups of disciplines that run together before the next group starts. They exist because of distinct music needs — modeling uses slow music, strut uses march music, solo and novelty use upbeat music. Each block must finish before the next one begins, so the music can change.

A typical individual events schedule might have:

- Block 1: Modeling Events — Modeling, Best Appearing

- Block 2: Strut Events — Basic Strut, X-Strut

- Block 3: Solo & Novelty — Solo, Two Baton, Three Baton, Duet

Within each block, you add the specific disciplines. Twirlmate shows you all unscheduled disciplines so you can drag them into the right block and reorder them.

The order in which you place the disciplines determines their order in the schedule. To ensure open events appear before pageant or title events, put open events first in that block.

Block Settings

Each block has its own configuration for how contestants are ordered and spaced:

- Performance order — how contestants are sequenced (by age, last name, registration date, or random). Most directors use random or registration date (latest to earliest) within each division.

- Performance gap — the minimum number of rows between the same contestant's appearances. This prevents an athlete from performing back-to-back in two lanes. Blocks with less physically demanding disciplines such as modeling can get away with smaller gaps (1-2), while blocks with more strenuous disciplines like solo may need more (4-5).

- Event gap — empty rows after the last contestant in each discipline, giving judges time to finish commenting and tabulate. 1 is standard, and is included by default. Unless you want to give judges extra tabulation time, we recommend leaving this field as 0.

- Auto-insert byes — adds an empty slot after each contestant for breathing room. Useful for strut if you want to give contestants more floor space.

Once your blocks and disciplines are set, build them one by one to auto-populate contestants into the grid. Twirlmate creates the lane assignments, respects your performance gap and ordering settings, and fills everything in.

For a smooth editing experience, we recommend building your first block and fixing any conflicts before building the next block.

After building a block, you can fine-tune in the grid view:

- Drag and drop events and performances to reorder

- Add individual contestants or disciplines from the sidebar if something was missed

- Insert byes to create spacing

- Expand events across lanes for disciplines that need multiple columns

- Shift cells up or down to align timing across lanes

After building, check the conflict indicators in the toolbar:

- Time conflicts (clock icon) — an athlete is scheduled to perform in two places at the same time, or the performance gap was violated

- Coach conflicts (scale icon) — a judge is evaluating a contestant they coach

- Repeat divisions (repeat icon) — the same division appears more than once in a given lane

Time conflicts are critical to resolve before contest day. Coach conflicts should be resolved if possible — swap the affected performances to a different lane, or adjust judge assignments.

You can always go back:

- Add a discipline that was left out — use the sidebar to add events or individual contestants to an existing column

- Change a team's name or song — this is managed on the team's profile, not in the schedule. Changes there are reflected in the schedule automatically.

- Edit the outline — switch to the Outline tab to restructure blocks and rebuild

- Edit judges — reassign judges to lanes from the schedule detail page

- Edit settings — change schedule-wide options like the name, start date/time, or set number display

Creating one schedule per block. This makes scoresheet printing tedious and clutters the day-of portal. Use multiple blocks within a single schedule instead.

Ignoring performance gaps. Without a gap, the same athlete might be scheduled on Lane 1 at set 12 and Lane 2 at set 13 — impossible to do in real life. Set a gap of at least 2.

Not checking conflicts. Build the schedule, then check the conflict indicators before printing masters. It's much easier to fix conflicts in the builder than to scramble on contest day.

Building all blocks before fixing conflicts. If you build a schedule with blocks A, B, and C, then make a change to block A, that potentially affects the order of performances in subsequent blocks. The system then has to make lots of extra changes to keep the overall schedule in sync. Building and perfecting blocks one at a time avoids this and helps the system run faster.