What it does
Scorebox assignment looks at the game schedule for the upcoming season and automatically assigns four players to staff the scorebox for each game. It tries to make the assignments as fair as possible – spreading shifts evenly across the player population – while also respecting players’ preferences.
Who is eligible
Not everyone is eligible for a regular scorebox shift:
- Coaches and players we’ve exempted from scorebox duty are excluded and will not be assigned a shift.
- Scorebox Leads (board members, captains, Hockey Ops members, and anyone with the Scorebox Lead role) are treated as a separate group. One lead is always assigned to each game, and they receive a different reminder email with additional responsibilities.
- Everyone else is a regular eligible player.
How the four players are chosen for each game
Each game is staffed by players from another game happening at the same rink.
The game we source people from follows a rotating pattern: the first game of the evening is staffed by players from the third game (N + 2), the second game by players from the first (N – 1), the third by players from the second (N – 1), and so on. This means each game’s players get spread across multiple scorebox duties throughout the evening rather than always staffing the same slot.
Keeping it fair
The website tracks how many shifts each player has been assigned. When it’s time to pick the next player, it prefers whoever has the fewest shifts so far. Over the course of a full season, this tends to distribute shifts evenly across the whole league.
Respecting preferences
Scorebox assignment takes players’ play-with preferences into account:
- Must Play With: the website will do its best to assign players who have must-play-with requests to the same shift.
- Do Not Play With: players with a conflict are never assigned to the same shift, regardless of which player filed the request.
What happens if there aren’t enough players
If the usual pool of players runs dry (everyone from the source game has already been assigned a shift that cycle), the website restocks from the beginning – re-shuffling the source game’s players and sorting them again by fewest shifts, so the next round of picks stays fair.