Spread Matches Evenly Across a Date Range
You set a Start Date, enabled Mondays as your match day, added a couple of pitches, and hit generate. Score7 built the schedule — and crammed every match into the first Monday. If you're running a league that's supposed to last a season, that's not what you want. You want the matches spread across the window.
The fix is the End Date field in the scheduler. Set it and Score7 switches from "pack matches as early as possible" to "spread matches evenly across the available days."
Where to find it
Open your tournament, go to the Scheduler page (Premium, admin-only), and look at the Date & Time section. End Date sits directly below Start Date.
Leave it blank and the scheduler behaves the way it always has: matches pack into the earliest available slots and your rest-time and gap settings are honored. Fill it in and the behavior changes.
What "spread evenly" means
When you set an End Date, Score7 looks at every day between Start and End that's available for matches (based on your weekday settings and excluded dates), counts how many matchdays the schedule actually needs, and picks evenly-spaced dates from the available set to place matches on.
Concretely: if your window has 26 Mondays and your schedule needs 8 matchdays, Score7 picks 8 Mondays spread roughly every third week, and places matches on those.
Score7 also takes over pacing — the resting time and the three gap fields (between rounds, stages, and legs) go grey and are ignored. The helper text under the End Date field makes this explicit:
When set, matches are spread evenly across available days. Resting time and gap settings are managed automatically.
Clear the End Date and those fields re-enable with their previous values.
The success message tells you what happened
After the scheduler runs, the banner confirms the distribution:
18 matches scheduled across 6 matchdays from 2026-05-04 to 2026-09-14
If you wanted a wider spread than you got, this tells you exactly how many matchdays were used and which ones, so you can adjust the inputs and regenerate.
When it fails (and why)
If the window doesn't have enough available days for the schedule:
The schedule needs 12 matchdays but only 8 are available between 2026-05-04 and 2026-06-29. Extend the end date, add more available days, or reduce the number of matches.
The error gives you three concrete levers: push the End Date out, enable more weekdays, or reduce the number of matches. Pick whichever fits the event.
If End Date is earlier than Start Date:
End date must be on or after start date.
Set End Date to the same day as Start Date for a single-day event (this is fine — the scheduler packs everything into that day). Or set it later.
When to use spread-evenly vs. pack-as-early-as-possible
| Situation | Use End Date | Leave End Date blank |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-week league (every Monday, every weekend) | Yes | No |
| Weekend-long tournament finishing Sunday | Maybe — set End Date to Sunday | Also fine |
| Single-day event | Leave blank (or set End Date = Start Date) | Yes |
| Tight schedule, minimize duration | No | Yes |
| Long window, want natural pacing | Yes | No |
A realistic league example
You're running a 10-team round-robin league. That's 45 matches. You have 3 pitches, matches are 1 hour, and you've enabled Saturdays 10:00–14:00 (so 12 match slots per Saturday). Your season runs from early May to mid-September.
- Without End Date: 45 matches land on the first 4 Saturdays. Everyone plays 3–4 games in a month, then nothing for four months.
- With End Date set to mid-September: Score7 picks evenly-spaced Saturdays from the window and spreads the 45 matches across them. Teams play one or two matches per Saturday across the full season, which is what a league is supposed to feel like.
A caveat worth knowing
If your matches can physically fit on fewer days than the window allows, Score7 uses only that minimum number of days — even if End Date is months away. Example: 11 matches with 3 pitches on a single Saturday slot all fit in one Saturday, so even a 6-month window lands them on one date.
To force a wider spread in that case, one of three levers:
- Reduce pitches — fewer parallel matches means more matchdays are required.
- Shorten each day's time slot — same effect.
- Split available days — enable only every other week, for example, so fewer match slots per window-length.
A more automatic fix is in progress.
Ready to try it?
Open your tournament, head to Scheduler, and set an End Date. If you haven't created a tournament yet, start one — it takes about a minute.
For a walkthrough of the auto-scheduler from scratch, see Auto-Scheduling: Let Score7 Build Your Tournament Schedule. And if you're still choosing a format for the league itself, How to Choose the Right Tournament Format is the place to start.