The encyclopedia · R&D & Science · Operational decision · 2023–2025
Belgian youth field hockey cut travel 25% by redesigning league as incomplete round-robin
Youth hockey leagues merged into one incomplete round-robin, cutting total travel up to 25% and the dropout risk behind it.
Royal Belgian Hockey Association
The solution
Youth field hockey in Belgium was organized the way adult leagues are: teams partitioned into divisions, each division playing a double round-robin. The result was long drives for many teams, and extensive travel is a documented driver of youth dropout in sport.
The redesign abandons the partition: every team plays in one incomplete round-robin, where not all pairs meet, and an equity model keeps each team's travel time close to its own ideal. A fix-and-optimize matheuristic constructs high-quality schedules under these design choices.
Compared with the official schedule, the approach cuts total travel time by up to 25% — or 20% while enforcing that no individual team is disadvantaged too much. The Belgian Royal Hockey Association adopted the design and has been scheduling with it since the second half of the 2023/2024 season.
Why it worked
- An incomplete round-robin lets the optimizer trade which teams play each other against where they travel, a lever partitioned double round-robins make impossible.
- The equity model converts a fairness concern ('nobody travels too much') into an explicit constraint, so the 20% solution is provably fair while still far cheaper than the old schedule.
- Youth dropout follows travel distance, so the metric the league optimized is the metric that actually keeps kids in the sport.
What can be applied
When a constraint forces bad outcomes (like travel), redesign the competition structure itself instead of just optimizing the schedule inside the old structure.
Aftermath
The Royal Belgian Hockey Association adopted the incomplete round-robin design and has used the researchers' schedules since the second half of the 2023/2024 season. The method was published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in 2025, documenting the 25% travel reduction and the equity model that made the redesign implementable.
Sources
- Redesigning Belgian Youth Field Hockey Competitions Using an Incomplete Round-Robin Tournament
- Redesigning Belgian Youth Field Hockey Competitions Using an Incomplete Round-Robin Tournament
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