1. Budget: determine what part of your budget goes to entry fee. This was the first thing I did since you need to know how much this is going cost your team before you can make further decisions.

2. Then I looked at any special destinations I might want to go to. How does this effect the rest of my schedule. Ie: We want to go to Park City World Series, what events do we need to play in to ensure we qualify etc.

3. How far do we want to travel on a given weekend. If we are based in Loveland do we want to play in Pueblo or Colorado springs or stay closer to home.

4. How many events do want to play for the year.

5. What weekends do we have major conflicts......Prom, Graduations etc.

6. I also tried to make sure we had some quality time off.....playing 16 weekends in  a row seemes a bit much.

7. I tried to make the schedule work around when I thought we should peak as a team. Start with maybe 2 early spring events close to home. Then I looked at 2 weekends on and 1 off the rest of the way. Avoiding burnout is huge.

8. I generally had 2 drafts and let the team pick the schedule they liked the best.

9. Finally after the decision was made I got my entries sent in as early as possible, then I could concentrate on any Travel related planning.

10. Get this done as early as possible so you can concentrate on practice and conditioning.