As the Power Four conferences lose regional relations and grow their national footprints, scheduling conference play is an extra challenge. So, how do conferences, big and small, balance location, rivalries, TV schedules, shared arenas, and more to create positive experiences for student-athletes and fans?

Unsurprisingly, most conference schedules come together through many meetings among conference leadership and stakeholders. In a piece for VolleyballMag, reporter Lincoln Arenal dove into how a volleyball conference schedule is prepared, using the 18 school, New Jersey to Washington, Big Ten as a case study.

Grace McNamara, the Big Ten’s senior director of television administration Arenal that she and her team stick to a list of parameters that account for travel efficiency and ease, closeness of games, breaks between playing the same team multiple times, and limiting how much a team is consecutively on the road or at home. The team that creates this schedule includes a combination of representatives from schools, athletic medicine groups, and senior women’s administrators. The presence of various voices for decision-making is intended to consider all factors – not just travel efficiency but player well-being.

Wisconsin vs Nebraska is one of the top rivalries in NCAA volleyball

Arenal describes another challenge the Big Ten had to tackle when developing the 2024 volleyball conference schedule. In November, at some participating schools, basketball teams also used arenas for volleyball. Per Arenal, the Big Ten utilized Kevin Pagua, who runs a scheduling company called Faktor, to “gather blackout dates” to ensure volleyball, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball all had proper time and space to play in the same arena.

Coordinating travel logistics, prioritizing player needs, and scheduling around blackout dates are not the only things schools take into consideration when building a conference schedule. Other important elements for NCAA volleyball scheduling were competitive balance and historic rivalries, which conferences want to take into account. That is likely why Wisconsin and Nebraska played twice in the regular season in 2024.

In the Big Ten, some schools played a series of single home and away matches, while other schools doubled up at home and away. These decisions were made in anticipation that the intensity and fan appreciation of competitive matches with rivals would increase the school’s interest in the sport overall. With various schools and programs breaking attendance records this year, this seems to have been a worthwhile consideration.

Of course, volleyball is not the only NCAA sport taking competitiveness into consideration. In a recent Athletic piece breaking down the Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball schedule, reporters Scott Dochterman and CJ Moore share that the men’s game maintains a 20-game schedule, where every school plays 14 teams once and three teams twice. For the women, teams will play 16 teams only once plus one “designated rival” to play twice. Dochterman and Moore confirmthat, for the men, the conference selected each team’s three double-play opponents “based on multiple factors, including rivalry status, geography, and national prominence.”

To develop a conference schedule, you can bring the stakeholders together to make big decisions, and you can focus on competitiveness and historical rivalries. But there’s still another, lesser-known option – leave it up to the math. The University of Wisconsin-Steven’s Point created the Center for Athletic Scheduling in 2006, where students use math to create individual sports schedules.

“Having this service lifted an incredible burden off a conference like ours,” said former Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) Commissioner Gary Karner.

The students who work at the center create schedules using mathematical equations and algorithms for variables that represent every possible scheduling constraint, such as travel and restrictions, player well-being, and rules that determine how much a team is allowed to be at home or on the road consecutively. At the time the article was written, the center provided for “80 percent of the schedules for the WIAC,” and had retained clients from all across the country to provide similar scheduling products. As more factors come into play as conferences change, conference scheduling may not get any easier, but the juggling act for all parties will continue.