Airtennis part 1 of 3: Challenges of scheduling tennis in SF

Since my last post, I have gone through three sizeable life changes:

1. Began a new job at Airtable
2. Started to compete in a local tennis league called "UTR", organized by Universal Tennis
3. Moved to San Francisco

These events all correlated with each other. I started to compete in Universal Tennis about a year into the pandemic; my job switch from Facebook (now Meta) to Airtable was somewhat motivated by the pandemic as well; finally, I decided to move to San Francisco to shorten my commute to the Airtable HQ.

That created a unique challenge: despite SF's numerous public courts, there are even more people here who are eager to play. As a result, UTR matches were a bit more time-consuming to coordinate than when I lived in South Bay.

Due to the relative scarcity of courts, players here have to do one of two things:

• wait potentially a long time to walk onto a court
• diligently monitor a few reservation sites to snag a booking within seconds of when they unlocked

UTR coordination

To add one more logistical hurdle, each UTR "season" typically involves 4 matchups to be scheduled over about 6 weeks, which adds some urgency to scheduling.

When I started to play UTR, I would often try to schedule one opponent at a time, find a time that worked for both of us during that week, and finish those matches by the season's end.

But now in San Francisco, there was less certainty on availability of courts; when I did succeed in finding a court, it might also be for only 2 days in advance, so I needed to match with any opponents who could play with little notice.

All of this made manual scheduling really tedious. What can make this more efficient?

I ended up building a solution on Airtable! See part 2 for an overview of what I made.