A real engine.

You give the engine your teams, venues, dates, and rules. It looks for a schedule that meets your hard rules and does as well as it can on the soft ones, weighted the way you set them. No language model is involved at any point.

That matters the first time a parent gets loud. When a coach asks why their U12s are playing at 8am on back-to-back Saturdays, you don't have to blame the software. You can point at what produced it: the field wasn't free at ten, the older division had it, and their team had already taken its share of the late slots.

If part of the schedule has to stay exactly as it is, lock those games. The engine plans around them and leaves them alone.

Single round-robin, double round-robin, group pools, and single- and double-elimination playoff brackets. That covers the shape most leagues actually run: everybody plays everybody once or twice, or the field splits into pools, the standings sort themselves out, and the top finishers go into a bracket at the end.

A season can be built out of more than one of those. A regular-season phase followed by a playoff phase is a normal setup here. The bracket can seed off the standings from the round-robin or pool stage, and each phase has its own dates and venues. Chaining phases is part of Plus.

Swiss pairings aren't supported yet. If that's how your season runs, tell us.

Rest days between games. Venue blackouts for the two weeks the field is being resodded. Maximum games per day and per week. Home and away balance. Coaches who run two teams and can't be in two places at once. The engine considers all of them together: hard rules come first, and soft rules are traded off the way you've weighted them.

You author them by describing them, or by picking a rule type from a list, never by writing a config file. Either way every rule you've added sits in a list you can read, edit, and delete: one row per rule, no syntax to learn. Nothing is buried in a preferences pane you'll rediscover in March. Say it in plain English covers the describing half.

Sometimes the rules can't all be met, because there are only so many Saturdays in October. When that happens the engine tells you which rules it had to relax, and it's your call what gives.

The engine doesn't get the final say. When you want a game somewhere else, you put it somewhere else.

The grid lays the season out by day and venue. Pick a game up, drop it in another slot, and the grid shows you as you go whether that slot is clean or would cause a conflict, like a field that's already taken or a team playing twice in a day. You know before you let go.

And everything you do by hand is a change like any other change, which means it lands in the change history with your name on it, and undo takes it straight back out.