Seven on court and no time to recover.

A full netball match is four quarters of fifteen minutes and takes over an hour with intervals — fine for a league, impossible for a one-day carnival. Carnivals almost always run two shortened halves, typically ten minutes each, which gives a slot of about twenty-five minutes including the changeover and the walk between courts.

From there the arithmetic is ordinary. Twelve teams in three groups of four is eighteen group matches; take the three group winners plus the best runner-up into semi-finals and a final and you add three, for twenty-one in total. On three courts at twenty-five minutes that is seven rounds of court-time, just under three hours, and every team plays three matches minimum.

A full round robin with twelve teams is sixty-six matches — nearly ten hours on three courts, which is why carnivals use groups. If you have more time than that, three groups of four with a longer knockout is the right way to spend it, not a bigger round robin.

A netball squad is seven on court with a handful on the bench, and positional rules mean you cannot rotate freely the way a football squad can. Three matches with no meaningful break is not a scheduling inconvenience, it is an injury risk and it visibly changes results in the last game of the day.

That makes netball one of the sports where the objective is not to keep every court busy. A schedule with a court idle for one slot so that a team gets forty minutes between matches is a better schedule, and it is the opposite of what a naive optimiser produces. Tournamyx lays one round across your courts at a time rather than packing the day as tight as it will go, so a team plays once per round and the next round does not start until that one is finished. The gap that gives you is the round length, not a rest rule you set — if a squad needs longer, add a court or lengthen the slot.

The practical version: decide your minimum gap before you generate anything, and check the first and last rounds specifically. The teams that reach the semi-finals are the ones that have already played the most, and that is exactly where a tight schedule bites.

Netball is followed closely by people who are not playing — parents, club committees, and the teams waiting for the next round to know whether they need a win or a draw. If the ladder lives in a spreadsheet on the organizer’s laptop, every one of those people has to ask somebody, and that somebody is you.

Every Tournamyx event publishes one link with no login and no install: fixtures, courts, live scores and the ladder, recalculated on every saved result with goal difference applied consistently. Clubs check their own next match and court on their phones instead of at the desk.

Scores go in courtside from any phone, and roles are per tournament — so a team manager or an umpire can enter results without being able to edit the draw. For a season-long ladder rather than a carnival, the round robin generator works out the fixtures and the ladder for your real club list.