Sports scheduling is messy. It involves lots of factors, from which teams need to play which, to making sure that everybody has the right number of home games, to minimizing the travel that teams need to endure to get from one city to another. It's not something you want to do by hand.

But it doesn't need a big company to handle it either. A small outfit called The Sports Scheduling Group (www.sports-scheduling.com) does the work, using computer modeling for big time sports such as The Big Ten, Major League Baseball, The ACC and others.

Talking with Doug Bureman, one of the three principals, you'd think it was a matter-of-fact process. Mr. Bureman, whose background includes vice presidential duties for the Pittsburgh Pirates and operational positions for the Cincinnati Reds, can readily describe various situations in which schedules easily could have been botched up, but happened without incident due to good modeling methods.

One such challenge happened last year for New York and Washington, when they were nearing the end of their baseball scheduling process, almost ready to release a final schedule. Suddenly, news came that the pope would be speaking at Yankee Stadium and National Stadium. This could have created major snafus associated with hotel rooms, traffic and other interconnected factors. So the team needed to quickly adapt the schedule, which meant affecting everybody as it bubbled through the league.

You and I might not always like the schedule, and we might think it unfair. But it conforms to the needs of the leagues and the teams. The leagues provide the rules, then The Sports Scheduling Group creates the schedules. For instance, Major League Baseball dictates that each team must play 162 games -- 81 at home, 81 on the road. No team may play more than 20 days in a row. And there always needs to be a day off for travel when a team is going from the West Coast to the East Coast. Add interleague play and other factors, and you have one complicated problem.

The Sports Scheduling Group is a virtual company, with founders living in Georgia and Pennsylvania. George Nemhauser has a doctorate degree and is department chair at Georgia Tech. Mr. Bureman and Michael Trick live in the Pittsburgh area.

Mr. Trick brought the team together six years ago when the principals were doing related work separately. Mr. Trick and Mr. Nemhauser were doing work for the ACC, while Mr. Trick was working with Mr. Bureman for Major League Baseball. Mr. Trick had previously performed an economic study for the Pirates, which brought him together with Mr. Bureman, then the Pirates vice president.

Now, Mr. Bureman looks for new customers, and Mr. Trick and Mr. Nemhauser develop the technology, all of which was developed in-house so far, which Mr. Bureman believes gives them an advantage.

Seeking customers is a full-time job, done by word-of-mouth and networking, with little formal marketing.

Now they're starting to take on international inquiries. It sounds like a new set of travel challenges to me.