A practical problem encountered by the management of a tennis club is the o
rganization of a tennis tournament for the club members. The tournament par
ticipants are split into different series: in each series, every player pla
ys once a week with a different opponent in a round robin tournament. All m
atches are subject to a time limit corresponding to one hour. All the serie
s share the same pool of courts, whose weekly availability is predefined. I
n addition, the players have their own availability constraints. Given the
courts and players availability, the objective is to schedule the tournamen
t with no violation of the constraints or, more realistically, in order to
maximize the number of feasible matches. This problem can be formulated as
a maximum matching problem, with the additional constraint that each player
must play just once a week. It can also be modeled as a maximum clique pro
blem. A two-step heuristic procedure is proposed to solve the problem: firs
t, the round robin tournaments of each series are generated, then the match
es of each tournament are assigned to the available courts for every week b
y means of a local search procedure. The procedure has been succesfully imp
lemented and is currently used by the tennis club.