Missouri Valley / St. Louis

Smarter scheduling arrives in St. Louis tennis thanks to Dom Marticorena and his LLC

David Smale | May 07, 2026

You signed up for a USTA League in St. Louis in January. It’s a 10-week indoor season with matches every Sunday. Then it hits you: the Super Bowl is played on the second Sunday in February.

You panic, because you always go to the same Super Bowl party and don’t want to miss it.

You’re committed to the league, so you quickly check to make sure you’re not scheduled for a match during the big game.

Fortunately, you’re not scheduled to play at that time. Lingering on the league schedule, you notice that nobody is scheduled for a match that starts after 2 p.m. that day.

You can thank Dom Marticorena for that.

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Algorithm Advantage

Marticorena earned his PhD in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in April, specializing in computational neural systems, the kind of work that’s fundamentally about optimization and algorithms.

His company, Over The Net, LLC, built a scheduling system now in use by USTA St. Louis and expanding across the USTA Missouri Valley. Marticorena uses the system to help him run the USTA St. Louis Under 40 Social League.

Acceptance and implementation at the national level is possibly just around the corner.

The technology is called constraint satisfaction, the same concept used to build NFL schedules, route airline equipment and crews, and run logistics at major retail companies across the country.

Where a human scheduler adds variables one by one and hopes for the best, Marticorena’s system satisfies thousands of rules simultaneously and guarantees the result. If you tell it nobody plays after 2 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, that’s a hard constraint with zero violations.

Using the program, league schedulers can balance home and away patterns, venue and time preferences, and team matchup requests across hundreds of teams and dozens of facilities. It’s the kind of thing that used to take up endless hours of a coordinator’s time per season, now solved in about three minutes.

Marticorena said the system he created has a simple explanation.

Dom Marticorena (right) created a smart scheduling system now used by USTA St. Louis and expanding across the USTA Missouri Valley.

“The process can be called dimensionality reduction or parsimonious reification,” he said.

In case that didn’t help, he explained the latter term.

“Parsimony means explaining the most with the least,” Marticorena said. “Reification means turning a real-world constraint into math. Together, they give you speed and universality. We only model what actually needs to be modeled. There are 300 USTA districts in the country, each one with different quirks. But they’re not fundamentally different problems. They’re the same problem with different values.

“Instead of building a system of special cases, we model the features continuously. Any district’s setup is just a different position in the same model.”

User-First Approach

Marticorena is quick to point out that the algorithm isn’t the product.

“Having a very good algorithm is less than 20% of the value,” he said. “That’s the ground floor. The real work is the interface. I’m big on keeping the human in the loop, not just spitting out a schedule from a hidden process, but letting users see all the options and tradeoffs at a glance.

“If a coordinator needs to explain to a captain why their team plays at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, they should be able to pull up the tradeoff and show why. Offload the complexity to the computer, but let the human make the decisions only they can make.”

For years, the National Football League has released its fall schedule in May. While the next season’s opponents are known within minutes after the conclusion of the last game of the previous season, it often took that long to construct the schedule. Factors like shared stadiums and parking lots with baseball teams, unavailable dates, travel arrangements to remote locations among many other variables were in play.

But using a system like Marticorena’s, the schedule can be done in minutes, not months. The NFL likes grabbing the sports world’s attention every month, so the league still releases the schedule in May.

“What I want is for scheduling a tournament to feel like Tetris, and for running a drop-in league to feel like a cooking game, where you’re managing the flow in real time,” Marticorena said. “It just works, and everyone is having the best possible time. That’s the bar I’m setting for my products.”

And it helps that everyone is happy they don’t have to play at the same time as the Super Bowl.

Check out a prior story about Dom Marticorena using tech-driven scheduling to run the USTA St. Louis Under 40 Social League here.

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