I spent Labor Day weekend figuring out how to make the new Season Management system work for our youth hockey association. We have a small association with four or five youth travel teams, a high school team, and several club teams that use our rink. This might be more complicated for a bigger association. We really needed a way to show all events on a master rink calendar. We also wanted team specific webpages on our website.
Season Management would actually work fine if you didn’t need a master calendar. Players/parents would just need to get their info about games and practices from the Team Site or the app. The real problem is if you need a master calendar that lists all of the events from all of the different teams.
Here are the steps I took to create the season, and to create a work-around for a master calendar.
Create each new team in SportsEngine HQ Season Management: From SportsEngine HQ-Competition-Season Management-Seasons (add new season if necessary)-Teams. (Be sure to roster your teams on the Season Management page and not “Rostering” below Sport Management.)
Next, go into Edit Mode on your SportsEngine website and create new general pages for each of your teams. I put all of the teams as submenus under “Teams” on the main menu. Just click on “Pages” under the Edit Mode. Any page you create here will become a subpage of the page you are on when you click it. So if you want a number of teams listed under teams, first create a Team page in the main menu. Then click on the Team page and click “Add New Page” from there. You want to create a General Page. Give your team a short name and a long name. This will be the name of the team. This is important: be sure to click “Enable Events” at the bottom. This will create the necessary calendar tag that everyone wants. More on that below. Create a new General Page for each of your teams.
Here is how I populated the content on each team page. From the Season Management Teams page (where all of your teams are listed in the Season), click the ellipses at the far right of the team and click “Share Team Site.” (sidenote: make sure all of your team pages are set to public on the same ellipses if you want others to be able to see them.) Copy the Embed Code at the bottom. Now go back over to the team page you just created on the website and with Edit Mode on, click “Add Page Element.” Click “Code.” Paste the embed code from the team page Season Management into the Code box. I also labeled the Title as the name of the team. Click “Create This Page Element” at the bottom right. Now this page will auto populate with the game schedule (not practices or other events, sadly – this is a problem that needs to be fixed).
I also added a link to the Season Management Team Center page right above that which actually does list all events, but it is an extra click. You can add that by going back to Season Management, click on the ellipses next to the team again, and click “View Team Center.” Go to that page and copy the URL. Go back into your website team page, and in Edit Mode, click “Add Page Element” and then “Link.” Paste the URL at the top, but be sure to delete the https:// from the beginning. Label Title as “Team Center” or whatever you want. Click “Create this Page Element.” Now a link to the Team center shows up.
One last element I added to each team page on the website was an event aggregator. On the website page, in Edit Mode, click “Add Page Element” again and click “Event Aggregator.” Create a title like “Upcoming Events” and choose the Display format you want. I know Five Day view is popular, but I chose Upcoming Event List with 5 events. Here is the important part. Be sure to choose the correct tag above for this particular team. Then anything that appears in your master calendar for that team will also show up here on your team page. (You could also select other tags that might be relevant to the team, such as “open hockey” or “open skating.”) Click “Create the Page Element.” Feel free to add any other information you want for your team (photos, contact, etc). Replicate this process for each of your team pages.
After all of this, you will have all of the team pages done on your website. You will add games and practices over in Season Management, and they will show up in the SportsEngine app, and on the Team Center pages. Games will show up directly on the website pages you just created through the embed code. But like I said above, practices or other events will not show up and there is no master calendar where an association can see everything. Here is what I did to solve that problem (not ideal, but it works).
Go back into SportsEngine HQ. Click on Website-Website Settings. Click on iCal Feeds. Here you want to create an iCal feed for each of your teams. First how to create the feed: Click on “Add iCal Feed” then name the feed the same name as your team. Also be sure to select the relevant tag above. Only select the tag for your team (if you don’t see your team listed here, then you messed up when you created the team website page earlier and forgot to click Enable Events). Getting the correct Feed URL is where it gets a bit tricky – and there is probably (hopefully) a better way of doing it, but this is what worked for me. I first created one practice for each of the teams in Season Management. I then made myself a member of each of the teams (temporarily). Then I went into the app on my phone, went into a particular team, clicked on schedule and then hit the share button on the top right which allows you to “subscribe to team calendar.” I changed the option to the bottom one “Other Calendar” and clicked OK. This copies the iCal feed URL to your clipboard. Since this was on my phone and not a desktop computer, I had to mail this link to myself and then copy the link from my email to past into the Feed URL on the Add iCal Feed in SportsEngine. (I know, crazy). I did this for each of my teams – created iCal Feed, selected appropriate tags, got the iCal link from the app, and pasted it in.
Now, all of the events you add in Season Management, will show up in the Team Center, in the App, on each team website page, and in your master calendar on your SportsEngine website. Two other hassles I noticed. Anytime you add a game/event in Season Management, you need to click over to Settings (for that season) and click “Publish Latest Changes.” You also need to go back into the iCal feeds list and click “refresh” for each of the feeds. I am really hoping SE fixes these last two issues. But maybe someone else has a solution for this.
Anyway, this is what worked for me. Thanks to those here who posted tips to get to this point. Reply with anything I missed or ways to simplify this process!
Here is what we need from SportsEngine:
1. All events should show up when we use the embed code.
2. There should be an easier way to access the iCal code for the events/games created in Season Management. These events/games should automatically publish to the app/site without the extra step.
3. SportsEngine should create a way to put all of those iCal links into the master calendar, automatically tagged based on the team name. Different colors would be even better!
