SportsEngine Management - YOU MUST ADD THE FEATURES FROM LEAUGEATHLETICS OR YOU WILL LOSE MANY CUSTOMERS!!

[LaxNOVA]

It is unthinkable that you would sunset LA and NOT have the features it had.  Everyone is now looking at LeagueApps, Demospehere, SportsConnect, etc.

The inability to autoroster during player/coach signups is an absolute DEALBREAKER for me and I'm sure many others once they figure it out.

LA was not perfect, but you just needed to build a better mousetrap, not replace it.

I'd suggest you figure this out quick!

Edited January 25 by LaxNOVA

[freezinKT]

For us the dealbreakers were:

• No recurring events for practices. Can you imagine hand scheduling 500 individual practices 1 by 1? Awful.
• No conflict checking between practices and practices or practices and games - the only conflict checking was between games and games. LA had the perfect scheduler - the SportsConnect and Team Sideline sales guys both admitted it. Why HQ didn't implement that in a modern web look and feel when creating season management I do not know. EVERYONE else offers conflict checking.
• The bugginess in the app. I got more complaints as an admin from families and coaches about that app - where I never got complaints about SportsSignUp Play.
• The fact that there was a new bug every time there was a Season Management release and new features seemed to roll out at a glacial pace. For example they promised recurring events in April. They still didn't have them last time I checked in December. They promised a copy season feature would be here by December. I don't believe it's still here.
• The fact that Season Management didn't even have all the features of Sports Management. Coaches who had used HQ for other leagues hated Season Management. Within a few weeks of our season starting everyone used other apps, text messaging, and emailing lists to communicate.
• Lack of game and practice reminders. These were advertised, but never happened and my bug reports were ignored.
• Lack of a bracket for end-of-season tournament. Only the hand-wavy promise of future integration with Tourney Machine. Every other platform offers it built-in.
• The fact that Season Management messed up our standings randomly. Having to check a hundred games regularly to make sure the score hadn't zeroed out was a nightmare. Also coaches could only score games from the app, and everyone hated the app.
• No way to match registration data to season team. In LeagueAthletics you could flexibly match any registration to any season and correctly get the team assignment with the registration data. Do you know how hard it is to handle uniform purchases for hundreds of players without this feature?
• The fact that the help desk, which was truly great in summer, tanked in quality around September to the point that basic questions aren't answered.
• The way that NBCU seems to care only about advertising other NBCU products, and not providing a good expeirence in SportsEngine HQ.

[Rich Woytowich]

Here are the issues our league has seen, for context we are located in Central Florida and run a Fall Program from Aug - November and a Spring Program from Feb - June. We have three different levels Travel, Advanced Baseball and Rec with over 700 kids ages 4-18. We were forced to use this inferior product when they purchases SIPlay and Babe Ruth Cal Ripken sold their soul to them.

Deal Breakers:

• Background Checks are not compliant with local state and county mandates in Florida. We require an annual FLDE 1 background check which SE and Babe Ruth do not offer. We have utilized the county system to perform at a cost of 27.50 per volunteer (over 150) and then are told we must utilize SE to run the check thru their system (which is lesser standard then the FLDE 1 check) and pay their charge.
• Inability to lock registration for those that have outstanding invoices or payments due. We have about $4,000 outstanding in receivables from parents who had a decline on the billing payment plan, we have been told by SE there is no way to lock registration for those that owe funds (SIPlay had this feature) and have had to pull manual reports and cross reference the 700 plus registrations to make sure those owing funds pay
• Bulk Upload feature for Practices. We have over 60 plus teams across 6 fields which we schedule practices on as a league admin, we do not want managers to have the ability to change this or schedule their own as double booking has occurred and is confusing to the parents. We currently must enter over 1200 practices manually in the system instead of a bulk upload function similar to games (another SIPlay feature gone)
• Scheduling in app creates a duplicate field if the exact spelling and punctuation is not used. We end up having 43 Field 3s. 
• League Age calculation must be put in as a rule for Birth Date between this date and that date. SI Play auto calculated based on the leagues affiliation (Babe Ruth Cal Ripken is April 30 cutoff) we would have a drop down for registration season (League age 2024 etc.)
• Child Membership unable to merge by admin staff. Divorce parents create an account for John Smith using dads email and then mom does the same. Now have 2 players with same exact info but all data is separate based on which one was used.
• Admin unable to fix errors such as incorrect Birthdate or merge duplicate accounts for child (The duplicate button on membership does not work)
• Pitch Count tracking - While there is a Web Module stating there is one it is no longer active and does not work. We follow Pitch Smart guidelines in this park and have multiple players playing on 2 teams. Would be nice to have a way for a manager to input the pitch count for the child and a team manager (with team admin access) can see his rostered players previous counts and date. This way if John Doe plays for travel and rec team each manager can go into the app and click the rostered player and see his pitch count for both teams which would include Date, Count and required days of rest 
• Registration Withdrawals - Currently when a player request to withdraw from registration we have to refund the amount and then set the Entry to Inactive, however this does not update in registration reports unless we specifically filter by Entry Active. SE recommended we just delete the entry however we then lose the refund data
• Integration with Gamechanger, we currently use Gamechanger for our official scorekeeping (all star qualifications etc) however we have to manually create each team and roster. Competitors offer this integration (sportsconnect)
• League Standings are bugged as mentioned above where the scores would randomly drop one team to 0 runs and change the standings.
• No way to schedule single or double elimination tournaments in Sportsengine, why would you integrate with Tournymachine for us to pay another fee?
• EMail needs to have a way to change the sent from name so when a parent hits reply it can go to the league admin not the person who is sending the message.
• Product enhancements are based around Profit Generation for Sportsengine and not to improve the leagues experience. For example the push for live streaming.
• Way to turn off our opt out of the Add-ons at the cart in registration. For example the league registration insurance (not needed as our league refunds 100%) or the NCSI college recruiting sign up (this is a scam and waste of money based on personal experience and reviews online) 
• Public calendar option for scheduling. We have 3 different divisions and would like a Web Based Calendar which integrates each Fields schedule. Current work around is to have a dumy Admin account on each roster and subscribe to a Google Calendar thru ical, however when a manage schedules a practice in app it only shows Practice on google calendar (no location, field or even the team)
• Download of a master schedule in .csv or .xls form so we can double check conflicts etc (You can only do this for Games not practices)
• Umpire scheduling No way to integrate this into system. We use a program called referee scheduler which stated they can interface via API with sportsengine, however SE has turned API support off. This API interface would port games over to the referee scheduler and allow for games to be approved for umpires. Currently need to enter over 500+ games seperately.
• Sales Item reporting ( I would love to create a custom report for Sales Items by selecting which to include)
• A way to archive Sales Items so they dont appear in drop down menus as we utilize a new sales item each season so we can restrict registration
• WAIT LIST for registration - Currently when a sales item is sold out, we have to create a separate entry for a wait list. SI PLay would allow a way to automatically sign up for a wait list, and the league could then accept off the wait list and would add the charge (sale item) into the cart to pay for. Currently we need to send a separate invoice which is confusing to parents especially if there are addons in registration like uniform fee or volunteer opt out fees. SIPlay would then send an email to the parent their child was approved off the wait list and sale item added to their cart.
• Season Management no auto update, currently after entering the scores, a league admin must go to setting and publish changes, this should be auto updated as games are played each night and at various times on weekends, standings should update in real time.
• A way to add divorced parents to the childs profile from the league admin (we have had several divorced parents specifically ask this as the parents did not get along) We actually had a court order to allow both parents to access information, which SE has no way of doing on the league admin area
• Help Files need to be updated as there are several items in there that are no longer functional (IE Pitch Count tracker, API Integration etc)
• DIBS - Would like to see a little improvement on ways to mark completed (maybe have an app for admins) as login to website is not practical by admin for each shift.
• Late Fee for registration - Add a late fee to be applied to all registrations after a date of X, currently we are told to change the Sales Items cost, which does not help for record keeping. 
• Sense of urgency needed, while my experience has been most employees are based in a northern climate, the Southern states which play year round cant wait for these issues of "Next Season". We have been using Sportsengine for two years now and several of the "features" which we were told would be here next season have yet to come. Alot of these features were in SIPlay which is owned by SE and the coding is there. Most of the time I get a message response stating that they cant help, or a link to the help file (which no longer applies)

 

[Rich Woytowich]

On 1/25/2024 at 9:29 AM, freezinKT said:

For us the dealbreakers were:

• No way to match registration data to season team. In LeagueAthletics you could flexibly match any registration to any season and correctly get the team assignment with the registration data. Do you know how hard it is to handle uniform purchases for hundreds of players without this feature?

@freezinKT - I actually found the solution for this, as I spoke one to one with a tech support person. The trick is when you go to do rostering of your teams in Season management. Make sure you are filtering by the registration and not by membership. You then are able to go to that registration and create a saved report in which you can add a field under Seasonmanagement which includes the team name and division. While it is problamatic at times (not all players populate sometimes I go back and re-roster) it has worked 95% of the time. 

[Simon MacKenzie]

@freezinKT @LaxNOVA 
 

First off, a big thank you for sharing your feedback with us. It's your insights and experiences that help us grow and enhance your experience in SportsEngine. We've looked closely at the "dealbreakers" you've outlined, and here are several updates.

1. Auto-roster from Registration: We hear you loud and clear on this one. It's definitely on our roadmap, but will take time to implement and is not expected in the short term. In the meantime, while we're not fully automatic yet, our current rostering tool is pretty user-friendly. Rostering based on registration responses is straightforward. Check out this helpful guide for more details: Rostering Made Easy.

2. Recurring Events in Season Management: Great news here – we're super close to rolling this out! If your organization wants early access, you can sign up as a beta tester. Just let us know your organization ID, and we'll get you set up.

3. Conflict Checking Between Games and Events: This is currently in development and is shaping up nicely. The new feature will allow conflict checking across all seasons, games, and events for any location. We're aiming to release this by the end of Q1. Stay tuned!

4. Functionality from Sport Management to Season Management in Mobile: We're actively working on bringing more functionality to the mobile experience. This includes messaging teams in the app and viewing stats/standings. We're targeting a Q1 release for these features, though the exact timing is still being nailed down.

Regarding matching registration data with season information, you can pull in team name and division into your quick reg report. We are dealing with a bug causing issues with that data in certain instances. Rest assured, this is high on our priority list, and our team is working hard to fix it

Lastly, we would like to clarify that any advertisements are intended to operate independently of the functionality and service quality of SportsEngine HQ.

@Rich Woytowich - I wrote this up and saw that you just posted - I'm sharing it with the product team, and thank you for sharing that detailed feedback.

Once again, thank you for sharing detailed feedback about your experience with SportsEngine. We value your input and are committed to addressing these areas to provide a smoother, more efficient user experience. Our primary goal is to deliver a platform that prioritizes your experience, and your feedback is crucial as we strive for continual improvement.

Thanks for being part of our community!

[freezinKT]

1 hour ago, Rich Woytowich said:

@freezinKT - I actually found the solution for this, as I spoke one to one with a tech support person. The trick is when you go to do rostering of your teams in Season management. Make sure you are filtering by the registration and not by membership. You then are able to go to that registration and create a saved report in which you can add a field under Seasonmanagement which includes the team name and division. While it is problamatic at times (not all players populate sometimes I go back and re-roster) it has worked 95% of the time. 

I've used this functionality.

If you've ever re-rostered a player (like...they had a practice night conflict and got moved), it breaks.

If you roster a player to two teams, which we regularly do because we run multiple levels of play and there is no cross-season conflict checking so we have to roster players to multiple teams in one season, it breaks.

If you use the CSV import to create your teams, it breaks.

It's a nice thought, but it doesn't work.

[Felzani, Matthew]

With hopes of keeping content in one area for SE and others who might come along later, these are some items which caught me off guard:

• I spend 25% of my time saving the data, importing it into Google Sheets, and then being productive with it
• Inability to allow someone to register without paying. I know this one seems counter-intuitive, but when we were on LA I would say that 5-10% of our registrations were people who signed up and then we just hounded them for money over the course of the season. Certainly not perfect, but I'd rather that than a child not play
• The model where it seems like SE was built on some existing point-of-sale system and if it can't be done in a point-of-sale system it can't be done. I don't like how much work I need to do in order to scholarship a child, create a family discount, etc.
• Data fidelity - we still (?) seem to have people register as members and the data we see of theirs in Season Management is not consistent (at one point we had 15 of our 60 Basketball kids show up with a gender of 'Unspecified')
• In fairness I haven't played with the Auto Groups yet, but I feel like it's going to be really hard to send emails to multiple registrations. That it's going to end up with people getting multiple copies of the same email. With LA I could select all the Registrations I wanted to include - for example highlighting the past three years' worth of sports - and know that each person got one email. That it was a union of those folks and not sending one copy to each person per registration.
• I still don't understand how SE doesn't have an 'opt out' setting at the account level. I believe this violates the CAN-SPAM Act ... the answer to, "How do I opt out?," cannot be, "Delete your account."
• There appears to be lots of thinly-covered topics in the way of documentation, and virtually every link on our site was broken when we got it (e.g. - references to helpful material)
• Inability to add additional recipients when sending emails. For example, most of the messages I send also need to go to the Snack Shack Coordinator; however, if she doesn't have a kid registered then she doesn't get the email. It's a pain to have to remember to forward her stuff afterwards.
• Some fields I cannot modify like Grade? I need PreK ... asking people to register their 3-year-old as Kindergarten makes no sense to them and then I get questions.
• I don't see a way to do reporting across registrations, only within a registration

And each League is different, but of the items previously mentioned these are ones which have caused us the most grief:

• Inability to unregister a player once payment has been received
• Lack of an auto-incrementing age/grade
• The issues with the App
• Lack of recurring events; buggy-ness of conflict checking (we keep getting messages that events conflict, but then can't get at them to be able to delete them)
• Inability to have late fees kick in on a configured date
• The fact that everything now seems to be an up-sell ... that it seems the base features are just there to check a box and that add-ons are the only way to have a usable platform

And our background: we're a small league with about 350 registrations each year. We run four seasons with Basketball in the Winter, Soccer + Baseball in the Spring, Baseball in the Summer, Soccer + Flag in the Fall. Most of our sports recruit from the other sports so while we have 350 registrations annually there are probably only 200 unique athletes. We're all volunteers and each sport has a Director who usually did the team construction, messaging, etc., but with how Season Management works a lot of that has now fallen on me as the Web Admin because of how cumbersome, error-prone, and feature-deficient it is.

[freezinKT]

Quote

We're all volunteers and each sport has a Director who usually did the team construction, messaging, etc., but with how Season Management works a lot of that has now fallen on me as the Web Admin because of how cumbersome, error-prone, and feature-deficient it is.

Oh man, agree a thousand times. The webmaster job basically makes one registrar, vice president, and commissioner/director all in one because of Season Management. Some of that is just the pain of switching platforms, but so much of it is the feature-deficiency, error-prone-ness, and lack of meaningful documentation. All but my most technical board members would try to do something and give up because it was so painful. Rather than sitting around watching our league go to pieces because of the platform, I wasted hours upon hours fixing everything and eking out functionality.

Quote

The fact that everything now seems to be an up-sell ... that it seems the base features are just there to check a box and that add-ons are the only way to have a usable platform

And this. So much this. And it's been very clear from all the "what other products would you like us to integrate with?" quizzes on this very Feedback forum that there is no intent to actually build more functionality that would lead to a better experience into the base platform.

[Rich Woytowich]

22 hours ago, Simon MacKenzie said:

 

1. Recurring Events in Season Management: Great news here – we're super close to rolling this out! If your organization wants early access, you can sign up as a beta tester. Just let us know your organization ID, and we'll get you set up.

@Simon MacKenzie Can you add our org to that beta our ID is 184638 (I believe) the name is Fishhawk Youth Baseball. https://fishhawkbaseball.sportngin.com/

As far as the practice import and export, we started practices on Jan 24 as our games start Feb 14, which a Q1 release seems too late for Spring season here in the south.

[Rich Woytowich]

21 hours ago, freezinKT said:

I've used this functionality.

If you've ever re-rostered a player (like...they had a practice night conflict and got moved), it breaks.

If you roster a player to two teams, which we regularly do because we run multiple levels of play and there is no cross-season conflict checking so we have to roster players to multiple teams in one season, it breaks.

If you use the CSV import to create your teams, it breaks.

It's a nice thought, but it doesn't work.

We actually run seperate Seasons for our Travel, AB and Rec segments so we only allow 1 per team in that case (when making roster changes we unroster the  player (save and update the report) then go back and re-roster the player to the new team. Like I said 95% of the time it works, the other thing I noticed is having to clear the cache and cookies in the web browser to see these updates sometimes as well. I hope this helps. @freezinKT

 

[freezinKT]

29 minutes ago, Rich Woytowich said:

We actually run seperate Seasons for our Travel, AB and Rec segments so we only allow 1 per team in that case (when making roster changes we unroster the  player (save and update the report) then go back and re-roster the player to the new team. Like I said 95% of the time it works, the other thing I noticed is having to clear the cache and cookies in the web browser to see these updates sometimes as well. I hope this helps. @freezinKT

 

You must not have as complicated a conflict checking structure as we do. If we tried to run multiple seasons without cross-season conflict checking we'd end up with a weeknight rec game and a travel practice on the same lighted field on a random Tuesday or something. We have too many teams and not enough assigned fields.

[Rich Woytowich]

3 minutes ago, freezinKT said:

You must not have as complicated a conflict checking structure as we do. If we tried to run multiple seasons without cross-season conflict checking we'd end up with a weeknight rec game and a travel practice on the same lighted field on a random Tuesday or something. We have too many teams and not enough assigned fields.

Oh we do, out scheduler makes this offline which is why he wants the upload feature for practices and a master export feature to double check.

 

We also restrict our travel to Wed and Sun at our field due to use agreement as the county requires us to be a rec first program as we have 600 rec kids 100 AB kids and 100 Travel kids. So MTTFS are for REC (with AB/Travel able to take any open time (reason we need a public calendar for all leagues) and cancellations). WS are for AB and Travel. We do allow our travel and AB programs to utilize our cages (which we dont schedule) after games have started. 

[Felzani, Matthew]

On 1/31/2024 at 8:45 PM, Felzani, Matthew said:

I spend 25% of my time saving the data, importing it into Google Sheets, and then being productive with it

I wanted to circle back on this one just to try to address the, "Why?" In SE I like that I can have one Registration for everyone, and then attach the fee based on the Division chosen by the registrant - in this way SE has an edge over LA because in LA I would have needed separate Registrations to charge separate fees. However, one thing I didn't see coming with a commingled athlete population is that I lost the ability to easily see how many kids were registered for my, "Boys' 3G/4G Basketball" division, or my "Girls' 1G/2G Basketball" division. Now, in order to do that, I need to save the data locally and pull it into a pivot table.

I don't know if this is a feature which has been suggested before, but it would be great to have a 'Group By' option on the Report. It would require some validation logic since the 'Group By' would render the 'Fields' and 'Sort' parts of the report moot (and vice versa), but here's what I put together as a mock-up using MS Paint:

[freezinKT]

11 hours ago, Felzani, Matthew said:

I wanted to circle back on this one just to try to address the, "Why?" In SE I like that I can have one Registration for everyone, and then attach the fee based on the Division chosen by the registrant - in this way SE has an edge over LA because in LA I would have needed separate Registrations to charge separate fees. However, one thing I didn't see coming with a commingled athlete population is that I lost the ability to easily see how many kids were registered for my, "Boys' 3G/4G Basketball" division, or my "Girls' 1G/2G Basketball" division. Now, in order to do that, I need to save the data locally and pull it into a pivot table.

I don't know if this is a feature which has been suggested before, but it would be great to have a 'Group By' option on the Report. It would require some validation logic since the 'Group By' would render the 'Fields' and 'Sort' parts of the report moot (and vice versa), but here's what I put together as a mock-up using MS Paint:

You actually don't need to save the data and use a pivot table. The filtering logic in HQ registration is superb, one of the few things they do well. Create saved reports filtering on each of your divisions and a status of Active, and you'll get current registrations. I had a ton of saved reports when I was using HQ for registration.

[Felzani, Matthew]

9 hours ago, freezinKT said:

You actually don't need to save the data and use a pivot table. The filtering logic in HQ registration is superb, one of the few things they do well. Create saved reports filtering on each of your divisions and a status of Active, and you'll get current registrations. I had a ton of saved reports when I was using HQ for registration.

Right but then I need to have and run nine reports, right? Most of our seasons have a PreK, 1G/2G, 3G/4G/ 5G/6G for Girls and then the same for Boys so that would be 9 reports (PreK isn't separated by gender) and then I'd need to view the nine to collect the data. With a 'Group By' option I'd get it in one shot.

[freezinKT]

11 hours ago, Felzani, Matthew said:

Right but then I need to have and run nine reports, right? Most of our seasons have a PreK, 1G/2G, 3G/4G/ 5G/6G for Girls and then the same for Boys so that would be 9 reports (PreK isn't separated by gender) and then I'd need to view the nine to collect the data. With a 'Group By' option I'd get it in one shot.

Ah. What about sorting by division name, assuming that's in your registration?

[Felzani, Matthew]

4 minutes ago, freezinKT said:

Ah. What about sorting by division name, assuming that's in your registration?

Right, but I need counts. If you get a second have a look at the screenshot I mocked up. I mean, I could sort by Division but that doesn't tell me how many kids are in that Division. Previously on LA we had a separate Registration per Division because it was a different fee for each so anytime I looked at the main Registration page it told me the counts.

This wasn't my site, but something I grabbed off the Internet to use as an illustration of what a 'Group By' feature would get you back that was sort-of there in LA:

[freezinKT]

4 hours ago, Felzani, Matthew said:

Right, but I need counts. If you get a second have a look at the screenshot I mocked up. I mean, I could sort by Division but that doesn't tell me how many kids are in that Division. Previously on LA we had a separate Registration per Division because it was a different fee for each so anytime I looked at the main Registration page it told me the counts.

This wasn't my site, but something I grabbed off the Internet to use as an illustration of what a 'Group By' feature would get you back that was sort-of there in LA:

There *is* a competitor who has counts by division, but their registration system otherwise is not as nice. They have a more obvious connection between Seasons, Registration Programs, and Divisions which helps some things and makes other things harder.

[Felzani, Matthew]

21 hours ago, freezinKT said:

There *is* a competitor who has counts by division, but their registration system otherwise is not as nice. They have a more obvious connection between Seasons, Registration Programs, and Divisions which helps some things and makes other things harder.

Yup, and no two platforms are exactly the same for sure. I was just trying to offer an item that has caused some heartache and might be cool to have that 'Group By' design I mocked up as part of the platform. I imagine a lot of LA alumni are in the same boat where getting counts takes a few extra steps.

[riseatl]

On 1/31/2024 at 8:45 PM, Felzani, Matthew said:

With hopes of keeping content in one area for SE and others who might come along later, these are some items which caught me off guard:

• I spend 25% of my time saving the data, importing it into Google Sheets, and then being productive with it
• Inability to allow someone to register without paying. I know this one seems counter-intuitive, but when we were on LA I would say that 5-10% of our registrations were people who signed up and then we just hounded them for money over the course of the season. Certainly not perfect, but I'd rather that than a child not play
• The model where it seems like SE was built on some existing point-of-sale system and if it can't be done in a point-of-sale system it can't be done. I don't like how much work I need to do in order to scholarship a child, create a family discount, etc.
• Data fidelity - we still (?) seem to have people register as members and the data we see of theirs in Season Management is not consistent (at one point we had 15 of our 60 Basketball kids show up with a gender of 'Unspecified')
• In fairness I haven't played with the Auto Groups yet, but I feel like it's going to be really hard to send emails to multiple registrations. That it's going to end up with people getting multiple copies of the same email. With LA I could select all the Registrations I wanted to include - for example highlighting the past three years' worth of sports - and know that each person got one email. That it was a union of those folks and not sending one copy to each person per registration.
• I still don't understand how SE doesn't have an 'opt out' setting at the account level. I believe this violates the CAN-SPAM Act ... the answer to, "How do I opt out?," cannot be, "Delete your account."
• There appears to be lots of thinly-covered topics in the way of documentation, and virtually every link on our site was broken when we got it (e.g. - references to helpful material)
• Inability to add additional recipients when sending emails. For example, most of the messages I send also need to go to the Snack Shack Coordinator; however, if she doesn't have a kid registered then she doesn't get the email. It's a pain to have to remember to forward her stuff afterwards.
• Some fields I cannot modify like Grade? I need PreK ... asking people to register their 3-year-old as Kindergarten makes no sense to them and then I get questions.
• I don't see a way to do reporting across registrations, only within a registration

And each League is different, but of the items previously mentioned these are ones which have caused us the most grief:

• Inability to unregister a player once payment has been received
• Lack of an auto-incrementing age/grade
• The issues with the App
• Lack of recurring events; buggy-ness of conflict checking (we keep getting messages that events conflict, but then can't get at them to be able to delete them)
• Inability to have late fees kick in on a configured date
• The fact that everything now seems to be an up-sell ... that it seems the base features are just there to check a box and that add-ons are the only way to have a usable platform

And our background: we're a small league with about 350 registrations each year. We run four seasons with Basketball in the Winter, Soccer + Baseball in the Spring, Baseball in the Summer, Soccer + Flag in the Fall. Most of our sports recruit from the other sports so while we have 350 registrations annually there are probably only 200 unique athletes. We're all volunteers and each sport has a Director who usually did the team construction, messaging, etc., but with how Season Management works a lot of that has now fallen on me as the Web Admin because of how cumbersome, error-prone, and feature-deficient it is.

Not sure if the information is still useful, but have you tried creating a storeitem as a zero fee?  we have a CashApp option where folks can complete registration and it "wont ask for payment". Then they can zelle or cashapp the payment at a later date.  Like I said it works for us and if you want I can send screen shots. Hope it helps

[Felzani, Matthew]

On 2/19/2024 at 2:21 PM, riseatl said:

Not sure if the information is still useful, but have you tried creating a storeitem as a zero fee?  we have a CashApp option where folks can complete registration and it "wont ask for payment". Then they can zelle or cashapp the payment at a later date.  Like I said it works for us and if you want I can send screen shots. Hope it helps

Right now we have a structure where you register for the sport and then the fee gets set based on the Division, and the Division is automatically set based on the Grade you choose (i.e. - I hide any Division which doesn't match the Grade chosen), so I can't quite envision how this would work? I could see if we went all-or-nothing where everyone did cashapp, but not on a case-by-case basis.

Or do you prompt the user if they want to pay offline and then have two different versions of your Division Question? One with sale items attached and then one without? Though that feels like it would make things harder data side since those would be two separate fields in the Registration data.

I'd be interested to hear more, but don't stress over it. Unfortunately at this point we've resolved we'll soon be moving to a new platform.

[riseatl]

On 2/25/2024 at 11:43 AM, Felzani, Matthew said:

Right now we have a structure where you register for the sport and then the fee gets set based on the Division, and the Division is automatically set based on the Grade you choose (i.e. - I hide any Division which doesn't match the Grade chosen), so I can't quite envision how this would work? I could see if we went all-or-nothing where everyone did cashapp, but not on a case-by-case basis.

Or do you prompt the user if they want to pay offline and then have two different versions of your Division Question? One with sale items attached and then one without? Though that feels like it would make things harder data side since those would be two separate fields in the Registration data.

I'd be interested to hear more, but don't stress over it. Unfortunately at this point we've resolved we'll soon be moving to a new platform.

This is how I set ours up, Yours may be a little more intricate.  Everyone pretty much gets a card option and a cashapp option, either one will allow registration to complete without issue.  The cashapp version will register as a "payment" and will complete registration normally.  Yea I don't blame you Sports Engine really screwed the pooch, shows what happens when a company gets too big they tend to forget how they got there.

[Felzani, Matthew]

23 hours ago, riseatl said:

This is how I set ours up, Yours may be a little more intricate.

I'm always happy to take advice and suggestions ... thanks for circling back with the additional notes! Below is how we attach our sale items. On one of the upstream screens the user specifies the kid's grade, and based on that I restrict which option shows up in the Division widget:

Each Division prices differently and I think that might be where we're different. To align how you have yours I think I'd need a separate question for the Division (since that's the most important piece of data in my Registration) and then a Radio list like above where I add a 5th entry of "Pay Offline". Thus the entry field above then becomes a tracker of "how-they-paid-and-coincidentally-their-Division-if-they-pay-via-card" and each person would see two options of "Pay Offline" and the grade-specific Division.

I've often thought that I don't really need the Division at all because the Division is just a function of the grade (e.g. - a 5th Grader will always be in the "Majors (5G/6G)" Division), but having it does make it more straightforward for rolling up the data and sorting during Team creation. If I could find a way to default the value conditionally then I could suppress it all together, and pretty easily / cleanly move to what you are suggesting and what I talked about above with a 5-option field.

Thanks again for sharing.