Confused on how to add new season/team page to the website with Season Management

[rpd_md]

I have created a new season in the Season Management section of SEHQ.  I have populated it with divisions (I used USAV age groups) and our team names.  We don't have rosters, the season will not start for several months, but I want to get a head start on this as I am a volunteer with a full time job and two kids.

Now - when I go to our "Teams" (club) page and click Edit - Admin - Seasons - Create a New Season, the page jumps over to the SEHQ Season Management.  There I see the new season that I created within SEHQ, but how do I translate that to the web page for the teams?  Do I just create a regular new blank page on the website (because trying to create a club or team page bounces me back to SEHQ also) and use the embedded microsites???  The "help" pages aren't helping, as they seem old (they say "updated over one week ago" - does this mean prior to Season Management?).  

Also - do the events/games added to the schedule in Season Management end up on the website calendar somehow?? (from the testing I have attempted it does not appear to do this).  

I am upset that SE has not clearly addressed how Season management translates over to the website!!!  Thanks for any assistance.

[fba]

same exact issue... 

[freezinKT]

There is a season microsite that does part of what you are talking about, but doesn’t seem to fully replace the old system’s team pages. Check out “Settings” under your season for information on how to embed the microsite.

A master calendar option to add all games and events to is a feature request I have seen several times. It’s our league’s number one request for sure.

[bmurn]

same issue here.. 

[Eric Bischof]

I'm using Season Management as well and from what I can tell, there's no easy way around it--you need to manually create a page for the season/division/team and then embed the particular URL of the microsite that you want and link to Team Center. I followed the instructions via this video: Season Sites Short (wistia.com)

This was very time consuming to set this up and I wish there was a better way. 

Also, whenever a new score is posted for a game, the microsite "publish" button needs to be clicked from the season's Setting page to republish the info on the site. This can only be done by an admin. I wish they would change this approach as well and just auto-publish. 

[freezinKT]

3 hours ago, Eric Bischof said:

I'm using Season Management as well and from what I can tell, there's no easy way around it--you need to manually create a page for the season/division/team and then embed the particular URL of the microsite that you want and link to Team Center. I followed the instructions via this video: Season Sites Short (wistia.com)

This was very time consuming to set this up and I wish there was a better way. 

Also, whenever a new score is posted for a game, the microsite "publish" button needs to be clicked from the season's Setting page to republish the info on the site. This can only be done by an admin. I wish they would change this approach as well and just auto-publish. 

Absolutely yes on needing auto-publish. 100%.

Also an automated way to include public teams on the site.

[freezinKT]

On 8/7/2023 at 5:25 PM, Eric Bischof said:

I'm using Season Management as well and from what I can tell, there's no easy way around it--you need to manually create a page for the season/division/team and then embed the particular URL of the microsite that you want and link to Team Center. I followed the instructions via this video: Season Sites Short (wistia.com)

This was very time consuming to set this up and I wish there was a better way. 

Also, whenever a new score is posted for a game, the microsite "publish" button needs to be clicked from the season's Setting page to republish the info on the site. This can only be done by an admin. I wish they would change this approach as well and just auto-publish. 

I just put about 1/4 of our teams on our site following this suggestion (thanks for adding it, Eric). It was pretty time intensive, and I'm not even half way. But it's going to have to be better than nothing.

[Michael Blair]

I've gone around and around with the Sports Engine help desk on this issue. Bottom line is that they intentionally broke the integration between SE HQ and the Website with the introduction of Season Management. There is NO WAY to automate the integration of teams in SE HQ with the website anymore. It gets worse. If you used the website calendar function previously to schedule events for your club/program and teams, you will need to start using Season Management or the SE App AND work them ONE SINGLE team at a time. No more scheduling a club-wide event by tagging each of the teams. Now we have to create these individually for each team. My club has 10 teams. The larger clubs in our region have 30, 40, or 50+ teams. Guess they will be hiring someone to manage the team pages and event calendars. Additionally, Season Management broke the Smart Groups that used to be generated using the Sports Management Rostering function. The help desk excitedly told me (quote) "Instead, you can create those groups manually!" Way to go SportsEngine. You took away the features that were the most critical to those of us who volunteer to create team sites and communicate with our members. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by Michael Blair

[freezinKT]

10 hours ago, Michael Blair said:

I've gone around and around with the Sports Engine help desk on this issue. Bottom line is that they intentionally broke the integration between SE HQ and the Website with the introduction of Season Management. There is NO WAY to automate the integration of teams in SE HQ with the website anymore. It gets worse. If you used the website calendar function previously to schedule events for your club/program and teams, you will need to start using Season Management or the SE App AND work them ONE SINGLE team at a time. No more scheduling a club-wide event by tagging each of the teams. Now we have to create these individually for each team. My club has 10 teams. The larger clubs in our region have 30, 40, or 50+ teams. Guess they will be hiring someone to manage the team pages and event calendars. Additionally, Season Management broke the Smart Groups that used to be generated using the Sports Management Rostering function. The help desk excitedly told me (quote) "Instead, you can create those groups manually!" Way to go SportsEngine. You took away the features that were the most critical to those of us who volunteer to create team sites and communicate with our members. 

Yes, this has to be fixed. We are one of those 30-40 team leagues. We come from League Athletics. Sports Engine HQ sold us on the old system but forced us onto the new.

[bmurn]

Related to the publishing of information to the website calendar I am using a work around now.  I have created a dummy sportsengine account and invited it to be on the staff of the teams that I want to publish on the calendar.  I then generate the ical link for that dummy account and add it to the website calendar.  There are still issues since you cannot tag different teams with different tags (unless you create multiple dummy accounts) and you still can't adjust the tags to be for the current season.  But, this at least got the information into the calendar so people can see practices and games without a sportsengine account.

[freezinKT]

7 hours ago, bmurn said:

Related to the publishing of information to the website calendar I am using a work around now.  I have created a dummy sportsengine account and invited it to be on the staff of the teams that I want to publish on the calendar.  I then generate the ical link for that dummy account and add it to the website calendar.  There are still issues since you cannot tag different teams with different tags (unless you create multiple dummy accounts) and you still can't adjust the tags to be for the current season.  But, this at least got the information into the calendar so people can see practices and games without a sportsengine account.

Oh, that's definitely a start of a workaround! In the general thread someone posted the different iCal links they were trying - wonder if you can just extrapolate them from the ID?

[freezinKT]

9 hours ago, bmurn said:

Related to the publishing of information to the website calendar I am using a work around now.  I have created a dummy sportsengine account and invited it to be on the staff of the teams that I want to publish on the calendar.  I then generate the ical link for that dummy account and add it to the website calendar.  There are still issues since you cannot tag different teams with different tags (unless you create multiple dummy accounts) and you still can't adjust the tags to be for the current season.  But, this at least got the information into the calendar so people can see practices and games without a sportsengine account.

OK, utilizing this tip above and also the below comment in the General forum about different iCal feeds, I finally got a working master calendar for a Season Management site.

I had already created individual pages for our teams on the public site by hand. I set each of them to have an events aggregator as an option so they would show up in the tags menu. Then in the iCal Feeds part of Website Tools I set up, painstakingly, one by one, the iCal fee for each team FROM HQ ITSELF. I used the first link option in the comment above as a base. For the team ID I found each by looking at the URL of each team's TeamCenter. That provided the ID. Each individual iCal Feed was tagged to the appropriate team page. Then I could add an individual events aggregator on each team's page containing a schedule that actually shows both practices AND games (as opposed to the Team Site that only shows games). Plus now our default calendar has every single team appropriately tagged with all their events, giving us a master calendar that everyone can see.

It was about an hour of work for between 30 and 40 teams, plus all the time to read everyone's tips and ideas here.

[calebg]

Just ran into the same problem. Spent hours trying to understand why the Club setup was missing and why I couldn't select my newest season for my club's teams pages. To be frank, this lowered the value of the product for me exponentially. Will most likely be transitioning to another platform.

 

[stago]

Really could they make this more difficult.  A majority of the people using this site are volunteers with minimal website experience.  I find it confusing and tedious and I am in the computer industry, but not related to web site development.  I agree with calebg, might need to look elsewhere.  If your are going to force a new process make sure it is ready or allow us to use the old way until it is ready. ugh!

[KatieDeutschNelson]

On 8/22/2023 at 9:17 PM, freezinKT said:

OK, utilizing this tip above and also the below comment in the General forum about different iCal feeds, I finally got a working master calendar for a Season Management site.

I had already created individual pages for our teams on the public site by hand. I set each of them to have an events aggregator as an option so they would show up in the tags menu. Then in the iCal Feeds part of Website Tools I set up, painstakingly, one by one, the iCal fee for each team FROM HQ ITSELF. I used the first link option in the comment above as a base. For the team ID I found each by looking at the URL of each team's TeamCenter. That provided the ID. Each individual iCal Feed was tagged to the appropriate team page. Then I could add an individual events aggregator on each team's page containing a schedule that actually shows both practices AND games (as opposed to the Team Site that only shows games). Plus now our default calendar has every single team appropriately tagged with all their events, giving us a master calendar that everyone can see.

It was about an hour of work for between 30 and 40 teams, plus all the time to read everyone's tips and ideas here.

What specifically did you use as the iCal feed URL from HQ? I.e. - where did you pull the URL from? I see how to set these iCal feeds up, but when I try and put them into the events aggregator getting an error message. 

[freezinKT]

52 minutes ago, KatieDeutschNelson said:

What specifically did you use as the iCal feed URL from HQ? I.e. - where did you pull the URL from? I see how to set these iCal feeds up, but when I try and put them into the events aggregator getting an error message. 

This was painstaking, but I pulled up every team’s TeamCenter from the Season Management -> Teams view. The end of that URL is the team ID. Then I filled that in at the end of 

http://ical.sportsengine.com/v3/calendar/ical?team_ids=

So you do that for each team, one by one. And that gives you their individual iCal feed.

[KatieDeutschNelson]

@freezinKT - thank you! Can you validate these are the correct instructions? 

1- creating the iCal URL - here is an example of one of mine - http://ical.sportsengine.com/v3/calendar/ical?team_ids=64a4bc16a999c814a19f9f2b

Question - are your iCal feeds valid if you click on them alone? I'm getting an error.

2- going into HQ > website settings, and adding an iCal feed, making sure it's tagged with the appropriate team.

3- on individual team pages, adding an event aggregator. 

4- edit the event aggregator and add an iCal feed.

When I follow these steps above, it tells me the iCal URL is invalid, so I must have an error in the code. Perhaps they changed the code? 

[freezinKT]

21 minutes ago, KatieDeutschNelson said:

@freezinKT - thank you! Can you validate these are the correct instructions? 

1- creating the iCal URL - here is an example of one of mine - http://ical.sportsengine.com/v3/calendar/ical?team_ids=64a4bc16a999c814a19f9f2b

Question - are your iCal feeds valid if you click on them alone? I'm getting an error.

2- going into HQ > website settings, and adding an iCal feed, making sure it's tagged with the appropriate team.

3- on individual team pages, adding an event aggregator. 

4- edit the event aggregator and add an iCal feed.

When I follow these steps above, it tells me the iCal URL is invalid, so I must have an error in the code. Perhaps they changed the code? 

All my team IDs have dashes in them. They are much longer than that. Are you sure you grabbed everything after ‘https://teams.sportngin.com/teams/’ exactly as written in the TeamCenter URL? When I click a valid feed it tries to add it to my calendar (phone or desktop email client).

Also for each event aggregator I don’t have to add the feed. Since it is tagged to that page and the page has events enabled in the page options, it just shows up.

Edited October 4, 2023 by freezinKT

[freezinKT]

More information plus another way of getting feed URLs can be found in this extensive guide 

 

[Hank]

This is the dumbest setup I've ever seen. Seriously, why is this not automated?
Our organization used to use League Lineup and we're seriously considering going back.
It's $100 and everything is automated.
Need to make a new season? You literally say "New Season", select Yes to copying all the old teams/divisions over and voila! The website is auto updated with the new season. No copying code/snippets, or any other BS.
I cannot get over how convoluted this software is. It's 2024, this should be click and point, plug and play. You shouldn't have to be Bill Gates to make a new season and then make sure the UI/website reflects these changes.
Get your act together SportsEngine. I'm not sure we're going to deal with this trash for more than one season. Absolutely ridiculous.

[freezinKT]

HQ, the video you just popped up on my administrative page, along with links like this telling me how I can save just a tiny fraction of the headache above by using a built-in template that I have to copy 40 times (if 40 teams) to spin up a new season is...not the solution. You guys do realize that, right?

Advertising that I can do a lot of manual work to do what League Athletics gave me for free feels like a slap in the face, not a good thing.

[HPBAadmin]

Sports Engine, the new Team Pages is a poor attempt at making Season Management work through a league or organization's website.  We have just over 80 teams we have to manage and communicate to.  Our website, through League Athletics, allowed us to do this seamlessly when creating a new season.  Now, I have to fumble through creating a season without games mysteriously disappearing only to then have to create 80 webpages to embed an iframe in.  I hope we can get some updates and plan of intent around how these things are being improved in the near future.

[LBYSO]

Maddening.  I see some folks saying they've done a lot of manual workarounds.  We've got 92 teams and like a lot of you, we're volunteers and many of us are on computers all day at work so it's not like we're tech newbs.  Maybe it will get better but this is probably the push that gets us off SE.  The old platform had some issues and bugs to be sure.  But the microsites thing is a disaster.  Support is slooooooow, probably overwhelmed with support tickets, and seemingly unable to offer much help beyond regurgitating what's already in the online help.  Ugh!

[Lake County Challengers]

I concur. I am having lots of trouble just adding a page as a team page. I have spent hours trying to figure it out. Sports Engine was a great product. I had a good run. I can waste much more time on simple stuff. 

[RBBaseball]

Found a bit of a work around that might not work for everyone but worked for our league. If you use the previous years season you can just delete all the players from each team and re-roster. Obviously not ideal but will get you through season and allow time for evaluating other solutions that dont force you to have to embed code as, you know, none of us are programmers.

Edited April 14 by RBBaseball