Season Management Team Website Pages and Master Calendar Workaround

[JustinPatchin]

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!

[freezinKT]

So helpful to have someone type all this out! When I did something very similar, I had to cobble it together via multiple other forum posts. They should pin this post for now!

I would add a few requests:

1. Team pages should be added to the page automatically under a specialized page if set to anything but inactive, with season and division organizing them (we run 3 concurrent seasons at different levels with multiple divisions).

2. The page shouldn’t be an embedded code thing. It should be a real page styled to match the look and feel of your site not the look and feel of Season Management and TeamCenter.

3. The above would solve a problem we are having where we have to change team names (as our teams vote on their own names after rosters are set) in multiple places - season management and the public page.

We really shouldn’t have to be adding iCal feeds at all - many sports league platforms offer a master calendar built in and it’s clear HQ could add this functionality because they have all the pieces.

[JustinPatchin]

22 hours ago, freezinKT said:

So helpful to have someone type all this out! When I did something very similar, I had to cobble it together via multiple other forum posts. They should pin this post for now!

I would add a few requests:

1. Team pages should be added to the page automatically under a specialized page if set to anything but inactive, with season and division organizing them (we run 3 concurrent seasons at different levels with multiple divisions).

2. The page shouldn’t be an embedded code thing. It should be a real page styled to match the look and feel of your site not the look and feel of Season Management and TeamCenter.

3. The above would solve a problem we are having where we have to change team names (as our teams vote on their own names after rosters are set) in multiple places - season management and the public page.

We really shouldn’t have to be adding iCal feeds at all - many sports league platforms offer a master calendar built in and it’s clear HQ could add this functionality because they have all the pieces.

 

All great suggestions! From my perspective it wouldn't take much effort to not only make Season Management usable, but to make it the industry standard. Let's see it SportsEngine! 

[HPBAadmin]

2 hours ago, JustinPatchin said:

 

All great suggestions! From my perspective it wouldn't take much effort to not only make Season Management usable, but to make it the industry standard. Let's see it SportsEngine! 

Couldn't agree more!!

[KatieDeutschNelson]

Wow! That was quite a lot to get to the workaround. I am wondering if you'd be able to share the link to your site so we can take a look at how you set up the team pages and how your calendars look. Right now I am having issues getting "events" to show up in the Microsite Calendar, and it looks like based on what you discovered it's an issue that SE needs to fix. 

[JustinPatchin]

On 9/19/2023 at 9:44 PM, KatieDeutschNelson said:

Wow! That was quite a lot to get to the workaround. I am wondering if you'd be able to share the link to your site so we can take a look at how you set up the team pages and how your calendars look. Right now I am having issues getting "events" to show up in the Microsite Calendar, and it looks like based on what you discovered it's an issue that SE needs to fix. 

Here's our site: https://www.altoonahockey.com/. Events don't show up on the microsite (only games). When I spoke to SE they said they are working on seeing if adding events will work. Events and games do show up in the team center (and on the app), which is why I included a link to the team center on each team page on our website.

[freezinKT]

7 minutes ago, JustinPatchin said:

Here's our site: https://www.altoonahockey.com/. Events don't show up on the microsite (only games). When I spoke to SE they said they are working on seeing if adding events will work. Events and games do show up in the team center (and on the app), which is why I included a link to the team center on each team page on our website.

I don't understand the bolded - did they explain further? Unless they literally coded themselves into a box, it's just writing more web code to make adding events show up on the microsite.

If they can't do that, then they need to start over. They've done something wrong and made a system that isn't what users need.

[JustinPatchin]

9 minutes ago, freezinKT said:

I don't understand the bolded - did they explain further? Unless they literally coded themselves into a box, it's just writing more web code to make adding events show up on the microsite.

If they can't do that, then they need to start over. They've done something wrong and made a system that isn't what users need.

Yeah I was a little suspicious about the statement as well. The woman I spoke to acknowledged the issue and said they were working on it/testing different options. I think she might have been just trying to placate me in the moment.

[freezinKT]

1 minute ago, JustinPatchin said:

Yeah I was a little suspicious about the statement as well. The woman I spoke to acknowledged the issue and said they were working on it/testing different options. I think she might have been just trying to placate me in the moment.

Since our page setup is nearly identical to what you described (except I got the calendar feed links a slightly different way since we have 40 of them) and it's proven absolutely clutch already, I wish they'd just give me a different way to show the results and standings. If I had that, I would remove the microsite entirely. Ours is almost garbage looking with ghost games that I can't delete from our Season due to
https://community.sportsengine.com/topic/922-anyone-else-finding-scheduling-buggy/. I have access to the API and perhaps I can use that to make a standings/scores page.

[JustinPatchin]

1 hour ago, freezinKT said:

Since our page setup is nearly identical to what you described (except I got the calendar feed links a slightly different way since we have 40 of them) and it's proven absolutely clutch already, I wish they'd just give me a different way to show the results and standings. If I had that, I would remove the microsite entirely. Ours is almost garbage looking with ghost games that I can't delete from our Season due to
https://community.sportsengine.com/topic/922-anyone-else-finding-scheduling-buggy/. I have access to the API and perhaps I can use that to make a standings/scores page.

Our teams don't play each other within the system so the standings aren't important to us. The main interest for us was a master calendar so that we know who will be on our sheet of ice at any given time. Even though I don't like how the SE changes impact our SE website, most people will probably just use the app, which seems to work fine. Thankfully we haven't had the buggy game issues you described in your post (at least not yet...). That would truly be maddening.

[Jon Kuznicki]

I really appreciate all of this and agree with all of the suggested improvements.  There is one other thing that drives me crazy.  The master calendar view shows the address of the location.  For the purposes of our organization, the field / location name is more meaningful to the people using the calendar.

[freezinKT]

21 minutes ago, Jon Kuznicki said:

I really appreciate all of this and agree with all of the suggested improvements.  There is one other thing that drives me crazy.  The master calendar view shows the address of the location.  For the purposes of our organization, the field / location name is more meaningful to the people using the calendar.

YES! League Athletics had both. I have meant to play around with adding the location name to the address, but I haven't checked yet if that will mess up Map integration. Plus it will make the app redundant.

[JustinPatchin]

It looks like they just added events to the embedded mini site! It used to be just games. A step in the right direction.

 

[rpd_md]

I have attempted to copy the calendar into the ical feed from the app from one of my teams.  It created the link, I copied into ical (using the team tag).  My issue is, the link that is created by the app is the same for all teams and shows all teams on the calendar - I am not sure what I am doing wrong!!!! 

[freezinKT]

11 minutes ago, rpd_md said:

I have attempted to copy the calendar into the ical feed from the app from one of my teams.  It created the link, I copied into ical (using the team tag).  My issue is, the link that is created by the app is the same for all teams and shows all teams on the calendar - I am not sure what I am doing wrong!!!! 

Microsite Now Is Master Calendar

As an important note, the microsite now does act as a master calendar, so you don't strictly need to do the calendar part if you don't want to. I know it's ugly and not a match for the rest of anyone's site, so I can see why you may still want to.

Possible Issue: Did Not Grab Right Feed

Your iCal feed for a team should look like:

http://ical.sportsengine.com/v3/calendar/ical?team_ids=<TEAM ID FROM TEAMCENTER>

That TeamCenter team ID is a whole long string. 7 hexidecimal characters (numbers 0-9 and letters a-f), a dash, 4 hexidecimal characters, a dash, 4 hexidecimal characters, a dash, 4 hexidecimal characters, a dash, 12 hexidecimal characters. So something like:

0000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

I manually grabbed it from the end of my TeamCenters - each and every one. Each feed will have a different team ID.

Possible Issue: Used All Tags

When you copy an iCal feed, you need to set the tag to JUST the page for that team. From the instructions:
 

Quote

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.

If you didn't do that initially, in edit mode on your team page click the "Options" tab and then the "Edit Page Details" link. In the modal dialog that pops up click "Enable Events."

Now, when you go to add the iCal feed (or edit the iCal feed you added), you have to click "Show Tag Menu." Unselect ALL tags except the team matching that feed. Save. In the iCal feeds page click "Refresh." That will remove the feed from all your other teams (otherwise if you don't click refresh it will happen after a few minutes to hours. There's substantial lag on how often HQ pulls from the iCal feeds - drives my scheduler and umpire coordinator CRAZY).

[HIJK25]

This is so helpful!! Thank you! 

FYI, make sure when you set up your iCal feed on our website that you select the right tags. It took me a couple days to figure out why one of my team pages was showing practices for a second team... If this is happening to you, here is the fix: 

1) In HQ, go to Website --> Website Settings

2) click on iCal Feeds

3) Click on "edit" next to each iCal feed to edit the tags associated with that iCal feed. 

4) Click "refresh" next to the iCal feed you edited 

 

This will automatically change the tags of any event pulling from the iCal feed. 

[southsideandy]

This is resurrecting an older solution, so thank you, because it is great, and it works really well...

But, I have one issue I'm not code-savvy enough to figure out. We are a house league where our teams play each other, and the iCal feeds end up duplicating every game in the calendar. Given that I just voluteered about four hours time to even get this far, I'm not willing to even call that a small victory. Anyway, anybody have any idea how to get "T-Ball Yankees vs. T-Ball White Sox" for example, to come up only ONCE on the date/time/location in the calendar using iCal?

Or is this a fruitless, wasted effort on my part and I should just look for another alternative?

Our field maintenance, concessions and umpire assignors all need ONE master schedule on the homepage that shows the next five days' worth of games by division, locations and times of all games. This Season Managment tool so far completely sucks for this, and is actually a BACKWARD move in our opinion from Sport Management or whatever it was that we used (as a first-time client) last season.