Best way to handle waitlists?

[MSchroed]

I was just wondering how others have handled waitlists? We have 9 divisions. In league athletics we had one registration per division that would automatically roll over to a waitlist when the max number of players was reached (we have a waitlist in every division) but that doesn't exist in Sport Engine. Our Sports Engine support person recommended we put all divisions in one registration, adding a "what division are you registering for?" question and make each division a sale item with the available items being the max number of kids for that division, then adding a second set of sale item on the same question that say wait list for each division that has no item limit and no fee. So when someone went to register their 5 year old, they would have the option of  both "Rookie" and "Waitlist - Rookie" until "Rookie" is sold out. Then when someone drops out of the league and someone gets a spot from the waitlist, I make the person dropping out "inactive", increase the "available items" in that division by 1 (this part seems ridiculous), change the waitlisted player's sale item from "Waitlist - Rookie" to "Rookie" and then manually invoice them the league fee. Is this what others did to handle waitlists? (Their other suggestion was creating a separate waitlist only registration but there does not seem to be a way to move a player from one registration to another.) Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[freezinKT]

50 minutes ago, MSchroed said:

I was just wondering how others have handled waitlists? We have 9 divisions. In league athletics we had one registration per division that would automatically roll over to a waitlist when the max number of players was reached (we have a waitlist in every division) but that doesn't exist in Sport Engine. Our Sports Engine support person recommended we put all divisions in one registration, adding a "what division are you registering for?" question and make each division a sale item with the available items being the max number of kids for that division, then adding a second set of sale item on the same question that say wait list for each division that has no item limit and no fee. So when someone went to register their 5 year old, they would have the option of  both "Rookie" and "Waitlist - Rookie" until "Rookie" is sold out. Then when someone drops out of the league and someone gets a spot from the waitlist, I make the person dropping out "inactive", increase the "available items" in that division by 1 (this part seems ridiculous), change the waitlisted player's sale item from "Waitlist - Rookie" to "Rookie" and then manually invoice them the league fee. Is this what others did to handle waitlists? (Their other suggestion was creating a separate waitlist only registration but there does not seem to be a way to move a player from one registration to another.) Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

We are in our first season after switching from League Athletics. This is close to the way we did it. However our wait list is date based, not numbers based. So we had a hidden “Waitlisted” question. It defaulted to “no” during regular registration. During that time our regular levels of play with sale items question was visible and required. On the day we wrote waitlist we defaulted the waitlisted question to “yes”. We made our question with sale items optional and hid it. We showed a question for levels of play (marked waitlist on reports) that had no cost and made it required.

As commissioners said they had room for players we invoiced them. Honestly it took a LOT of emails to get everyone to pay. But we had the same problem with the balance report in League Athletics. We typically take our entire waitlist, so we end up invoicing all of those people.

The one thing this makes hard is automated reporting logic. If you want “all players registered for 10U,” you have to make a saved report for either the regular OR the waitlist question equaling “10U” and you can’t automatically filter out inactive registrations in that saved report. But we dealt with it.

I’d still love true wait list capabilities though.