Tournament Scheduling Webinar
Hello, and welcome to Stack Sports tournament and league scheduling software.
To get started, you will have a tournament tab located in the top right hand corner.
You will notice you have a dashboard view.
We have team application lookup and management, statistics for game scoring and reporting, Couple different ways to put a schedule together within the platform.
View, we have publish, and how to set things to be internal or public view.
And then we have the setup option.
So we're first going to go underneath setup configurations.
You will see here a bunch of different tabs that we will go through and how to set up your tournament or your league.
You first have your event start date, check-in date and the end date of your competition.
There's also a schedule lock date, if you'd like to lock your schedule.
Rescheduling, So if this is a league and you allow teams reschedule amongst themselves between the coaches or the team managers, and you can also choose to charge a rescheduling fee.
Here you will have show on public league list or tournament, state cup rules apply, So if this is a league or a tournament, more than likely, you'll put it on no.
Is this gaming league seasonal play? So this is how you differentiate between if this if the software should be in a tournament mode or for league play, you know, eight or ten weeks of play. So is this gaming league seasonal play? If it is, go ahead and put yes. If it's for a tournament, you want to select no.
Synchronize multi roster players. So if your competition allows a player to be on more than one team, you can choose to automatically sync that from the registration side of things. Or you can simply toggle it off. Club pass player assignments.
We have a different set of configurations to allow auto removal app each game, or if you prefer to leave the club pass player on until the coach or tournament director removes them, you can choose that.
Rescheduling options.
If you'd like to use the app, uses only registration teams. If this is a league, that means they have to be registered teams in the association.
If this is a tournament and you allow teams to apply from anywhere, then you can say Use registration teams, you can set it to no.
Game Day rosters, do you use payment tracking, synchronize jersey numbers and positions. So if jersey numbers are entered on the registration side, they will automatically come over to your tournament or league. And then developmental players is just another method of club passing.
So then here under payment, this is where you would contact your account manager to set up your payment processor process credit cards and electronic checks.
You will not have the ability to set up your own merchant account. This is something that you would reach out to your account manager or support for.
Billing is if you happen to still allow paper check mail ins, you could come in here and say who to make checks payable to and which address you would like the check mailed to.
Right. The next area is security. This is where you can set up your tournament director or if you have a scorekeeper or somebody else that you would like to have access to your competition.
You can look them up here and add them in or simply create another profile for that individual.
Underneath the applications tab, this is where you're going to say when can Teams start applying to your competition.
You can use early date if you'd like, on time date, and then the cutoff date. So when is the absolute last day that someone can apply to your competition.
Age calculation date. So this needs to be twelve thirty one of that current seasonal year.
Can Teams play up in age? So that's at your discretion if you allow Teams to play up. If you have any minimum number of players, email addresses, per team contact, Is there a specific number of team contacts that you wish to have required at submission?
Do you require a head coach? So a lot of times, like if this is league play, you might say, I just need at least a head coach or a contact, and then you still have a lot of time to get your raw stir in as we know registration's still going on. But maybe as the scheduler, you wanna start seeing at least how many teams you're gonna have by age group and division. So you can begin bracketing or at least start the prelim schedules.
If you are taking electronic payments online, You have a few different options here where we can auto charge credit cards with application approval or we can charge credit cards independently of you accepting Teams.
You can choose to make everything required before submission. Those are like custom field questions. Things that you'd like to collect from those team contacts.
Do you require a team manager automatically accept when paid? Are you allowing loan players?
That might be something you're using if you're running a tournament.
And then these options here, we have batch registration of Teams to get into the system. So you can allow your club registrar or league registrar.
Maybe it's an RC. Any kind of administrator for your organization could batch apply teams in. And I will be covering that here shortly.
And then auto post status changes, we always recommend you put that on. Yes.
And then down below, you can choose what season you want to accept Teams from for your competition.
We have active Teams, and we have all Teams.
So a lot of times if this is for a league, you might want to select all teams because again they're still just getting players on rosters and everything like that. If this is a tournament, you might say I only want to accept activated Teams, which means they've met all of the rules within your organization.
And coaches have been background checked, safe support, all the required compliance pieces in order to apply into your competition.
You can also go a step further and select which play types you'd like to apply into your league or competition.
So if this is a competitive tournament, you would have that selected. Maybe it's just a wreck or in the season.
And so this would control what teams are able to sign up for your competition.
And then obviously down below, you can come down and hit update. We also have integrated referee assigning platform called Stack Officials. So if that is something you're interested with, just setup, you'll have the ability to link your referees into the scheduling component.
If you are charging fees, you would come here.
I already have a couple of fees set up here. So these are five hundred dollar entry fee. M means it's a mandatory fee. You can collect optional fees if you'd like.
We also have custom field questions. These are additional gathering tools.
Should you want to ask specific questions, you know, What was your win loss tie record last season? Or would you like to play up an age or preferred game dates? So you could set up any kind of drop down menus or radio buttons are good for yesno type questions and you could set up as many as you'd like and you can also choose to make certain custom field questions required.
Team settings?
So, we have a lot of default out of the box questions that you can ask teams. Would you like to play up an age, calculate your team based on the oldest player on your roster, show team ID fields, jersey colors.
The only one that you really want to make sure you have is show application roster. You want to always make sure that's on yes, so you can see the players and the contacts.
Player settings, Again, you can choose to make certain fields shown, hide, or required, so jersey numbers, possibly.
And this edit player team info, everything else, so you can leave blank if you'd like.
Additional settings.
This is if you want to control the number of blackout dates per team.
Any kind of electronic legal agreements or waivers that wanna put in to have your team contact sign. You're able to set them up here.
We have promotional code discounts.
If you want to set up a promo code with an expiration date, let's say if you put in, you know, ten Teams, we'll give you fifty dollars off. You can set up that discount code. And then give it out to those teams applying or to those club registrars or RCs that are batch applying teams into your competition.
And then we also have a team discount option. So if you wanted to give a discount to teams that have played in your league, in the spring and now it's fall. You can offer that.
And again if you have any questions on these pieces here, this is where you would go through with onboarding, they can walk you through a little bit more of how the team discount works.
Next option.
Or tab is the age groups tab. So this is where you're gonna set up your age group, your lowest age of the player, highest registration age, Give it a code, an age code, gender, and then you're gonna have your maximum roster active.
Minimum number of players and your maximum number of players.
Maximum roster active is let's say you have a maximum roster of eighteen players, but The maximum roster active is how many can dress to go onto the field.
And then after you have your age group set up, you'll have flight Flights are basically divisions or brackets.
So here you could see we have boys eleven division one two three, All the way down. You can click here to new.
And you give it a description.
And a code.
And then the age group associated with it.
Then you would hit create.
And then within each flight or division, you have a couple more toggles here. So, show print roster button. This is if you allow coaches to log in each week and print out a game day roster.
You can configure the system how many days prior they can print that game sheet.
If you're allowing team to team rescheduling, Let's say how many days prior to the game, coaches are allowed to reschedule games.
And then down below, we have some additional club pass settings.
Which divisions you can club pass from and to.
There is this apply settings to all flights. So once you've configured one division or flight, can apply the same parameters to additionals if you'd like.
Bracket scoring and cards, So here we have public schedule presentation. We have our original plastic view, two point zero, and our new three point zero mobile enhanced view. So that's device responsive.
Looks really nice on phones.
And so that's the public presentation of schedules.
You can choose to show the score score board display.
Who is allowed to enter scores. So if this is league play, you might allow your team coaches to enter scores. If this is a tournament. Maybe only the tournament director or the administrator is allowed to enter scores.
Down below here is your win loss tie record. So how many points for a win, for a loss, for a tie, for forfeits.
If you have gold differential, gold maximum, And then down below is the tie breaker criteria. So you can come in here and say, you know, the first tie breaker is winner and head to head. Most goals four, goals differential, and then you can use this up and down to set your tie breaker criteria. And then hit save.
Messaging.
This is where you can control system generated emails that go out based on the status of the application.
So the first one we always recommend you update is this application submitted, and then potentially the application final acceptance. So once you've accepted a team into your tournament or competition, you can configure this automated email that will go out to those teams.
Make sure you always enter a valid from email address that the system is able to send out your email.
Route request is a way where you could see all the emails that you have sent out through your competition.
If someone ever says they didn't receive it, you come in here and and review those submissions that went out.
And then the last tab in the configuration setup is content. So this is the look and feel of your competition.
This is where you can choose a color scheme. You can upload graphics and banners.
More than likely, these are the areas down here that you'll be uploading your tournament or your league logo is here and on the login page.
And then content content.
You don't do a whole lot in here, but this is if you want to add specific instructions or additional detail to each page of the term and application.
So if it's, you know, enter your jersey numbers for your player roster, you know, anything like that. You can come in here and click on the specific tag and update that content.
The other one that a lot of tournament directors use is this tournament homepage, and this is the front landing page where you might wanna put your tournament rules or different instructions to show publicly.
The next area I'm gonna do is cover team applications. So I'll click on the dashboard and here you will see I have six new teams, one hundred and seventy one already accepted, and fifteen that are unassigned to a flight or a division.
So if I go into the thirty six new Teams, I will click on view details.
And here it's going to take me to all the teams that have applied into my competition.
I will have this little pencil icon where I can go from the new status and put them in final acceptance.
And again, in the configurations, you can choose to auto accept Teams. So if it's for a league, you might want to do that. If it's for a tournament, maybe you have some sort of guidelines or things you want to evaluate before you place them in final acceptance.
So you can go ahead and come in here, select the drop down, final acceptance, and then you would hit save changes.
You'll also notice there's an envelope here. So if you needed to send any kind of communication emails, you can select the teams here. Everybody except these two teams to receive this communication.
I click on email selected applications, This will bring up your from name, your email address, where you'd like them to reply to, you can send an attachment.
So if you have a PDF flyer or any kind of marketing material something you need to send out, you can attach that here. And then the body of the email. You can use macros if you'd like to personalize the body of the email.
Maybe age group and the full team name and team identification number.
And then down below, it'll show you everybody that has a valid email address to send to, and then you could go ahead and hit send.
Alright. I will go back to the team application page.
Again, you can filter by your age group, by your flight.
If you're doing using a flight preference. So when teams apply in, they can say, I think I should be in the gold silver bronze division.
So then I will go into now how do teams get into your competition.
So over on the association side, go to your Team Lookup from your dashboard view.
And you can click on your team.
Click on this team here.
And then on the tournament tab, Any competition open for registration will show up here, so you would select the team and then click register.
So that's if a club registrar or an RC wanted to register one team at a time. There is also underneath Teams, declare multiple Teams feature.
This is if you want to batch apply all of your Teams and then make one single payment.
So you would come in here.
It would default to your organization.
You would search for your team list.
It's going to show you the teams that you've already applied to the competition.
And then any eligible teams that are still able to be applied, you can check them off here, and then you would scroll down, and you would click apply Teams button, It's gonna give you a quick overview. You say yes, go ahead and submit those applications.
And now they're over on the tournament and league scheduling side.
Next, I will show you how a coach can log in to their my account and apply their team to a league or competition.
So when you log in as a coach, either through single sign on, through your club portal or your regional portal, you will come in here Go to your teams tab. Here's all your teams that you're assigned to. You would click on apply to tournament.
This will prompt you automatically on the tournament tab. And then you would select that league or tournament that you wish to register to.
And then you would just go through the team application process.
So over here, there you're listed as the contact.
You could click on your player roster, review, and submit the application.
Now, we will get into scheduling.
So back on your tournament tab underneath scheduling, you'll have a couple different options.
The first one I'm going to cover is the scheduling wizard.
You have four choices here. You have pairing only, date, time, and field. So these first two options are used more for league play, but you can use it also for pool play for a tournament if you'd like. We do have our tournament bracketing wizard and then we also offer a single elimination style tournament as well.
So I will go ahead and do the date, time, and field. Some of these different options have to do with how you organize and administer your leads.
Do you as the director do everything?
Do you do the pairings only and then release it to your club representatives to go in and do a time in a field location.
So there's couple different variances that you can choose from. I will go ahead and do the date, time, and field. I will select voice thirteen silver as my first division.
The system is going to ask you the number of teams you have in this group. So I will say I have ten teams. If this was nine or eleven, you can choose to use a by team.
Should you have an odd number of teams? A by team will tell your parents that they need to sit out that week.
So, I'll go ahead and create the group team.
So, this is where you can come in and you can manually assign the teams into the division.
You can use the automatically assigned Teams option. And once your Teams have been accepted, it will automatically pull them in here. And you would select next.
Game time in minutes, I'll say sixty minutes, in our game interval. So this is how many minutes you wish the team would rest before the system schedules them for a second game. This is used more for tournaments where they're playing potentially two games on Saturday So we'll say we'll give them a two hour break. And then gains per team per week, if it's a league, maybe you're saying one game per week, if it's a tournament, You can leave it blank or you could put three. If you're do using any kind of blackout dates, you can add them here. And you could add them for this one division or you can apply it to all of your different divisions and flights.
We have balance templates already generated for you.
So they'll have an equal amount of home and away gains. So for this ten teams, I'm going to guarantee them eight games for the season. I will select create games button.
And this isn't going to go ahead and show you all of the match ups that were created. You can use this view option that will show you the balance template of home and away.
And then you can go ahead and hit save and continue.
Here's where you will select your venues where you wish to schedule on. So you would select off fields that you want to schedule this competition on. You can click on any of these plus signs right here and add your field availability.
So when does the field open? Is it Saturdays and Sundays?
You select your date from and to and then your times.
So you could say eight AM until eight PM, and then you could hit create If there is a holiday or a blackout date, you can also just delete those weeks here as well.
Alright.
So we will go ahead and select those couple of fields.
Save and continue.
So, it's showing here that I have a total of forty games, forty need to be scheduled, And here are my scheduled parameters that I've put in place.
So I'll go ahead and select schedule games.
And the system will generate all those forty games for us.
Schedules created.
We can do a quick overview of what this system produced.
Select next.
And then you can choose to publish it.
And click finish.
And then you would start over with your next division.
There's one method of scheduling.
The next one would be assign game schedule.
So here I will go ahead and select the voice thirteen silver.
This is another view too of what the system just created. So we have Saturday, March fourth.
If you had weather come through, you can easily take all of your games and move them. And you can use the copy to dates below.
Same with the time. So you can use the time.
And then for the field location, you click on this dot dot dot.
And you would select the field here.
You can also copy to below. If there's any rescheduling or anything like that, you can say what the reasons for.
And then we also have a canceled and postponed status. This is integrated with stack officials for referee assignments. So if there are any reschedules and the games have been rescheduled on the platform.
A notification goes out to the officials that were already assigned to those games as well as the assigner.
The next method is the drag and drop field usage.
So this is where you can come in and select off a few divisions that you'd like to take a look at. You'd say field scheduler in graph.
And this will bring up a graphical presentation, where you can easily take your unassigned or unscheduled games.
And you can drag them onto a field. So if this was for a tournament, I'm gonna say I want this game to start at twelve PM. Maybe I'm gonna factor in a a lunch break.
If it turns out in red, the red square means that there's a head coach conflict. So if you hover over it, it's going to tell you why there's a conflict.
Over here, there's also a legend.
So if you see a box in gray, that means that another tournament or league is using that field space at that same time.
So over here is just a really nice legend that will tell you you know, the different options.
And again, once you could take any games and move them over, and you'll see it's listed by the date and then the fields listed.
Green means that everything's good. It checked out.
And this is the easy drag and drop tool for scheduling.
If you want to remove again, you can drag it right here into the recycle bin. And it'll just show up here as an unassigned new game.
Next, I will go into the upload template.
So you have a very complicated schedule that you prefer to do in Excel.
You can use our template and then you can upload one flight or division at a time.
So here the system will generate the game number for you. You enter the date, the time. Every field that you enter will have a unique ID number, You list the home and the away team and then what's the round type. So B is for bracket.
If it's You're running a tournament. You can use some of these codes here for the round of sixty four, thirty two quarterfinal, semi final, and final.
And then once you have your schedules listed here, you would save that template, and then you would come here into upload.
You would select that flight, and then find your file, and you can import that.
If there's any issues with it, such as a game is already being scheduled at that field at that time, it'll come back with an on screen message or alert, letting you know that there is a conflict with that schedule.
Next, we will go into schedule map.
So this is the system generated schedule. You can select one division at a time, or you can click off multiples.
And then come down and hit schedule selected rounds.
You would hit confirm.
And then the system will come back and produce the schedule. Based on your limits.
So it says unable to schedule all due to time constraints. So of the forty games twenty five were able to be scheduled fifteen or not. You can click on this plus sign here, and it's gonna list all of the unscheduled games up top. And then down below the ones that the system was able to successfully schedule.
So more than likely I ran out of field space.
Another view under scheduling is play levels.
You can click on one from here.
And this is just another option for scheduling, where you see your groups, your teams, and your games. Maybe you wanted to come into the Teams area and quickly drop swap out a Team.
So we can replace the bears with the coyotes.
And we'll put the bulldogs in there, and the Bob cats. So it doesn't change your schedule or anything like that, but it's just a quick easy way to swap out a team.
Go ahead and click back to rounds.
If you were going to have like a semifinal or final round. You can say how many teams are going to advance.
And then you can come over here into ladder play.
And you'll go ahead and create your ladder rounds.
You have your semi final and your final tab.
And then you can come in here. This is kind of a more manual process. The scheduling wizard would take care of this for you automatically.
And this is just how you can tell the system how to progress your teams.
If you need to. But we really recommend the wizard since everything is automatic at that point.
Alright. So, once you have your schedules produced, you will go into the publishing matrix.
And this is where you can control what you'd like the public to see. So you can say all my accepted teams, bracket visible, schedule visible, statistics, and then you manually publish.
So once you come down here, you hit save changes. You can also choose a date range. So if this is your league and you're under pressure to get a schedule out, maybe you only have the first week or two, but not all ten weeks. You can at least just put the first week or two, so parents stop contacting you and then come back and then do an auto publish.
So once everything's set, you got all ten weeks out there. You can come back, turn on auto publishing.
So every seven to fifteen minutes, the system will do an auto update of your scores and any schedule changes.
You can click on then here if you just kinda wanna see really quick at a glance what the public's going to see.
So here's your win loss tie record. Here's your schedule.
I'll go ahead and click back.
And then within the setup under your configuration, you'll have a URL that is set up. And this is what the public would see when they come to look at your schedules.
So we'll drop that URL in.
So your logo, your name of your competition.
If you wanted to come in here, and I'll click on our silver one.
And again, this is mobile responsive. So it looks really nice on your phone or your tablet.
Me just go ahead and pull up this Team's schedule.
You can search by all different kind of parameters.
It links to Google Maps. So that's really nice for driving directions, you know, mom, dad, parent, guardians, grandparents, anybody trying to travel the field that makes it very easy. So we'll just go ahead and click on view map. Pull that up.
If you only wanted to see that one team specific schedule, you can click on that. It'll just narrow it down.
We'll go ahead and click on a few more things. We've got the standings.
We've got statistics.
And then underneath more is where we'll list any kind of field closures or club standings.
So we'll go ahead and go back to the front here.
And that's the public facing view of schedules.
Next, I'll go into scoring. So we'll go into statistics and then game scoring.
You can search by a date range, by a venue, by a time. So all my games that went at ten AM, you can come here really quickly and record the score.
So if you're a scorekeeper and you just want to come in here and quickly record them, you can do that here.
If you want to click on the team name, this is where you can enter the scores, if any players got any cautions or objections.
You can come in here and list it here.
What was the reason for it, and add them here for players as well as coaches.
After you have entered the cautions and ejections, on the Game Day roster, it would show up that that player needs to sit out or serve that suspension.
And this is an example of a photo roster.
So there's couple different versions that you can choose that will print. This example is if you print it out every week and you take it with the field.
Which is really nice to help with the disciplinary items. We also have digital player cards.
So the coach can log in, and they'll be able to see their players. They can add pub pass players right here.
They can look at the players. Anyone that has a red card or concussion that needs to sit out would be listed here.
And then also underneath to sticks, there's a lot of different reports. You can run financial reports, team application reports, miscellaneous reports, So anything that you wanted to come in here, you can simply select the report, and then generate it, and then you can always sport it into Excel or whichever kind of format you wish and send that off to whoever needs it.
Alright.
So that's a pretty high level overview of the association for tournament and league play.
I hope this was helpful, and thank you so much for your time.
