Front Office

Innovation

BIG Updates with Tournament Brackets, Divisions, Canadian Currency and More!

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By LeagueApps
March 15, 2013
5 min

We’ve been working super hard to make the product better and better. This latest release includes a few great new features as well as a host of smaller improvements that will make your life easier as you manage your sports programs.

  • #1: Tournament Brackets: Just in time for NCAA March Madness, we’ve released a super snazzy tournament brackets feature!
  • #2: Divisions: One of our core product themes is to continually improve FLEXIBILITY… and, the introduction of “Divisions” will give you a great deal more flexibility in structuring and organizing sports programs YOUR way.
  • #3 Canadian Currency Support: Running a league in Canada? If so, you’ll be happy to learn that we’ve added support for accepting transactions in Canadian dollars for our friends up North.
  • #4 A Slew of Smaller Improvements: As always, we’re committed to continually improving the quality of the product, and that means making smaller improvements with every product release.

Read on to learn more about these updates…

Tournament Brackets

Host your own March Madness! 🙂

The new tournament brackets feature is seamlessly integrated with the existing program game scheduling feature. It’s a CINCH to create a new tournament for any number of teams. And, you don’t even need to have a “perfect” number of teams (i.e., 4, 8, 16, 32, etc).

Here are the key things to know about this new feature:

  • Easily generate a ‘single elimination’ tournament with visual bracketsright on your program schedule.
    • Choose teams to be included in the tournament from the existing teams on the program.
    • Use any number of teams.
    • Specify the seed rank for each team.
    • Specify the start date, location(s) and game time(s) to be used.
    • Generate and save entire tournament brackets in under a minute.
  • Update game scores and have winning teams automatically advance to the next round.
  • Tournament games are displayed on all schedule views for members to see.
  • Visual brackets display is available from the program schedule.

To get started with tournament brackets, go into the schedule section for any one of your programs and click the “Generate Schedule” button. You’ll then be able to choose “Tournament Brackets” as the schedule type, and you’re off to the races. Let us know if you have any questions!

Organizing Programs into Divisions

You now have even more flexibility for structuring and organizing your sports programs. The new Divisions feature allows you to subdivide any program, assign teams to different divisions, and display standings broken out by division (see below screenshot).

The great thing about the Divisions feature is that it allows you to set up your programs in so many more interesting ways. You can now subdivide a program based on location, game dates/times, skill level, or whatever you’d like. Divisions are contained within the same parent program, so the pricing and registration settings are all based on the parent program settings.

Here are some of the important details about the Divisions feature:

  • Create and manage multiple “divisions” within your sports programs.
  • Assign teams to/from divisions, in the manager console. To do this, access the “move” control on the “Program Teams” page in the console.
  • Optionally display program standings broken out by divisions (i.e., teams are ranked within each division).
  • Display divisions on public facing website views for program profiles and team profiles.
  • Customize the label used for “division” on public facing website views.

To get started with divisions, follow these three quick steps:

  • #1: Setup Preferences
    • For any program in which you’d like to use divisions, go into the “Program > Settings > Preferences” for that program, and click the option to “enable” divisions. In this program preferences section, you can also edit the custom label used for “Division” on public-facing web views.
    • If you want your program standings to display rankings by division, then go to the site wide standings settings under “Settings > Standings & Scoring”, and make sure the option is enabled to allow divisional rankings (see option labeled “If divisions are enabled for a program, rank teams by division”).
  • #2: Create and Edit Divisions
    • Next, under the program’s “Settings” tab, click on “Divisions” and add/edit some divisions.
  • #3: Assign Teams to Divisions
    • Go to the program’s “Teams” tab, click the “move” control for any team to move it into a desired division. You can assign teams to divisions after they are registered in your program.

After these steps, you’re all set and your standings display will be broken out by division. As you get started with this feature, let us know what questions you have.

Canadian Currency Support

If you are running a Canadian league and need to accept payments in Canadian dollars, we can help!

It’s simple to get started. You need to use Stripe as your payment gateway. Here are the steps to get setup:

    • (1) Create or Log into a LeagueApps account

(2) Go to the Manage Account section of the LeagueApps Admin console and under Payment Gateway you can signup for a Stripe account. Be sure to select CAD support as this cant be changed once a Stripe account has been created. Here is a support article explaining the Stripe setup process.

Note that member payments will be processed as Canadian dollars.

Now, once your members submit payments, they will be processed as Canadian dollars.

Additional Improvements to Improve Quality

We made a bunch of additional improvements in this release to improve quality. Here is a summary:

  • Resolved an issue with setting invited and directly joining team player registration status to “reserved” when the team is already paid by captain.
  • Resolved issue so that live programs with closed registrations do not show up under the public-facing ‘registrations’ tab.
  • Game reminder subject line displaying “tomorrow” only when appropriate.
  • Team schedule showing “L” only when outcome is in fact a loss.
  • Locations page “programs” filter now working correctly.
  • Tweak to ensure that free-agent custom label is properly used on member dashboard.
  • Resolved issue related to quotes being used in custom labels.
  • Resolved issue related to rendering member details page in manager console.

We hope that you find some value in these updates. If you have any questions about what’s included in this release, please contact our account management team and we’ll be happy to assist you.