1) Change Member Profile Fields Settings

LeagueApps allows you to easily customize the membership form your members fill out when they create an account on your site. We shared some ideas on how you can use form fields to collect key information from your players.  As admin, you can change the privacy setting of each member field you add to your membership form.

Simply go to your Member Profile Fields in your LeagueApps admin console (“Settings > Member Profile Fields”). Here you have the option to change any field from ‘public’, to ‘protected’ or ‘private’.  Here’s a breakdown of what each of these settings mean:

1. Public – Field information is viewable on their account profile
2. Protected – Field information is only viewable to other logged in members
3. Private – Field information is only viewable to the league admin

This flexibility allows you to tweak each form field on a case-by-case basis. For instance, you may want to keep certain information you collect public, such as Hobbies, or Favorite Sport. On the other hand, certain fields like Address or Income Level might be best kept private. Some of our league partners that push the social element in their leagues like to keep their players’ contact information protected (e.g. Phone Number), encouraging fellow club members to connect off the playing field.

2) Turn “Show Attendee List” OFF

3) Create ‘Private’ Programs

4) Assign Admin Users

As the main admin of your site, you can grant console access to multiple admin users.  This comes handy if you have partners or employees that help manage day-to-day operations. You can assign a specific role to each admin based on their actual role in your organization. This flexibility is key for privacy – you want to make sure your admins have the appropriate levels of access. For example, you probably won’t want a part-time employee who reports game scores to be able to edit your homepage design. On the other hand, you do want your managing partner to have access to all your financial information. Learn how to manage admin users here.

 

5) Disable Site

You have the option to disable your LeagueApps site at any point in time. Disabling your site will hide your homepage and any other content pages you have. This might be applicable if you are implementing a new design that isn’t quite ready for the public. Or you may be transitioning your content from an external site into the LeagueApps CMS.

You can disable your site with the click of a button. Just find the ‘disable’ option on the top right of your site dashboard page.

We hope you use these tips to set privacy settings that best fit your organization. Drop us a line if you have any questions or want to share feedback about privacy on LeagueApps.

Any sports organization can now add cross-divisional games to their schedules on LeagueApps. This can be useful if you have several divisions in a season and want to give teams in different divisions the opportunity to play one another. It gives teams who wouldn’t normally cross paths the chance to mix it up with different opponents and meet new faces. You can even hype up your season finale by having the leaders of each division square off for a shot at the season title! Another use-case we’ve seen is with organizations who are scrambling to finish building out a schedule for their season. They now have the ability to schedule out-of-league games and easily fill up their schedules. Some organizations even match up teams in different skill level divisions for fun. For instance, a soccer team in the recreational division might face a team in the competitive division.

Read our help article for detailed instructions on how to handle cross-program scheduling. Once you schedule a cross-program game, you should see a green symbol on the schedule next to the game (see below).

We’re interested to hear how you like to schedule your divisions on LeagueApps. As always, send us feedback and let us know how this is helpful to you. Hit up Asaf if you’d like to chat – 646-660-9430, or awiner@sportsvite.com.

Most businesses and organizations have insurance needs but it’s especially crucial for sports organizations. Sports naturally have a fair share of injuries and accidents and there are certainly inherent risks and liabilities. A single mishap can devastate a sports organization if it does not properly protect itself and its participants. In addition, many sports organizations must provide proof of insurance to receive permits for playing fields, gyms or event spaces.

General Liability

The most basic type of insurance is General Liability. This protects against risks including bodily injury or property damage caused by direct or indirect actions of the insured. Most General Liability policies cover the risk of being sued for negligence or strict liability torts. Although the rules do vary by state, General Liability is usually required.

Unfortunately, many General Liability policies for sports organizations include an athletic participant exclusion. This means the policy does not apply to bodily injury to people participating in actual sports activities. In effect, this type of policy covers nothing more than lawsuits arising out of spectator injuries!

Participant Legal Liability

Insurance carriers that specialize in General Liability for sports organizations sometimes provide an affirmative coverage grant called Participant Legal Liability that ensures coverage for all participants. This blog post better explains how this works in more detail.

Accidental Medical

Finally, sports organizations may also consider accidental medical expense coverage. This covers participant’s medical expenses that can arise from a sports accident or injury including slips, falls and broken bones. Accidental medical is often obtained to help enhance General Liability coverage and help deter liability claims since the risk of lawsuits is less likely when medical expenses are covered.

Policy Costs and Pricing

Insurance policies prices are based on the number of unique annual participants within an organization. Prices per player vary based on the sport, location and other variables. General Liability often range between $1 – $5 per player and accidental medical can be an additional $1 – $1.50 per player. Policy premiums and limits also range with a standard policy having up to $1-$3MM coverage for general liability and a $1000 premium and a $25,000 coverage limit for accidental.

Waiver/Release Forms

Waiver forms that are signed or agreed upon by your participants may help protect against lawsuits. Well written forms that avoid common pitfalls can help reduce the ultimate settlement especially if the claim is more accidental and not caused by negligence. Waiver forms rarely bind the participant and more often are used to trigger the assumption of risk defense which may result in a significant reduction in damages owed. A waiver or release form will never take the place of the proper insurance coverage.

Here are a few tips to consider in evaluating insurance policies.

• Understand the overall insurance requirements in your state
• Understand the insurance requirements to receive field or gym permits in your community
• Accurately determine the number of annual participants in your organization
• Determine if the General Liability policy has an athletic participant exclusion clause, is “silent” or explicitly states Participant Legal Liability.
• Get quotes from multiple brokers and read the fine print!
• Find brokerages that have special programs setup for local sports organizations. Bell Anderson is one insurance company that does this and they were the main sponsor at the SSIA conference. Track down Jason Webb at jasonw@bell-anderson.com and he’ll be happy to help out your organization.
• The need and use of waiver forms vary by policy. Ask your insurance provide what type of online waiver form and waiver messaging is required or preferred

We made a brief video that illustrates how players can publish their registrations to Facebook each time they register for a program. The video walks through Facebook registration publishing and shows the viral impact it can have.

Facebook registration publishing can play an integral role in your organization’s growth. As players signup and publish their registration links to Facebook, their Facebook friends can follow the link and register for a program on your site. This leads to BETTER exposure, MORE registrations, and NEW members!!

Check that your Facebook Settings are configured so you can start leveraging Facebook registration publishing. Next up for Facebook, we’ll be creating Facebook Page Apps, allowing for even more integration between your LeagueApps site and Facebook fan page. Stay tuned for more details.

If you have any questions/feedback on Facebook or you need your Facebook App integrated, just ask Asaf! You can reach him at awiner@sportsvite.com or 646-660-9430.

• Most sports organizations are already creating and managing their own Facebook pages.
• Players (most everybody actually) are using Facebook every day
• There are unique marketing benefits to sharing an organization’s leagues, events and activities through Facebook
• Facebook is a social platform. People share updates, photos, videos and content. A main theme of LeagueApps is to help players prolong the positive feeling of playing sports on AND off the field.

Facebook Login & Member Accounts

The Facebook Registration plugin for LeagueApps allows league members to signup and login to their account using their Facebook credentials. Having members utilize their Facebook identity allows them to be more social with their teammates.

Account Convenience
New or returning members can signup, login and register using their Facebook account. This simplifies the registration process for all new members leading to more successful completed registrations.

Social Profiles
League members can initiate social connections that can go beyond the playing fields. Members profile photos are populated with their Facebook photo and links to their profile. Players can view and “friend” their teammates’ through Facebook.

Member Retention
More social interaction between players leads to more camaraderie and better member retention. Facebook connection is another way to get players excited about where a sports organization is heading and ensure they’ll continue to participate in leagues activities.

Facebook Feed Publishing – Program Registration

Players can publish their league program registrations to their Facebook profile feed. This viral feature allows players to easily share their sports activities with their friends. Members can now easily recruit new players for your leagues by sharing registration links through Facebook!

Facebook Page – Website Integration

Facebook Pages allow for unlimited “fans” and get great search engine visibility. They help an organization build a social mailing list that can be reached at any time. This LeagueApps feature allows a league to connect its Facebook page to its LeagueApps website. This facilitates members to “like” the Facebook page and join your league community on Facebook. Members are encouraged to “like” the league Facebook page after they register or join a league program.

Here is a short video tutorial that shows how a Facebook page is linked to a LeagueApps Account.

LeagueApps Wall

League organizers can use the LeagueApps Wall features to post announcements to members through the site. The wall gives a league the ability for admins to communicate with members quickly and effectively. These messages can automatically be pushed to a league’s Facebook page. Players that post to the wall can also share their messages through Facebook.

We’re thrilled to share all of these features with you and eager to hear your feedback and learn the benefit they bring for your organization. Be sure to check our our LeagueApps help articles to get more detailed instruction on how to use these new features within the admin console. There’s actually much more we plan to do with Facebook in the future. We’re just getting warming up!

Technology Stack
LeagueApps is built using freely available and open source Java based frameworks including Struts2 for web application development, Hibernate for managing database interactions, and Spring to glue it all together.
All data is persisted by MySQL, the world’s most popular relational database management system.

Performance & Scalability
It’s cool to be fast and we continuously try to optimize server speed and loading times. Our Java runtime environment is naturally optimized for performance.

Amazon S3 is the CDN service used by LeagueApps for image/file storage. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier by providing access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure and fast infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. It is also easily scalable.

LeagueApps uses DNS Made Easy to deliver fast, accurate DNS services with sub 30 millisecond response times in the United States.

LeagueApps system architecture is developed for horizontal scalability so our entire platform will remain fast and stable as we grow. Your site should never be affected by usage spikes by any of our other customers.

Data Security
At LeagueApps, we take great pride in ensuring our network is safe and secure for making payments. All web pages with sensitive information that are hosted on the LeagueApps domain are served over https (TLS) supporting 256 bit encryption. Currently https is served on the public site purchase page, the console login page, and any console page communicating with a payment gateway. Credit card numbers are never stored anywhere within the LeagueApps system.

Here is an example of LeagueApps payment page. You can see that the page is verified and secure, as noted by the “https” on the browser.

Data Center Facility and System Administration
The LeagueApps main data center is at the Canvas Dreams data facility in Portland, Oregon. Canvas Dreams offers on-site support and personally monitors all maintenance performed on co-location equipment. Cabinets and caged racks are secured through biometric checkpoints, multiple keylock entry and 24/7 video surveillance. From over two dozen available network upstream carriers, Canvas Dreams upstream carriers include AT&T (our primary connection), MCI, Sprint, and Level3 (backup providers). Enterprise-grade Cisco networking equipment is used for all switches and routers.

An interesting note is that the Canvas Dreams data facility is actually powered by clean wind energy Oh, and just in case of a natural disaster, five 50,000 Watt Diesel backup generators ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

The LeagueApps system administration tasks are performed by Infinitium and led by Tim Yardley. Also located in Portland, Oregon they have unparalleled access to the Canvas Dreams data center to perform and supervise maintenance on hardware equipment and IT infrastructure projects.

Data Backups
LeagueApps websites don’t just have daily back-ups but we have almost real-time redundancy. The production MySQL database is subjected to replication, meaning a “slave” instance is continuously copying data over from the “master” (the real production database). This ensures that all data is backed up if there are ever any issues with the production server.

Email Delivery
LeagueApps uses SendGrid email infrastructure to ensure that email messages sent by our league partners to their members through the LeagueApps platform is delivered successfully (and not caught in junk or spam). SendGrid offers world class deliverability expertise and handles ISP monitoring, DKIM, domain keys, SPF, feedback loops, white-labeling and link customization. SendGrid also offers unique IP addresses so that LeagueApps can maintain complete control of its email reputation. Large web platforms including Four Square, Spotify and Gowalla and Bebo use SenGrid to power their email solution.

This should better explain our system. We’re always open to feedback on our services, share how we made these decisions and discuss new technologies that we may utilize within LeagueApps in the future.

If that isn’t impressive enough, then let us share with you what young Jeff was able to do for the New York Yankees baseball franchise. In 1996, the Yankees had a promising playoff team featuring a talented but unproven rookie named Derek Jeter. Despite George Steinbrenner’s best efforts, the Yankees were in the midst of an 18-year championship drought (the longest in the storied franchise’s history). In the opening game of the ALCS, Jeter stepped to the plate in the 8th inning with the Yankees down 4-3. Jeter drove a long fly to right field. As Orioles outfielder Tony Tarasco backed up to the fence to attempt to catch the ball a young 12-year-old fan stuck out his glove and snatched the ball into the stands. The umpires official ruling was a Home Run! The Yankees would go on to win the game and the World Series. Actually, it was the start of one of the most impressive dynasties in baseball history as the Yankees would win three more championships in the next four years. Derek Jeter has gone on to be one of the best baseball players in the history of the game.

That fan that caught the ball…That’s Jeff! Ask him about it (or read about him on Wikipedia). His version is a much more modest yet entertaining account of the sensational events. Just be warned, he might also try and share with you why LeagueApps is the right digital solution for your sports organizations. He also might block your call if it’s from a 410 area code as Orioles fans still give him grief to this day!

The Major League Baseball Network rates Jeff’s play as the 6th best fan moment in baseball history. MLB also recently did a featured segment to commemorate the play. In 2006, the New York Times did a story on Jeff’s quest to play professional baseball.

While we applaud Jeff for his great play, we most appreciate that he brought his baseball glove to the game! (Our partnership manager, Asaf, also appreciates that Jeff enjoys getting sushi for lunch.) That’s the type of kid who loves the sport so much he always wants to be part of it…for his entire life. We’re glad to give Jeff another opportunity to make sports part of his life. We’ll even let him bring his glove to work if he wants!

Simply turn on the setting in your admin console (“Settings > Scoring and Standings > Edit Scorekeeper Settings”) and captains will be able to enter game scores right on their team schedule. Captains can enter scores for any of their games that are at least 1 hour past the scheduled start of the game. Team captains can also dispute the scores an opposing captain has entered. Ultimately, the league admin has the final say in settling the dispute.

 
We’re interested to hear how the captain scorekeeper feature affects your league. Feel free to shoot any feedback over to Asaf at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.

We built these features to help our partners promote and grow their clubs or leagues and encourage more member engagement.

Facebook Publishing

At LeagueApps, we are firm believers that having a solid referral program is key to growing your club and essential for growth (hey, we took your lead and started our own LeagueApps Referral Program). There’s nothing more productive than utilizing your existing player base as a means to recruit new players. Our new Facebook Publishing feature lets you do just that – it lets players become the driving force behind promoting your club. When players register for your leagues, events, and tournaments, they can now share the registration information on their Facebook page. Their Facebook friends will see the registration link on their Facebook feed. They can then click it to enter your site and register for a program. The more often players share your registration links, the greater your chances are of generating more registrations – and gaining new members! It’s like hiring all of your members as a brand new sales team without spending a dollar!

Aside from the promotional benefits, Facebook Publishing drives home the social element integral to every club. Taking advantage of all of our integrated Facebook features can help you stay ahead of the curve and be that cool organization that attracts the community.

We’re always available if you have any questions, issues, or feedback when using these new features. Feel free to hit up Asaf for a quick demo if you’re interested. You can reach him at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.

LINspired by the possibilities, the LeagueApps team decided to take our design tools to the next level. These new features will enable any account admin to develop a custom, professional website design within minutes!

Homepage Themes

A website homepage is often the first experience a potential customer or member has with your organization. So it should be amazing. LeagueApps has added three different homepage templates styles that can be integrated with a click of a button. The multi-column template layouts include modules for photos, registration buttons, and social media icons. Below are examples of the three different layouts.
 

 

 

Theme Editor – Color Schemes

With over a dozen different color options within the theme editor, it’s conceivable your site will clash worse than the 2011 Boston Red Sox clubhouse. To ensure it stays sharp, we’ve added a bunch of different base color schemes with ridiculous names from Blue Steel to Lemon Lime. Even once a color scheme is selected, it can still be tweaked with the custom color fields. Share your ideas on additional color schemes with us and we might just add it to our default list.

Theme Editor – Images

The “images” tab of the theme editor is now easier to use to add header images, logos or page backgrounds. Quickly and easily upload your league images and they will be properly formatted within your website.

Them Editor – Page Backgrounds

An image background is one of the best ways to bring your website to life. Many of our current partners use sports-themed backgrounds on their current website. We’ve added a help document with optimized background images that will look slick as backgrounds for LeagueApps websites. Check them out here and follow the easy instructions to add them to your website.

Custom Designers

If you have budget and are looking to hire a designer to invest in an even more customized design, we can help match you with independent web designers who are familiar with the LeagueApps platform and that we have worked with in the past. Let us know if this is an option you would like to explore.

These design tools should take your website to the next level. Now everyone will see that your league is hot on the inside (back-end admin tools) AND the outside (front-end website design)! And that’s what really matters!