Login to www.somersethillslacrosse.com Parents who are new to our programs often ask How do you schedule practices, coach? and for most of us the answer is Make sure I have your correct email address! Most of us assemble a giant email list containing all our players' parents' addresses (we hope!) that we use several times a week to communicate practice or game schedules, cancellations, etc. This strategy works fine until about mid-april when we discover: That the kid who registered late didn't get onto our email list until three games into the season. (His parents yelled at us.) That we mistyped someone's address and his mail bounced helplessly for a few weeks. (His parents yelled at us.) That we promised a weekly schedule every Sunday night, but then we got back awfully late from N'orleans that one time and it really didn't get sent until Tuesday afternoon. (Lots of parents yelled at us.) And these are just the obvious ones. Do I also need to mention the parent who desperately didn't want her personal email address circulated in the clear? (Evidently, she had her reasons and her lawyer yelled at us.) Or that inevitable moment when some bright parent hits "Reply all" to ask for carpool help Friday night and a dozen helpful moms immediately follow suit? You do the multiplication, Business Hero. Nothing makes a coach's correspondence disappear faster than drowning under a Reply All Swarm! This tutorial will show step-by-step how you can tame this monster by using some tools provided by our website. As with all of these tutorials, the first step is to login using your name or email address and personal password you selected when you registered. If you don't remember your personal password, use your email address as the username and leave the password field blank. Our system will send Reset Password instructions to that email address. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 1
Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 2
Logging in displays your Coach/Team Manager options Like everybody else in our League, our games are scheduled by our Club Scheduler in coordination with other Clubs and Tournament directors. SHLC Coaches still call the shots on practice schedules though, so let's add a few now. This screenshot shows the full set of Adminstrative Features available to Coaches/Team Managers. If you follow along with this tutorial, the next screen is where you'll create a new practice event. We'll start with just a single Practice, then move on to setting a series of practices that occur on the same day each week. Finally, we'll learn how to edit events after they're posted and discover how our Players and parents receive this information. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 3
Enter a new schedule Event Okay, I know it says "New Game Information" but we use the same screen to add Practices and Scrimmages. This screen requires you to set several options and they're all important, so we'll examine them one at a time. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 4
Steps 1-4: Add some Event details Here, we're setting up a Practice for Friday, April 5 at 6pm. Pick the date using the calendar widget or by typing a date directly. The Start time is required, but adding a finish time is optional. Next, choose a location from the drop menu and select whether the event is a Practice or a Game. (If you submit the event as a Game, you'll get an error message. Go ahead and try it. Holly Fay can help with those.) Steps 5-6: Designate your team Next, we want to apply this event to a specific team, triggering our Club email engine to handle the communications for you. The current season should be pre-selected (you can't schedule in the past, right?), but if it isn't, make sure you're scheduling for this year. Then pick your own team from the first Teams drop menu. (As this is a Practice, we can ignore the second Teams drop menu and the Outside Opponent and Tournament stuff.) Here, we've selected the current 7th Grade Warriors (2018). Without typing a single address, every player on this season's 2018 Roster is going to be alerted to this practice. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 5
Steps 7-8: Add the Event and send notifications Here's where this system really saves Coaches time and peace-of-mind. Except for special periods when we've turned Event Notifications off, you can instruct this page to send an event announcement to each player on your Roster for this or any new event you create. Notifications are handled behind the scenes by our Club email service and logged with time and date stamps. All players have the option of providing RSVP attendance confirmations by simply checking a box. Players and parents who signed up for SMS service or to receive automated Reminders when they registered will also get additional day-of-event alerts regarding this event. Final step: When you're finished adding event details, don't forget to SUBMIT your event to enter it onto your Team's Calendar and the Club's Master Schedule! Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 6
Scheduling Recurring Events As easy as it is to schedule a single Practice, you're probably wondering who's going to input all those dates. Well, most coaches have field times at scheduled intervals on the same day(s) each week. Setting them all up at once solves the problem, and our system provides another screen to handle that. For a Team that wants to schedule practices every Tuesday and Friday from March through April, you'd set all the Tuesday practices in one Recurring Event and all the Friday practices in another. There are separate screens to edit individual recurrances after they have been added to the Master Schedule. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 7
Editing a Recurring Event So, you've just added a whole season of Thursday night practices for your team when one of the Moms (you know which one) calls to tell you that you can't hold practice on Valentines Day. You know when you're beaten, so just go to the Master Schedule, select the calendar for February 14 and click the pencil icon next to your team's Practice entry. It will bring up the screen below and you can edit any of the details, just as with Single-event entries. IMPORTANT NOTE: Once a Practice has been scheduled using our system, it receives a unique database number, as seen below (#2909673). This number means that a record of the practice will be kept for future reference. If you subsequently CANCEL your practice, it still stays in our system, but marked Cancelled. Years from now, when some kid shows up and blames his lopsided grin on a hit he took at your practice one year on Valentines Day, well, your attorneys will be grateful that you scheduled practices using our online system rather than your personal email account. Do you have a better strategy? Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 8
How Players can use this information After you load a series of individual or recurring Practices, your players will have several ways to stay informed. First, they'll get an email broadside each time an event is created or edited. Event notices include a link to add the Event to ical or other personal calendar software. Second, if they've subscribed to SMS notices, they'll receive a reminder on the day of the Event. Finally, the event will appear on your Team's Event Calendar and in the "Next 10 Events" feature on your Team's home page where it can be viewed from any web browser. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 9
How events look on a Team's Calendar Here's a look at the 8th Graders' hypothetical Practice Calendar for February. As you can see, we've cancelled Practices on the 14th and 28th. Each of these events are tagged NEW because they were added since this user last logged in. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 10
Practice or Game Information If the player or parent clicks on the Event detail, they will immediately have the information they need to contact Coaches (just click the Coach's link and a logged email option will appear) and find directions to the venue. In addition, each event is timestamped, adding to its credibility as official team communications. Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 11
Conclusion This tutorial was necessarily brief, but it demonstrates how using the Club website to manage and schedule your players is way superior to getting yelled at by parents. It's more reliable than your personal email accounts, it complies with Best Practices for Youth Sports communications and record-keeping, and it provides a superior customer service experience in an era when everyone has smart phones and web access. Try it and tell us if you agree! [Note: if you jump in and add some events for April 2013, they won't be immediately visible to players or people who aren't logged in as Coaches/Managers or other site Administrators. We're currently "offline" for scheduling while Game calendars are being updated. You can add March practices though, and those will appear on team calendars right away. Once you've set up your March schedule (or even a few weeks of it), use your Roster's Email Team feature to email your players alerting them to review the new calendar. After April 2, we will turn on LIVE updates. At that point, any new or changed events will automatically generate email and other notifications for your players.] Using our Club website to manage team Practice Schedules Page 12