Sports Website Features Explained
Please click on any of the features listed below for more information:
Online Sports Registration:
Create your own custom online registration forms and allow users to register players for your programs right on your sports website. Our Form Builder tools make it easy to create forms that capture the information you need from your members and compute costs. Our sports registration engine already captures basic information like name address, phone and email for members and their children, so all you need to do is specify any supplemental information your sports club requires.
Form features include:
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WYSIWYG Labels
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Text boxes of various kinds including:
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Free-form text
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Numeric values
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Cost items
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Quantities multiplied by a specified unit cost
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Dates
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Agreement documents that must be acknowledged to continue
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Checkboxes
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Radio buttons
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Dropdown lists
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Questions can have dependencies such that they are only displayed or required if other questions have been answered in a certain way. This allows you to create sub-forms within your forms.
When a member registers through your sports league website, their basic information is automatically stored in our member database where it's available for team assignments, emailed news bulletins, etc.. The supplemental information you capture is stored in a separate database and can be viewed or retrieved at any time.
Registrants can pay for their sports program via credit card in our secure credit card processing center. Our shopping cart is fully compliate with Payment Card Industry, Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) for the piece of mind of both you and your members. Your organization receives the funds daily through your own merchant account. Backend reports help you keep track of registrations and payments. Unlike at least one of our competitors, LeagueAthletics.com does not lock you into any multi-year contracts or force you to pay exorbitant per registration fees. Be very careful about this. Your annual hosting fee is all you'll ever pay LeagueAthletics.com to use our online sports registration software.
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Live Schedules:
Schedule changes made within the system, on your sports website are automatically emailed to all affected members, including parents, players, coaches, and officials/referees. Optionally, at the members request, these notifications can be text messaged, as well.
This feature has become an invaluable component in improving communications within our current member organizations.
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Team specific bulletins:
In addition to news items for the home page, you can also create bulletins and news items for specific sports teams. Coaches and team managers can use this feature to communicate directly with their team members and keep them informed and up to date. For important or urgent bulletins, you can optionally choose to broadcast a message to the all team members via email.
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Association news:
Your home page can display news and information pertinent to all club members. It's easy for club administrators to post news items via simple web forms found in your site's Administration area. News items can include a title, the author's name and email address, posting date, an optional photo and the body of the message. You can also set an expiration date so that you don't have to remember to delete an item after an event for instance or after it's no longer relevant. For important or urgent news, you can also choose to broadcast the message to the entire club membership via email.
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Broadcast Email:
As mentioned above, you can send out copies of news items to your entire membership via email or to specific team members only. These are powerful communications tools that make it easy to keep your membership informed and up to date.
Event Reminder Notices:
Improve your team member's attendance rate with auto-generated event reminders. Club members can choose to have reminder emails and optionally text messages sent to their cell phones for games and/or practices. Emails are sent out the day before the event and text messages are sent an hour beforehand.
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Discussion Forums:
Your site can optionally include a discussion forum (public bulletin board) where members can post messages and responses on any topic regarding your sport or organization. This allows your members to air their views, give advise or help each other without involving help from administrators. As an administrator, you'll be able to get a good idea of your membership's needs and concerns while turning your site into a two way communication tool for your entire membership. From a security standpoint, posters must register with their real name and email address and you can also appoint a moderator to monitor discussions for inappropriate content.
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Club Contacts:
Your site can contain a Contacts page listing your board members and/or other important personnel within your organization along with their addresses, phone numbers and email. This can help prospective and existing members to quickly find the right people to get in touch with. Also, this page is 'spambot' proof so you don't have to worry about your email address being obtained by spammers who search for email addresses on websites.
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Feedback Page:
Your site can have an optional feedback page where visitors can leave comments or questions for you or your board, or request help with using the web site from LeagueAthletic.com personnel. Visitors just fill in a simple form with their name, phone number, email address and their question or comment. A drop down list allows them to direct their message to the appropriate administrators you specify.
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Surveys:
Build survey forms and allow visitors to give you their feedback, vote for initiatives or just ask trivia questions. You control how the questions are presented and what type of answers are permitted (multiple choice, ranking, scales or freeform). Results can viewed by participants or held private for administrators only.
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Exchange page:
This page is used by visitors to post items for sale, swap or lost and found. Any visitor can post an item as long as they give their real email address and don't include any inappropriate content. Postings are automatically screened for inappropriate language and also cc'd via email to administration personnel you specify. Before a submission is posted, the author is emailed a key number which they must include with their message to authenticate it. These measures ensure that people post things responsibly while also making it easy and convenient.
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Team schedules:
Create your association's master schedule with our easy to use tools and have individual team schedules broken out automatically. Schedules include date, times, opponent, notes and location with a link to a web page with facility information and directions - perfect for sports league websites and youth league websites alike! Administrators can also specify that whenever an event is changed on the master schedule, all affected team members (and their parents) get emailed automatically. In addition, team members can elect to receive game reminder emails and text messages.
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Multi-team schedules:
Visitors can view more than one team's schedule in a consolidated form with our Multi-team feature. Parents who have more than one child in your program will really appreciate this. They can choose as many teams as they like and then display the consolidated schedule in either a list format or on a monthly calendar.
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Download Schedules to MS Outlook:
You can download any schedule to your computer for importing into Microsoft's Outlook program. If you're a regular Outlook user or synch your Palm or handheld computer to Outlook, this feature can be VERY handy.
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Sports Schedule Generator:
Schedulers can use our sports scheduling software to create practices, round robin game series and even playoff brackets. This can save considerable schedule preparation time.
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Assign Officials:
You can assign one or more officials (refs, umps, etc.) to each game you schedule. Officials can in turn create their own custom schedules using simple tools in their own password protected area. The website also emails each official the day before each game in order to reduce or eliminate no-shows.
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Import schedules from spreadsheets and 3rd-party sports scheduling software:
Schedules can be imported via a comma delimited text file in a standard format. These files can be easily generated from a spreadsheet such as MS Excel. If you do your planning with spreadsheets this feature can save you from double entering your schedule and thus save enormous amounts of time. In addition, you can go the other way and export your entire schedule to a file of the same format for backup. If you use stand-alone sports scheduling software such as Diamond Scheduler or Splendid City's software, you can import schedules created by these programs directly in your LeagueAthletics.com sports website.
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Team rosters:
Association members can view team roster pages that include name address, phone number and email addresses for all team members as well as their coaches and managers. Each roster page can also include an optional team photo. Rosters are password protected so that only association members can view the information. Also, this page is 'spambot' proof so you don't have to worry about your email address being obtained by spammers who search for email addresses on websites. Team rosters are an important feature for sports league management.
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Drag and drop team assignments:
Administrators can generate rosters by dragging member's names who have registered for a program and drop them on teams. This is a quick and intuitive way to make team assignments. Assignments can also be made from individual member information forms.
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Game results with commentary:
Team managers and coaches can enter game results and commentary right on the site. Results are displayed on the home page for a week and all games are shown on individual team Results pages. If specified, the results can also be emailed to your local newspapers and/or regional association. The scores are also used to calculate optional league standings explained below.
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Player Statistics:
If you're interested in tracking any of your player's game statistics, this is a great way to do it. You can set it up so that statistics are: visible to the public, only visible to users who log in with your team's (roster) password, or only visible to managers and administrators. You can configure this setting on a team by team basis if for example, you only wanted to use this feature for older players. You can define any statistical data you want to track and even specify formulas for calculated statistics.
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Team standings:
You site can have an optional intra-league standings page that shows each team's win/loss season record in sorted order ranked by a number of different formulas and even compound (more than one formula) formulas. Administrators can even specify the number of places shown for each league so that for instance, only the top three teams are shown in a given league. Likewise, standings display can be turned on or off individually for each league so that travel leagues for instance wouldn't be shown. In addition to the obvious benefit of providing up to the minute league standings, this feature also motivates team managers and/or coaches to get their scores in quickly as blank games count as ties.
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Playoff Elimination Brackets:
Easily create graphical, tournament single or double elimination brackets that automatically update with the winners or losers of previous round games on your sports team websites.
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Unlimited number of leagues:
You can organize your association with an unlimited number of leagues, sub-leagues and teams. Leagues can be organized in a tree structure with unlimited nesting of parent and child nodes. Each leaf node can have any number of teams assigned to it. This allows you to match almost any league organization structure you may already have or can even imagine.
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Area Facilities:
Your site can contain a list of the playing facilities in your area with information, directions and maps for each one. Event locations in schedules are also linked to facilities so that visitors can easily find the information they need to locate any venue. New members will especially appreciate this feature.
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Create your own pages:
You can easily create as many of your own pages as you like to add to your sports team website. Post your club by-laws, rules, policies and whatever else you want your members to see. You create pages by filling in a simple form where you specify the menu you want your page to appear under, the menu caption, and the actual contents of the page itself. Our page entry form has a built in editor with special effects such as bolding and underlining, and even font sizes, colors, alignment, pictures, links, etc.. You can supply the page's contents either by entering it directly or by copying and pasting from any HTML source such as Word or another web page. If you're not familiar with web design or HTML coding, you don't have to worry, just enter your page's contents as you would a simple letter or document using MS Word. If however, you're an expert, you can get as fancy as you like adding text attributes, tables, hyperlinks or anything else allowed by HTML coding.
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Pictures:
Your site has a Pictures page that displays thumbnails and descriptions of digital photos submitted by your members as well as albums you create. Members who are given the appropriate password can easily upload sports photos through a simple form found on your site. Their photos are then immediately displayed on a Pictures page for either a particular team or for the whole club, and also featured at random on the home page on the upper right side. Pictures can be optionally organized by team and also into albums. Submitted photos are automatically sized to fit within the sites framework and smaller copies are made for the home page and the thumbnail display on the Pictures page. Local photos are a great way to personalize your site and add interest for all your members.
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File Storage:
Each site has an incredible 500 MB miscellaneous file storage area where you can upload and link to any type of file you choose. If you're putting together a complicated web page with more than one picture, you can upload the image files to this area and then refer to them in your page. You can also store other web pages, documents and even video clips. Note that the 500 MB limit is for misc. files only. You have unlimited space for all other data such as schedules, member data, web pages, photos, etc..
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Online Storefront:
Set up your own online team store and sell merchandise right on your sports website. Features include a shopping cart with tax and shipping options, inventory management, credit card processing of orders and a complete back-end system for fulfillment. Your website can now become a fundraising tool and profit center.
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Documents Page:
Each site can have a "Documents" page where visitors can go to download club forms or documents. You can post any MS Word or Acrobat file for things like paper registration forms, waiver forms or any important document you'd like to make available to the public.
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Sponsor features:
If your organization has sponsors, you can feature them on a special web page and also individually with a rotating link at the top of all pages. The Sponsors page lists each sponsor along with a description of their business and/or services, their contact information and an optional link to their web site. Each one is also randomly featured at the top of each web page with a link to their web site or to the Sponsors page. This is a great way to acknowledge your sponsors and give them the recognition they deserve. For your sponsors, it's a great way to reach a very important and targeted audience, one they'll really appreciate.
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Web Links:
Each site has its own Links page where you can set up links to sports web sites your members would find interesting or useful such as your governing body's web page or links to pages with your sport's rules, training or coaching information. You don't need to know anything about HTML hyperlinks to add a link, you just fill in a form with the name of the page, a description and its address (URL).
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Local Weather:
All sites have a "weather app" (current area conditions) on the right column of their home page. The display lists basic weather conditions for selected cities within your state and links to detailed conditions and forecasts on the National Weather Service's web site. If you play an outdoor sport (anywhere other than California or Arizona) your visitors should find this feature extremely useful.
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Administration Area:
LeagueAthletics.com sports software is controlled and maintained using simple web forms found in your site's Administration area. Anyone you authorize can update and control your site. Web gurus are not required. Board members can create their own news items and control the look of the site, coaches or team managers can enter game results and submit team bulletins, schedulers can generate game or practice schedules, registrars and members themselves can create and update your member database and team rosters. Since this is a web application, all these things can be done simultaneously by multiple people and even by those with very limited computer experience.
You can control who has access to what with customizable security privileges. Separate password accounts can be created where you can choose from over 40 different functions the password will allow. Create a password for your registrar for example that only allows access to the member database and online registration functions. Create another for schedulers that only supports the scheduling features you specify. You can also create individual team manager passwords for each team that allows entering team bulletins, game results and pictures for only that team. In addition, you can password protect team rosters so that only members can view contact information for the team.
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Online Documentation:
Your administration area has complete online documentation for all functions and is never more than a click away. Documentation is available on its own menu choice or via context sensitive buttons found on all forms in the Administration area. The documentation includes help for all fields on all forms and also general how-to guides for help setting up your organization and understanding the flow and structure of your site. These documents are also available in the support area of this site. Click here to go there.
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Site Traffic Statistics:
Your Administration area includes a live web site traffic statistics page where you can view an up to the minute report that shows how people got to your site and where they go when they get there. You can see which areas are the most popular and which aren't. The information can indicate what information your visitors are looking for so you know where to concentrate your efforts. You can also see how people are finding you, including search engines such as Google and Yahoo and what queries they are typing that lead to your site.
You can also view an email log which shows all outgoing email activity from your site, including all recipients. This way, you can tell for sure whether or and to whom your email broadcasts and notices go to.
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Advertising Policies:
Since LeagueAthletics.com sports software and websites are hosted on a subscription basis for a fee, there is no need for us to cover your pages with advertising or allow annoying pop-up ads. Your logo and organization name are featured at the top of all pages, not ours (our small logo appears at the bottom of the site, below everything else) and you choose the colors and appearance of your site. Consequently, you won't look like the guest of another hosting company and we won't annoy your visitors and members with advertising you didn't ask for or want. If you choose however, you can feature your own sponsors at the top of all your pages and you can create links to any company you choose (within the restrictions outlined in our Terms of Use Policy) on your links page. This is totally up to you and solely for your organization's benefit.
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Hosting Infrastructure:
You can rest assured that your site is hosted on extremely fast, state of the art servers that are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 99.993% uptime. Our servers are directly connected to the Internet via a Tier 1 backbone so you won't experience any long delays getting your data. You can also rest assured that your data is backed up daily onto media that is kept off site for maximum protection. Our servers use RAID Level I hard disk technology for redundancy and fault tolerance to further secure your data. We work hard to ensure you get the performance and reliability you pay for.
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Don't see what you're looking for? Just ask us. We're adding new features all the time and we take customer suggestions and requests very seriously (how do you think we got to be so good at this?).
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