» Attention: School swim teams ➞ click here, Non-swim teams ➞ click here.

Covered in this Article:

➧ Getting Started

Accessing your "Manage Team" Admin Console

Import your Roster and Meet History

Configure your Site Settings

Create your Stripe Account for Online Payment

Confirm Your Season and Age Up Date

Add Content to your Website

➧ People and Communication

Manage your People/Roster

Create and Assign Roles

Promote the Swimtopia Mobile App to Your Team

Communicate with your Members

➧ Registration

Create your Registration Form

➧ Merchandise and Sponsorships

Set up your Merchandise Items and Online Store

Set up your SwimOutlet Team Store

Set up your Sponsorships

➧ Schedule and Meet Management

Add Meets and Events to your Schedule

Learn about our Diving, Divisional, and Double Dual Scoring Features (if needed)

Test Drive Swimtopia Meet

Swimtopia Meet - Best Practices and Meet Settings Checklists

➧ Benchmarks

Set up your Record Books

Set up your Time Standards Sets

➧ USA Swimming Teams

  Connect to USA Swimming

➧ Billing & Product Support

Product Support

Billing Support

Getting Started     

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Accessing your "Manage Team" Admin Console

You will design most of your website from the front end, but the "Manage Team" admin console is where you will set up and manage your team.

After you have activated your account, you can log in and access the admin console by clicking on Manage Team from the menu at the top right of your screen.

If you did not receive an activation email after signing up for a subscription, check your spam/trash folder. If you still cannot locate this email, contact our Customer Support team for assistance. 

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Import your Roster and Meet History

The options below provide an avenue to import your data from your existing system into your site. For future seasons, the registration process allows you to collect the data from your members to keep your member information up-to-date.

➧ Active/Hy-Tek Team Manager

➧ Active SwimManager

➧ TeamUnify

➧ Excel Spreadsheet (Swimmingly or No Software)

» Tip: We recommend importing your team history first. Having that history in place helps you see how you can manage this data.

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Configure your Site Settings

From your admin console (Welcome Menu > Manage Team), you'll see a link to a Settings menu for a list of site-wide settings and tools. 

Each of these settings should be reviewed to ensure your site is set up for your team guidelines.

• Modify your team's name and abbreviation (if needed)
• Add a team logo, set your preferred course, and time zone
• Confirm your billing contact (keep this updated to avoid disruption in service)
• Set your Meet Entry Preferences (allow parents to sign up for events...)
• Confirm your Athlete Age Groups
• Configure your Athlete Roster Groups (if using)

The following Help Center articles will guide you through each of these steps:

➞ Admin Menu

➞ Manage Team: Site-wide Settings

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Create your Stripe Account for Online Payment

While you are in your Settings, if your team intends to take online payment for registration and/or merchandise, now would be a good time to set up a Stripe account from within your site (existing Stripe accounts created outside of our system are not supported through our integration). 

This can be done at any time before you open registration, but we suggest starting early since the process can take time if you need to gather the required information about your team. 

➞ Quick Start Guide - Enabling Stripe

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Confirm Your Season and Age Up Date

When you sign up for a team website, the active season will automatically be created using the year as the Name and Start and End Dates based on a calendar year. Additional seasons will be created if you import your roster and meet history. You can change these fields and create additional seasons as needed.

You need to set an Age Up Date if your team uses one to determine what age group your athletes compete in based on their age at or before that date.

➧ What is a Season?

A Season is simply a span of time during which your team’s activities take place. 

• A season defines a range of time, from the start date to the end date (default is the calendar year).
• Seasons are used to organize your events, athlete affiliations, role assignments, sponsorships, and registrations.
• The selected active season determines which season is active, regardless of the current date.
• Members affiliated with the active season are included in Communications and Reports.
• If a season has an age-up date, that date is used to determine athlete ages for age groups.
• By setting the active season you can control when your team "rolls over to the next season."

➞ Creating & Managing Your Seasons

➞ Age-Up Dates

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Add Content to your Website

No need for a trained website designer! We provide simple tools (called Snippets) to design your website quickly. Focus on the most important information first to get your website up and running - color scheme, page arrangement, navigation, and important content.

As time allows, you can explore all the design options as time allows. (If transitioning from another system, you can copy/paste relevant information into Text Area Snippets.)

➞ Pages and Navigation

➞ Editing Page Content with Snippets

➞ Site Settings: Header, Logo, Colors, and Background Images

➧ Do you need some inspiration?

• Check out how other teams have set up their sites ➞ Example Customer Sites
• Check out our training videos ➞ ▶️ Training Videos: Your Site's Content and Appearance

People and Communication    

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Manage your People/Roster

If there are other committee members or your coach who need access to view or set up specific areas within your team site, manually create their accounts (if not already in the system). In the next section, you'll learn how to assign them to roles with appropriate permissions so they can get started.

➞ Adding New Admins

➞ Adding a Coach

➞ Managing Your People/Roster 

▶️ Training Video - "Manage Team" Admin Portal Overview

If you imported your team roster, this article will show you how you can view the imported information within your team site, and export the data if needed ➞ Viewing / Exporting Imported Team Roster and History

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Create and Assign Roles

Create Roles with specific permissions and assign committee members to these roles so they can access the admin console (under Manage Team) to perform their tasks. Assigning members to specific roles also allows for communication targeted directly to these roles.

➞ Defining Roles

➞ Assigning Volunteers to Roles

▶️ Training Video – Roles

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Promote the Swimtopia Mobile App to Your Team

We’ve provided some tools to make it easy for you to promote the mobile app to your parents ➞ Tools to Inform Parents about Swimtopia’s Mobile App

➞ Mobile App Information (for admins and parents)

▶️ Training Video - Swimtopia's Mobile App

The mobile app is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

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Communicate with your Members

Your members may start looking for information about the next season, so you could begin communicating with them to let them know about your new team site, your new registration process, and the benefits of downloading the mobile app for important team communication (weather alerts, and meet delays) and other meet features.

If you have imported your membership/roster, you can send these messages directly from the Communications page. When ready, you can send an email to let them know when registration, meet and volunteer sign-up are open. 

➞ Communications

➞ How-To Guides for Parents

▶️ Training Videos - Communication 

Registration    

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Create your Registration Form

Ideally, your members become affiliated with your team each season through the registration process. Regardless of whether you import a past or active season roster, or don't import data at all, we suggest that you create a registration form and invite your members to register.

We highly suggest keeping your registration as simple as possible to ensure your families can complete the process efficiently. If you plan to sell your merchandise and/or sponsorships and allow members to sign up for meets/jobs during registration, you may want to get those areas set up first and then create your registration form, but you can always come back to update your form later as well.

The registration section of our Help Center provides step-by-step instructions and tips on each section available within a registration form, and includes the specific help articles listed below:

➞ Registration Section

➞ Registration Checklist (for Teams)

➞ Registration Tips & Tricks

▶️ Training Videos - Registration

If you find yourself questioning the best way to set up your form(s), feel free to reach out to our support team. We will do our best to provide direction based on your specific requirements. 

Merchandise and Sponsorships

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Set up your Merchandise Items and Online Store

Create each merchandise item you plan to offer in your registration form, and/or your Online Store. You can also sell your sponsorships and collect coach donations by setting these up as "merchandise items."

➞ Creating Merchandise Items

➞ Setting up the Online Store* 

*Features available to customers on our Premium tier PREMIUM

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Set up your SwimOutlet Team Store

We have partnered with SwimOutlet, the web's most popular swim shop, to streamline the management of your merchandise offerings directly from your team site!

If you want to take the hassle out of ordering and distributing the bulk of your team gear and spirit wear, allow your members to purchase through your SwimOutlet Team Store and receive orders at their doorsteps!

➞ See our SwimOutlet Team Store Snippet article to set up your own SwimOutlet Team Store (or connect your existing store) to your site.

▶️ Quick Feature Demo - Adding a SwimOutlet Team Store

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Set up your Sponsorships

Create your sponsorship categories (i.e., Gold, Silver Bronze). Then determine which category to assign each sponsor, and in what order they should display on your website. This setup is all done on the Manage Team admin console. Then using the website configuration options (under the Welcome menu), add the Sponsor Snippet on any page of your site to display your sponsors.

➞ Sponsorships

➞ Sponsors Snippet

Schedule and Meet Management    

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Add Meets and Events to your Schedule

Unless your league is importing your meet schedule (only available to 100% league-wide customers), you can create Meet and Job Templates (one-time setup) to apply to a "New (Empty) Swim Meet," or use the "Import Meet Event File" option to import a meet file and save the meet information as a Meet Template to apply to future meets. 

You can also create your non-meet RSVP Calendar Events, and apply a Job Template, or manually add jobs & shifts to your meets and events for volunteer sign-up.

➞ Quick-Start Guide to Setting Up Meets

➞ Meet Templates 

➞ Job Templates*

➞ Creating Calendar Events (Banquets, Socials, Meetings...)*

▶️ Training Video - Meets and Entries

▶️ Training Video - Your Volunteering Schedule

*Features available to customers on our Premium tier PREMIUM

» Tip: If you're creating your teams' meets, we highly suggest creating your Meet & Job Templates to save you time each season. Once created, you can just apply these events/settings and jobs/shifts to your meets each season. Quick and easy!

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Learn about our Diving, Divisional, and Double Dual Scoring Features (if needed)

➞ Diving Support Overview

➞ Scoring by Division

➞ Double Dual Scoring

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Test Drive Swimtopia Meet

Swimtopia Meet is included with your subscription, and accessible from your meets (after the entries are merged), or via a desktop application download if using a timing system.

➞ Swimtopia Meet Overview & Test Drive Options

➞ Getting Started with Swimtopia Meet

▶️ Training Videos - Meet Management with Swimtopia Meet

» Note: Swimtopia Meet is only fully supported using the Google Chrome browser (version 117+ Sept. 2023). If you experience printing issues, Chrome is usually the solution. Other browsers are generally supported (Edge 117+, Firefox 119+, Safari 17+), with the exception of Internet Explorer. (All major browsers are supported in the team management system, but some reports will print best using Chrome.)

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Best Practices and Meet Settings Checklists

We've compiled a best practices and meet settings checklist covering topics beyond the initial setup of your meet in your team management site. We want you to take advantage of all the great features and configuration options available.

➞ See our Best Practices for Running a Successful Meet (Start to Finish) Help Center article for a comprehensive checklist, and our Meet Settings Checklist article after your meet entries have been merged.

Benchmarks   

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Set up your Record Books

Don't forget to create your record books. If you import your historical meet data, this can be a quick process. You just need to set up your record books (Pool, Team etc.,) and use our feature to find the records on your site. Any records not already on your site will need to be entered manually. There is no option to import records at this time.

If you are using our meet management tool, Swimtopia Meet, to run your meets, you will have the option to include your record books.

➞ Creating a Record Book

▶️ Training Video - For the Record Books

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Set up your Time Standards Sets

If your league does not share Time Standards with your team through our automatic league sharing feature, you can create your own to apply to your Meet Templates and applicable meets.

➞ Time Standards & Qualifying Times Overview

USA Swimming Teams    

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Connect to USA Swimming

We integrate with SWIMS 3.0, syncing USA Swimming membership information and status with each member’s Swimtopia account information.

If you confirmed that you are a USA Swimming team on the Swimtopia signup screen, or have connected your Swimtopia account to your USA Swimming account, your team site is configured to integrate your member data with USA Swimming. 

You must have Swimtopia selected as your team management vendor on the USA Swimming Club Portal to utilize our integration features. This selection should be done now, if not already completed. 

▶️ Training Video - SWIMS 3.0 Integration Overview

Billing & Product Support     

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