With a little bit of housekeeping, your SwimTopia league website will be ready for your new season to start! We have put together a list of steps to make this as quick and easy as possible. We also have a condensed checklist version of this information if you prefer ➞ New Season Setup Checklist for Leagues
» Note: If this is your first time setting up your site, See ➞ SwimTopia Quick Start Guide (for Leagues)
Covered in this Article:
➧ Create Your New Season
➧ Steps After Creating Your New Season
- Update League Site Settings
- Update Access to Site Administrators and Coordinators
- Update Your Shared Acknowledgement Sections
- Update Meet Templates and Meets & Events Schedule
- Update Role Assignments
- Create or Update Benchmarks (Records, Time Stds)
- Update Sponsorships
- Edit Content on Your Front-Facing Site
- New Season Instructions/Reminders to Share with Team Admins
➧ Additional Setup Support Tools
Create Your New Season
➧ 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 current season determines which season is active, regardless of the current date.
- Members affiliated with the active current 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 current season you can control when your team "rolls over to the next season."
➧ How do I update my season?
When the current date falls outside the time that defines your current season, you'll see a reminder that your season is out of date. When you go to Manage League > Schedule > Seasons and click on Fix the Current Season, your new season will be created for you. Or you can select +Add Season to create one manually. Make sure to also set your league's age-up date for the new season (if applicable).
➧ Why did information disappear?
Once you change your season, you might notice that the previous season's role assignments, people/roster, division assignments, meets/events, sponsors, and reporting information seem to “disappear." This is because this information is tied to the previous season.
Past season data can be found by selecting the season from a drop-down box or from the left margin where applicable (Registration/Schedule), or from the Reports tab.
Learn more about this topic ➞ Creating & Managing Your Seasons
Steps After Creating Your New Season
Update League Site Settings:
➧ Confirm League Billing Contact
Most configurations within your site-wide Settings will remain the same each season, but your Billing Contact could eventually change. SwimTopia sends renewal reminders to the email listed as your Billing Contact, so it's imperative that this remain up-to-date to avoid any disruption in service.
➧ Confirm Online Payment Information
If you plan to collect League Fees online or sell merchandise through your online store, ensure your Stripe account is in good standing each season. If a new volunteer is taking over this role and they are not already listed as a Business Representative or Team Member on your Stripe account, you can update them here ➞ Stripe Account Access & Management - Add/Remove Team Members
Resolving issues or setting up an account can take time, so we suggest getting this started right away.
» Note: If you do not yet have a Stripe account, you will need to set up an account to accept online payments. Reference our step-by-step tutorial ➞ Stripe Account Setup
➧ Update Division Assignments
At the beginning of each new season, you'll need to assign your teams to the correct division. Go to Manage League > Settings > Division Assignments, and review the list of SwimTopia teams. If any SwimTopia teams are missing from the list, contact leagues@swimtopia.com. Use the drop-down menu next to each team to select the appropriate division assignment:
➞ See more about Setting up Divisions for Your League.
Update Access to Site Administrators and Coordinators
As you transition to a new season, one of the first tasks is to ensure the correct people have access to either all or specific areas of the league site. When you go to your People page, the members listed are those with an affiliation to the current season (you can easily change to a different season the season drop-down box).
➧ Full Access (Red Badge) Site Admins
Admin accounts from the previous season, those with the red "Admin" badge, will automatically carry over each season in People. If there are admins who will not return, you can click the Revoke Admin button in their profile to remove their access.
» Tip: To give you more control over who has the ability to make changes that could affect your site, we suggest limiting the number of administrators with full admin privileges.
➧ Limited Permission (Role-Based) Site Admins
Many Board Members and other volunteers only need to access specific areas such as People, Meets/Events, or Reporting. You can grant partial admin privileges based on a Role to limit access of each volunteer.
➞ Learn more about managing access for your site admin and coordinator roles in our Adding New Admins and Defining Roles articles.
➧ Manually Add Season Affiliations
You can manually add a Season Affiliation to members by clicking their name on the People page. (If they are not visible in the People list, you can search for them in a previous season using the Search function at the top.) On the right, you will see “Add affiliation for.” Select the current season from the drop-down box, then click “Save.”
Learn more about managing your members ➞ People/Roster
Review Shared Acknowledgement Sections
Review your Shared Acknowledgements each season to determine if you need to make any updates (Manage League > Registration > Shared Acknowledgement Sections). If any changes need to be made, we HIGHLY recommend you create a new Shared Acknowledgment versus editing the existing one as changes made will propagate to all past forms. Please refer to this Help Center article to determine the best way to manage any changes to an existing acknowledgment ➞ Managing Changes to Shared Acknowledgements
You can use the icons to the right of each form to copy, edit or delete an existing form. Forms will automatically be added to all teams' registration forms AFTER the Acknowledgement has been published. Any teams who have already opened registration will need to manually add it.
Update Meet Templates and Meets & Events Schedule
➧ Update Meet Templates
Review your Meet Templates each season to ensure they're set up properly. Pay close attention to the following sections:
- Check that your Entry Rules & Seeding/Scoring Rules still apply for the new season.
- Check your Eligibility requirements, paying special attention to any "only accept entry times since" dates.
- Check that any selected Time Standard Sets are still correct
➧ Update Meets and Events Schedule
If you'd like to send us your league's meet schedule at the beginning of the season, we can push those meets down to the sites of all of your SwimTopia teams, and they'll be automatically added to their Schedules.
To send a league meet schedule file to us, follow the instructions in this Help Center article ➞ Importing Your League Meet Schedule.
Update Role Assignments
Role assignments are associated with seasons. Some roles are set up so the assignments are reassigned every season, and others are set up so the assignments are ongoing from year to year when assignees do not change often.
➧ Seasonal roles
If the setting, “This role is reassigned every season” is checked, the role assignments will be reset at the change of a season, and all members who were assigned to those roles last season will no longer be assigned to those roles. If you know that any of your members are repeating their roles from last season, you have the ability to manually reassign them, but keep in mind, you won't be able to assign somebody to a role if they aren’t a member of the current season.
See ➞ Update Access to Site Administrators & Other Coordinators if you need to manually affiliate someone to the season.
➧ Ongoing roles
If the setting, “This role is reassigned every season” is unchecked, role assignments will carry over from season to season. Once you've updated your Current Season, you'll see people in your Roster with this Role badge next to their name. If a member is not returning to one of these roles in the new season, you’ll need to manually remove them from their role assignment.
» Note: Once a Role has been set up as being reassigned each season (or not), it's best to leave that setting as-is. If you need to change that setting, it's better to delete the Role and create a new one. Changing the setting from one season to the next may produce unexpected results for previous vs new assignees.
Learn more about how Roles are used ➞ Defining Roles
➧ Shared Roles
Leagues can create Shared Roles that are pushed down to their SwimTopia teams. Shared Roles are used for positions that are common to all of the league’s teams, and especially when the league admins would like visibility to the assignments for those positions as well as the ability to easily communicate to everyone assigned to that role. Examples include: Team President, League Rep, Head Coach, Meet Director, Technical Lead, etc. Each season, you'll want to review your Shared Role definitions and make any adjustments necessary for the new season.
» Note: If a shared role is seasonal, last season’s role assignments will “disappear,” so you’ll want to remind your teams to assign names to those Shared Roles.
➞ See more about Shared Roles.
Create or Update Benchmarks (Records, Time Stds)
➧ Update Shared League Record Books
Create or update your Shared League Record Books to display on the league site, and share with your teams to apply those records to their Meet Maestro meets. League admins can also directly attach them to meets listed on the league site as needed.
➞ See more about League Record Books
➧ Update Shared Time Standard Sets
Create or update your Shared Time Standards Sets and apply these to your Shared Meet Templates, so your teams can access these Time Standards to apply to applicable meets.
➞ See more about League Shared Time Standard Sets
Update Sponsorships
If you are displaying league sponsors on your site, be aware that Sponsorships are tracked per season. Once you update your Season, old sponsors will no longer show up in the section of your website that is created by the Sponsor snippet. We offer a handy tool for copying Sponsorships that renew from one Season to another:
Go to Manage League > Website > Sponsors > Sponsorships
- Select the last season
- Select all the Sponsorships that will be renewing for the new Season - you can either select all by checking the box above the top of the list, or you can select individual Sponsorships from within the list
- Once you've selected one or more Sponsorships, you'll see a drop-down box that says "Copy to Season"
- Select your new season
Once the Sponsorships are copied to the new season, you can edit their categories. And you can add new Sponsors to your new season's Sponsorships.
➞ See more about Sponsorships.
Edit Content on Your SwimTopia Site
Review your website content to see if there are any references to policies, dates, deadlines, etc. that are relevant to the last season but may have changed for the new season.
You can edit those pages directly by going to Manage Site > Edit Page Content.
➞ See more about Managing Your Website.
➧ Need some inspiration??
Check out how other SwimTopia Leagues have set up their sites ➞ Example Customer League Sites, or watch our recorded webinar (below) to learn how you can utilize additional website design options.
➞ direct link to our Looking Good! video.
New Season Instructions & Reminders to Share with Team Admins:
➧ Update Shared Roles
Remind your team admins to review any league-shared roles on their team sites to assign the correct individuals for the new season.
➧ Check Registration Forms to Verify League-Shared Waivers
Team admins should verify that the correct league-shared waiver is attached to their registration form for the current season on their team site. Any registration forms that were opened prior to new waivers being published by the league will need to have the new form(s) manually added.
➧ Verify Meet Dates are Accurate if Team is Adding Manually
If your teams would like to add the meets to their schedules prior to us running your league schedule import (example: in order to collect volunteer signups during registration), it is critical that the meet dates they use match the dates that will be on the schedule import. As long as those dates match, the import tool will automatically merge the imported meet with the existing meet on the team's calendar. If the dates don't match, duplicate meets will be created.
Additional Setup Support Tools
➧ New Site Admins - Are you a new League Site Admin this season? ➞ Check out our Quick Start Guide (New Site Admin).
➧ Product Support Options - We offer many support options to cater to your needs. Our robust Help Center, is accessible day or night. You'll find helpful step-by-step guides, topic-focused training videos on our very own YouTube Channel, and many tips and tricks within our Community section. ➞ View All Support Options
➧ What's New? - Want to catch up on all the latest and greatest changes since you've been gone? You can visit the "What's New" page from the top of your "Manage Team admin console" at any time to catch up. We also document the updates in our Help Center ➞ See our What's New? Making SwimTopia Better for You! article for details.
➧ Billing Questions - We are happy to answer any questions ➞ See our Billing Support & Policies Overview article for details.
➧ League Features Overview - If you need a refresher of all the great league features available, watch the recorded workshop webinar at your leisure.
➞ direct link to our League Features video.
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