sincSports

All websites come with a place to upload the sponsors for your event.  Organizations or events that have a large number of sponsors have asked for a different way to present those to their participants rather than just showing a large number of them down the left hand side of the website.  We’ve updated the options for sponsors to give a bit more flexibility and added a “neat” effect for them as well.

Now, you can indicate how many you’d like to show on the left and link to the rest of your sponsors which will display them on your sponsors page.  Clicking on each sponsor will show a “flipping” effect where the sponsor image will flip over and display the name of the sponsor and a link to their page on the back of the “card”.  In the image below, 2 of the sponsors have been clicked on, so the name and link appear.

We recently made some adjustments to our “Upload Background” page.  You can now customize your website even more by uploading background images of your choosing.  We always had this to some extent, but the new screen gives you a few more options.

You can choose to:

• Upload a large image that just appears at the top center of the page
• Upload a small image that will repeat horizontally and vertically on the page.
• Upload an image that repeats only horizontally across the top of the screen.
• Upload an image that repeats vertically starting from the top center of the screen

Clicking ‘Upload background’ will take you to the new screen so you can upload these different types of background images.

The sincMe bar is a recent addition to all sincSports.com websites.  We’ve spent a great deal of time researching the types of questions we get from teams, coaches, managers, tournament directors and athletes daily and the struggles some have had when working with the website.  We hope that this tool gives all users a more clear understanding of how to interact with each website when they visit to register for an event, check their schedule, update their profile, etc.

Why the sincMe bar?

We wanted to make a few things clear:

1. If you’ve used the sincSports.com system before, simply use your existing account which will pull in your information so you don’t need to do any extra work.  If you see that bar on the top of the screen, you’ll know that you can use your sincSports.com account with that website
2. It will Always be there. As you navigate through the website, the bar will always be at the top of the screen. Each person should be able to easily locate the “Tasks” (Team, athlete or club depending on their role) on the top bar.  If the “Tasks” do not appear, the role you are currently logged in with is probably not connected to this event.
3. As we continue to expand on the number of features and pages available with our event management system, getting the help each person is looking for gets more and more challenging. We’ve been building out help for each page which can be accessed by clicking on the question mark icon or the FAQ tab on any page.  If the answer to the question isn’t there (and the user is logged in), they can submit their FAQ to us and we can add it to the page.

How does the sincMe bar work?

There are 2 different “stages” to the sincMe bar.  When the user first arrives at the website and after logging in.

Not logged in yet

When you arrive at the website for the event you’d like to attend, we want to help point you in the right direction.  If you’ve used the website before, simply click “Login” and enter your information which will you to continue right on your way.  If not, and you need a little direction, check out the other options..  Placing your mouse cursor over the items on the sincMe bar will show what type of information can be found there once logged in.  There are 2 items on there that should help you figure out how to login to the system:

1. “Help me get started” – This will take you to a page where you will first identify your role for the event.  Are you an athlete participating? A college coach attending for recruiting purposes? Or a team coach, manager, etc?  Once you identify that information, we will ask for some information to find out if you have an account already.  Many people are added as an assistant coach, manager, or an athlete on the team which creates an account for you without even knowing it.  Logging in with that information will ensure you are corrected to the right team.  When  connected to the correct team, the “Tasks” for the event will appear on the sincMe bar, making it very simple to figure out what you need to do. Creating a new account which has no access to the team in the event makes it difficult to figure out how to interact with the website since that new account is connected properly.  The “Help me get started” process is meant to help new users find the correct account and get started right away.
2. Question mark icon – For those who do not choose to go through the “Help me get started” process, the question mark icon can provide some more information (although we highly recommend going through “help me get started” if you do not know if an account exists for you already).  It allows you to get your login information sent to you if you know you have an account, gives help for the page you’re on, links to a searchable help page or gives a link to the support forum where you can post a question for the sincSports staff.

Once the user is logged in

When a user logs into the system, he/she only can have access to one team or club at a time. We’ve discovered that team coaches and managers don’t always understand this so we’ve added a screen to point this out when logging in.  If a person has access to more than one team, club, tournament, etc, this window will appear.  It explains that only one type of access is used at a time, it will let you set the primary role you want for your account and also give the option to “hide this” if you don’t want to see it the next time you login.

Once a role is selected, it will appear at the top left of the sincMe bar.  Placing your mouse over the key to the left of your current role, will show all of the other types of access you have.  Each team that is registered for your event will have a check mark next to it and moving the cursor over it will explain just that.  You can then easily switch your access to any team just by clicking on the team name in that list.

To the right of your current access level will be the “Tasks” (Team, Player or Club).  These will appear for people who are connected to a team that has successfully registered for the event. The tasks are set by the director and should be the list of items that they’d like their participants to complete for each event (Directors can set these by: going to the globe icon page -> Then the participants tab).  Clicking on any item will take the user right to that task – for the role they are currently logged in with. The image above shows that this person is logged in as the coach for the Blue Sox. Clicking on any team task, will take him to the page where that task can be completed.

On the right hand side of the menu will be the help icon again to give additional help to you as you navigate through the website.

We truly hope that the sincMe bar will make the system more transparent to our users and explain how to interact with each website more efficiently.  We hope that introducing the sincMe bar will reduce duplication, help people find their tasks for each event more easily, provide additional help to people who have more questions and just make everyone’s lives a bit easier!

Later today, we will be performing an update to the system which will change the way emails are sent through our system. The purpose of this change is to make sure we provide additional options to ensure mail is delivered to the directors using our system when a team replies to them.

Here’s the breakdown of how the mail system works and the reason we do it this way:
1. When you send a message through the website, we create a FROM address that is specific to your event (ie. caslsc.director@sincsports.com)

The reason we do this is to prevent the message as being marked as spam. When you send out an email, the recipients email system checks to make sure the website that sent the message matches the from address on that email. If a message is sent from the soccerincollege.com website but has a from address of Johnny@yahoo.com, the email account will not match the sender and is likely to flag it as spam.

2. When a team coach or manager replies to that message, it comes back to us and then we send it back out to the main email accounts on your website (found on your SETTINGS page)

And here’s the change. When sending those messages back to you, since it is a smaller volume of emails, we were changing the FROM on the email to the address of the person sending the email. This does not match our server which is sending the message so it can be marked as spam – but since it was a smaller volume of messages it does not get flagged as spam in most cases. The reason we did it this way was so you could quickly and easily hit the REPLY button to write them back. However, we know how important it is for all directors to receive all messages so we will be sending messages back to you with a FROM address of MailSystem@sincsports.com.  The address of the person who emailed will appear at the top of the note which will just need to be entered in the TO box when replying.

If you think your mail system might be blocking some of the messages from teams, you can also try adding MailSystem@sincsports.com to your “Safe Sender’s list” which should help make sure you receive all messages.

If you would prefer that messages come with a from address of the person who sent it and you know your mail system won’t block them, you can adjust the settings for your event mail system to have it continue to work as it has been. Go to your event website, login, click on the Globe icon on the top menu and then click on “Event Mail System” (6th item down).   You can then click on “Change to sender’s email address” to change it back. We will then send you a verification code so we can make sure you received the message before making the change.

We recently made a number of updates to our registration process with one goal in mind – make it as simple as possible for the teams to get registered for your events.

Starting with the registration page: We changed it to drop down boxes and show only one step at a time:

Once the person selects their team’s information, they will be presented with the list of teams already in the system.

To filter out this list, the user can select their club in the “Filter by club…” drop down box which will show them only the teams in their club. Alternatively, they can click the letter in the “Jump to teams starting with…” if there is a long list and they want to jump right to team names starting with the letter “E” for example.

If the person does not find their team in the list, they can click the “Add New Team” button which will allow them to create a new team.

If the person finds their team in the list, they can click on the team name, which will pull up details on that team. This will allow them to make sure they are selecting the correct team. If it is correct, they need to click the “Register this team” button which will take them to the registration form.  The new flow jumps past the “Identify team contacts” page which has caused some confusion in the past.

Once the team is selected (or a new team is added) the person goes directly to the registration form.  Since we no longer use the “Identify your contacts” page, the contacts must be selected here. The person will be able to choose an existing contact from the team by selecting them from the list, click the “+” sign to add a new contact, or click the “Club staff” icon to select a different staff member from the club.