Sportsynergy

You know, rankings can be confusing.  Often times there is a club ranking, a state or province ranking, and maybe  a national ranking.  Which one is right?    What newly installed Squash Professional at the Commodore Squash Club and former famed touring Squash Doubles Professional, Jeff Mulligan suggested is to bypass all of this seemingly arbitrary floating point number b.s. and just have a Club Ladder instead.  So instead of listing players by their skill level why not just order them by the matches that they have played at the club?  We didn’t have a good answer for that, so we built out the Club Ladder.

An example of a doubles ladder

With this feature enabled, the Rankings link will be replaced with a Club Ladder link.  The administrator of the reservation system is in charge of adding members to the ladder.  But once the ladder is set up, the members themselves take over. The members are the ones to set up the challenge matches and record the scores.  The new feature is designed to get people playing more, promote a heathy competition, and mix up the matches.

An example of a singles ladder

If you are interested in using the Club Ladder, drop me a line at: adam.preston@sportsynergy.net.

We have been there.  You know a name at the club, you have heard people talking about a person, but you don’t know who they are.  If only the  Member Directory included a picture of all of the players.

Well, today we are announcing the Gravatar.  For those not aware of what a Gravatar is, it’s basically a photo that is linked to an email address.  You can learn more about how to use the Gravar service here.  Why are we talking about Gravatars you may be wondering.  Well, here at Sportsynergy we are now using Gravatars to display photos of the members.  Here is how it works:

When going into the Member Directory, you will now see a photo displayed under each players profile.   If a user hasn’t set up a Gravatar of their own, they will see a generic image displayed.  For those souls who have gone to the Gravater site and set up their profile, their profile will include a nice picture of themselves (or whatever picture they chose). We encourage this.

To set this up, just go to the Gravatar site and set up a profile with using the same email address you have on file with us.  Really, thats all there is to it.  If you have any questions, with this, please let us know at support@sportsynergy.net.

Where you are running the squash or racquetball program there may be a situation when you want to take over making the court reservations and not let the members do this themselves.  With the introduction of “locked” reservations, now you can.  A locked reservation is going to show up on the main reservation page with a little lock next to the time. This symbol will indicate that you must be an Administrator to make a change to this reservation.  With a locked reservation, the Administrator will have to put peoples names in him/herself.  The Administrator also has the option to unlock the reservation, this will open it back up for anyone to jump in.

If you have any questions about this, please let us know.

Not every block of time on a court is used for two people or more people playing a game.  Sometimes, the pro may want to have drills with 5 other people.  Or maybe a group lesson.  Now all of this is possible with a little something we call Court Events.  Administrators of the system can go in through Club Preferences and set up one of more of these Court Events.  Setting up these events is easy.  All you have to do is come up with a name and a player limit.  Now, if you leave the player limit to 0, the Court Event is going to look a lot like the way the Events worked in the past.  Its pretty simple though.  If you want to limit the Event to 6 people, then set the player limit to 6.  Club Administrators can book these event just like they did before, but now people can put their name down.  If you have any questions, please let us know at support@sportsynergy.net.

We have been busy lately. In addition to a lot of random fixes, we just added a new feature that will allow you get your next match time texted to you.  To use this simply send a text message to our server at 312-386-5501 with the following message:

{your Sportsynergy id} next

Your Sportsynergy ID is a unique identifier for you in the court reservation system.  This can be found in your Account Settings under ‘Edit Account’.

Enjoy!

If you haven’t checked out our Facebook page yet, head on over there now.  We promise not to flood your feed with random posts.  Keep your eye on this for tips and tricks using our software as well as what we have coming down the pike (or is it pipe?)  Enjoy.

If when recording a doubles score you have been confused on how the rankings worked, don’t worry you are not alone.  Up until recently when signing up for a doubles match with another player for the first time, the system took the average of the two individual rankings to form the team’s ranking.  This makes sense.  For example if Sam is ranked 3 and Fred is ranked a 5, their ranking as a team would be a 4.  Got it?

Now, what happens if Sam practices everyday and watches a bunch of squash videos and manages to improve his game? Now Sam’s ranking is a 5.  The problem is when Sam and Fred return to  the doubles court, their team ranking is still in the system as a 4.  To fix this we are now calculating the team ranking every time a score is recorded, instead of getting the team ranking from the database, which could be outdated.  So now, when the Sam and Fred play together their team ranking will be 5, the average of their current individual rankings.   Hopefully with this little update, the doubles rankings will be adjusted more accurately for everybody.

As you may have noticed we just released a new version of clubpro that looks a little bit different. We have streamlined and simplified the user interface, but managed to keep in tact most of the same award winning functionality. Here are the new features:

A New Look
A new navigation bar will simplify using the application, especially for administrators. For current administrators, the links that were found in System View can now be found under Administration. For Users, the menu items Edit Account, My Buddies, My Reservations, and Change Password can be found under My Account.

Club Events
This section will display upcoming events. To set up a Club Event, a Club Administrator can navigate to the Administration menu then to Club Events. On the Club Events setup screen, just click on the link that says “add one now” to get started. Once a Club Event is setup, all visitors to the site will be able to see the Club Event and the date displayed on the left hand side of the screen. Clicking on the Club Event link will display the Club Event information page which includes the description of the Event along with a list of members who are interested in coming.

Recent Activity
Before when a match was recorded, emails were sent out to all of the players with the match results. This still happens but now these same results are posted to the Recent Activity section. This way, everyone in the club keep a better eye on who is playing and who is winning…and losing.

Enjoy!

You may be asking yourself: Why is he telling me this? Or, what is open source?  Or even, why is he calling me baby?  There are very good answers to all of these questions, well, except maybe for the last one.  You see, earlier this week, we moved all of our code out of our private area into the vast open spaces of the Internet.  Now, if you want to run your own instance of the clubpro application, technically you can.  All you have to do in order to do this is basically download the source code, set up the database and boom, your done.  The main reason we did this is to hopefully take advantage of the collective mind.  If you are a software developer (or if you are just really looking for something to do), and you want to make an improvement to the code, now you can.  For example, if your club really wants to have a photo included on the users profile you are free to add that in.  Please contact me, if you are interested in becoming a Sportsynergy Clubpro contributor.

Well, we just put the finishing touches on the latest version of the Clubpro.  In this version we are pleased to introduce one of the most exciting features that we have been working on lately,  Clubpro Light, a free version of our flagship Clubpro offering.   Clubpro Light offers the same reliable, user friendly, online court reservation  service, but without many of the bells and whistles that come with the full version.  If you are a club or university that is interested in saving time and money while increasing competition with your racquet sport programs,  but not quite ready to jump in with both feet, Clubpro Light is a great alternative for you.  Register today for a free account here.