TIP: How to Best Use "LEAGUES" and League Manager - FAQ

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bacolon
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by bacolon » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:16 am

the league concept is what sets iscore apart. I just think people get confused by the word "league". I think of it more as a "season" or "season segment" concept. If you want to check out our site, http://www.sharksbaseball.net/10U_Sharks.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (shameless plug), you can see how I created a season (fall 2010 for example) and I've also created segments within that season (Labor Day Tournament). In this way our web site visitors can see not only our team's results in totality, but they can also "drill down" to see how we did in smaller segments. This concept also helps with coaching, as I can monitor our teams progress through stats (the password for the stats is sharks1) and hit charts. I can't say enough about ftm and the iscore product!
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FTMSupport
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by FTMSupport » Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:11 am

We agree that the term League is a little misleading --- when trying to describe the functionality, we usually start calling it a "Grouping" since it could really be anything from describing seasons, to night games vs day games, to any way you want to group your statistics. Thank you for sharing your experience with Leagues as well.
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PetroGuy
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by PetroGuy » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:53 am

I agree on the name 'League'. In my head, I think of it more as a 'tag'. For anyone familiar with tagging photos or blog posts or anything like that, the word tag will clear up a lot of confusion on how to use leagues. I use leagues like bacolon does for my son's team and it works quite well. I have a league (tag) for each tournament). I would also suggest if you are playing in tournaments to also create leagues for pool play and bracket play. Those are also some good ways to drill down.
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OhioTex
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by OhioTex » Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:37 am

at a boy acknowledgment for sharks website...

An excelent example of having your own custom web page and still finding value in the ftm team site subscription, even though sharks site does do not use the basic ftm web site template/ main page, they do use the underlying components. Good example of both worlds, custom organization web site and use of iscore team web subscription stats. shows power of leagues, but highlights the power of the team site subscription and one step exporting to update web access..
70clcl
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by 70clcl » Tue Mar 08, 2011 6:48 pm

I'm sorry if this is discussed elsewhere, but this seemed like a good post to put this question...

I tend to use leagues in a very normalized fashion. (I use multiple generic league names to uniquely identify specific groupings of games.) The reason I do this is because I don't necessarily know exactly what type of situation I will be asked to provide statistics for in the future. For example, I have the following leagues: 2009, 2010, 2011, City Night, Bracket Play, Pool Play, Early Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Tournament Name Leagues, etc... If the coach later asks me to provide statistics on Early Morning Bracket Play for a specific tournament I would expect to be able to make those three leagues active to find the UNION of those leagues and supply the correct information. This makes it so that I don't have to have numerous repetitive leagues like "Spring Bash Early Morning Bracket", "Spring Bash Afternoon Bracket", "Spring Bash Evening Bracket", etc, etc, etc...

It would also be nice if this sort of filtering functionality could be exposed in the team website. An AJAX implementation would be cool... :)... Maybe something that shows all of the leagues available, then as the user selects/filters the leagues to display they can see the page updated right away.

Does this make sense? If I need to be more clear please let me know. Also, if my interpretation of "Leagues" is used incorrectly, please let me know...

Thanks for the great product!!
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OhioTex
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by OhioTex » Tue Mar 08, 2011 7:14 pm

Let me probe for a moment.

are you saying the device works fine? but would like to see more on the team web site?
70clcl
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by 70clcl » Tue Mar 08, 2011 7:32 pm

I just tried it out, and it looks like the device applies OR logic instead of AND logic. It would nice if there were some sort of configuration that could be applied to achieve my desired result.

On my device I marked "2011", "Bracket Play", and "Morning" leagues active, and the results retuned a game that does not exist in "Bracket Play" and "Morning" but DOES exist in "2011".

Does this help clarify?
PetroGuy
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by PetroGuy » Tue Mar 08, 2011 8:02 pm

I understand what you are hoping for 70clcl. You are correct in that the filter uses an OR. A UNION would be nice to have, but would be difficult with the current interface for many users to comprehend.

I think there are quite a few iScore users who would appreciate more advanced filtering on the team websites. However, FTM usually places those requests under the heading of 'analytics' and not really in the realm of iScore functionality. This makes sense as iScore is a scoring app and not an analysis app. Hopefully, there is enough demand for analysis that either FTM or some 3rd party vendors step up with other apps that fill these requests.
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tmccombs
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by tmccombs » Tue Mar 08, 2011 8:04 pm

This is exactly what I was trying to convey in my post back on sept 17th. If you had leagues named 2010, 2011, league, and tournament and wanted to see all tournament games played in 2010 then by making active the 2010 league and the tournament league you get all games played in 2010 regardless of whether it was a tournament or a league game. Therefore it forces you to make your leagues more complex rather than using simple "fields" and assembling them such as 2010 "and" tournament "and" bracket play, etc.
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FTMSupport
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Re: "League" usage?

Post by FTMSupport » Tue Mar 08, 2011 9:17 pm

We understand the requests, and do agree it would be powerful. We may add this some day, but please also keep in mind that it will confuse a great many users, and there is nothing worse for us than support issues. We need to keep everything as simple and obvious as possible to support the number of users we have using the product. If you look through the forums, you would see how many people already think they have lost all their data because they turned a league off. They post a message that it is a big emergency that iScore has lost all their data. There are reviews posted on iTunes that iScore loses data. As far as we know, iScore has never lost a single game because of the product itself, yet new users look in iTunes and see reviews that iScore loses data.

We plan to add more statistics + reporting capabilities this season, but chances are it is going to be done on the Admin Website, and not on the device itself. So the options will be available to advanced users, but we won't have anything that overcomplicate things for first time users which are the ones that give the instant bad reviews.
Check out the new iScore Baseball documentation page!
Includes videos and user manual.
http://iscoresports.com/baseball/training.php#docs
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