CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My Soccer League Thread...

I've done the searches and found some older posts on this topic of setting up a sports club, from 1-2 years old, and for previous versions of Civi, but nothing seems to be current, so I thought I would start a new thread to document the process of setting up CivicCRM for a soccer league. When this is done, it might end up being a bit of a blow by blow setup guide.

Some of the older threads reference things that are now part of v. 4 such as this one http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3065.0.html - talks about the ability to register multiple contacts under one user - v. 2.0 couldn't do this apparently, but the current version can - etc.

I also saw that there seemed to be some interest  in how to do a community sports club model in Civi, but again I didn't find anything current that is on topic.

Soooo .... I am going to try to document my progress here so that when someone reads through this when we are done, they can get an idea of what it takes to set it up and how to do it.  I'm a beginner at CiviCRM, but I have a background in computers, programming, and database design, so I should be able to muddle my way through. 

I'm sure I'll have some questions as I go forward - and perhaps some answers for others too!

Let me know if you like the thread.

Next time some background and initial steps.

Slimm

Thanks Dave,

I hope this thread will be helpful along the way, or when I'm done.  I'm a strong believer in volunteerism, and community involvement.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around making some of the choices how to set up the system initially, wondering what impact the choices will have later on.  I also think it might be better to set up my system on Drupal, rather than Joomla - however I have no experience with Drupal.
Might have to jump in and get my feet wet.

First tasks:

1.  Set up contact types -
     Individuals: player, coach, manager, board member, committee member ...;
     Organizations: zones, community associations, ...;
     Households:
2.  Set up groups.
     Teams, Board of Directors, Committees, Tournament  Teams ...;
3.  Set up custom data sets associated with contact types and groups.

I'm still scratching my head (a bit) about whether this is the best way to do it, or if I should use Organizations, instead of groups or vice versa.
Next time, I'll start listing the custom data fields that I need and take a look at profiles.

Please feel free to comment if you see any problems I'm getting myself into.

I'm fairly new to all this, but thought I'd throw in the following, on the off chance that it's not all blindingly obvious.

Relationships - you didn't mention custom relationships, but I'm sure you will find the need to have a number of these. "Member of Team"/"Team of Member", etc. As you're thinking about this (along with whether to use organizations as teams, etc.) consider the following:

Households - since you mentioned this, I wanted to point out that there's overhead associated with it that you might be ble to avoid.
 
We are are a community organization with households where we want memberships to convey to all members of the household. However, we don't want the overhead of a third entity (person 1, person 2, and the household, 3, along with two relationships). Instead, we have defined a new relationship between two individuals, called "Same household" (it is bidirectional - same relationship in both directions).

Then the "family" membership type is defined to convey to persons related by the "same household" relationship. This way we have 2 entities, not three, and 1 relationship, not 2. Note also that the membership conveyance daisy-chains to everyone in the "family" defined by the "same household relationship, so it's not necessary to have "full connectivity" between all persons in a family.

Some of that discussion could also apply to teams as well. Hope this is more helpful than confusing.