Mr. Burdell runs a medium sized intramural sports program for his college. He is running a softball league and expects about 64 teams to sign up. Mr. Burdell divides his teams into three leagues: competitive, recreational and women’s. The competitive league is further divided into a fraternity league and an independent league. The winners of those two sub leagues play each other for the overall competitive championship. The games are played in 2 fields that are available for intramurals Mondays through Thursdays from 6 PM to 10 PM. Mr. Burdell also wants to simplify the registration process and get rid of the paper waiver system that slows down their check in process at the fields.
IMTrack has a lot of features that meet the requirements of Mr. Burdell while helping increase productivity and efficiency at the office. IMTrack could schedule this softball tournament in many ways. For this tournament, Mr. Burdell can setup 4 divisions of 4 teams on each night of play. This setup will allow the teams to sign up for the league and time that best fits their schedule, on a first come first served basis. This can help prevent forfeits as teams would know their scheduled time to play when they sign up.
IMTrack allows setting up leagues, sub-leagues and divisions. The sub-league feature allows Mr. Burdell to divide the competitive league into the great and independent sub leagues. Each sub-league is allowed to have a tournament, and then he can have a league championship tournament. In this case that league championship would only include two teams, but there is nothing preventing him from bringing 4 or more teams to the league championship. IMTrack will rank the competitive teams together even though they may not play against each other until the final tournament.
During registration, each softball team will pick the league, day and time they want to play. The captain of the team will be required to accept an online waiver before signing up the team. Since Mr. Burdell requires waivers, the captain won’t be able to add teammates to the roster. However, the team captain will setup a team password, which can be emailed to the teammates so that each person can log on, join the team and accept the waiver. While registration for the teams will close a few days before the season starts, Mr. Burdell can keep roster sign ups open through the end of the regular season or any date he decides. Thus, new teammates can add themselves online up to the deadline. Team captains benefit by knowing up front whether their teammates are eligible to play or not. The risk of losing a game due to an ineligible player are minimal compared to when players signed up to play on the field because IMTrack will only allow eligible players to sign up. Another way that forfeits can be reduced is by requiring a roster minimum to be met before accepting payment for a team.
ITMrack also allows players that don’t have a team to sign up as a free agent. Team captains that need a couple extra players to fill out their roster can search for free agents that made themselves available to play in the league/day of play/division. Potential free agents will receive an invitation to play in that team. Each free agent can accept or decline the invitation.
Mr. Burdell also likes the feature that allows him to limit each player to only play on one team per league. Thus, players can play on one competitive team and one recreational league, but not two competitive teams. If the popularity of his league increases, Mr. Burdell could change that requirement to only one team per sport so that more players can play.
After registration, teams have access to all their schedules on the league portal page. The portal also gives the players access to all results, statistics, teammates contact information, and a private message board. The statistics module allows Mr. Burdell to track a home run champion for each league. IMTrack could also track more complicated formula driven statistics like Batting Average and On Base Percentage.
As the season comes to an end, Mr. Burdell can take advantage of IMTrack’s ranking system to automatically seed all teams that qualify for the playoffs. The rankings are using the sportsmanship grades given to each team as part of the rating system, which has helped reduced the number of ejections and discipline problems during the season. Teams know that a bad sportsmanship grade can be the difference between a first round bye and an extra game. Mr. Burdell has a variety of ways to pick teams that qualify for the playoffs, including requiring at least one win, requiring a 500 or better record, or just allowing all teams to make the playoffs. Playoff schedules and results will be available to the teams on the league portal.
So with IMTrack, Mr. Burdell can manage his intramural league from pre-season to the league championship. Find out how Mr. Burdell can schedule umpires, supervisors and score keepers for each game with RefTrack.