TSTM meet result notification service sponsor program

TSTM (TSA Swim Team Manager) is the largest online swim team software system serving 15 TSA (Tarheel Swimming Association) swim teams in the 2014 season. We will start offering an email advertising service for our sponsor businesses in 2015. If you want to reach out to thousands of swimmer families and send your contact information through us, this is a great opportunity for you.

Here is how the advertising system works:

When swim meet results are entered into TSTM, emails are sent to the registered parents of the swimmers. At the top of the email message, it has the most up to date swimmer meet results. 3 pieces of your business information (business name, telephone number and web site or email address) are listed at the bottom of the message. The entire message is short enough to fit most email readers. Although such meet result notification emails are optional, 98% of the families remained subscribing to the service in the 2014 trial run. This provides a great channel to promote your business information to the majority of the swim team families. Your business information is estimated to be delivered to families (spread out in Wake county) for at least 2000 times which statistically covers every family subscribing to the meet result email service. These emails are typically sent in June and July months after swim meets so please signup early so we can set everything up for your business.

Your business information is expected to go to these teams (teams marked with a star, subject to change each year).

http://www.tsaswimteam.com/selectTeam.do

After signing up as a sponsor, we will create an account for you at http://www.tsaswimteam.com/sponsor.html. Using this account, you can monitor the number of times your business information has been sent to families.  You can also update your business information to be delivered to families.

Please contact us at tsaswimteam@gmail.com if you are interested in sponsoring TSTM.

Thank you!

Messaging in TSTM

Sending messages has always been a weak link in TSTM services, mostly because we depend on external services to deliver the messages. Sometimes, thousands of mails are sent without issues but some other times, it just stops sending for no apparent reasons. Sending messages in time is very important for teams, especially during inclement weather. If you found TSTM is not sending messages, there is a feature to assist you to send the message from your own mail client. TSTM provides you with a list of addresses that you can plug into your email software. Here is how to do it.

Go to admin menu Other->Send messages.
Select your recipient criteria and click the "Show recipients" button.
On the new page, at the upper right corner (above the Subject field), there is a link called "Email address list". Right mouse click on the link and copy the addresses.
Go to your own email software and in the To, CC or BCC field (your choice), paste the address list.
Type your message there and send it!

This works for both email and text messages.

Although this is not as convenient as directly typing messages and sending within TSTM, it should be a good workaround. One other advantage to send messages this way is that your recipients can reply to your inbox directly.

Transfer from one team to another

As the number of teams using TSTM grows, more and more families have the need to switch from one team to another due to moving or changing clubs. In the past, all such requests are manually handled by me.  To facilitate such changes by all teams, a new feature has been implemented so that such team transfer can be accomplished between the transferring family and the new team administrators. Please save this link so you can refer to it when a family requests to be transferred to your team.

To securely transfer a family from one team to another, there are three steps needed.

1. The family goes to their Family information tab. At the lower right corner, there is a new drop down labeled "Transfer to". The family selects the new team they want to join and click the button "Go" on the right. An email will be sent out to the new team's administrators. BTW, this admin email address is set on the Team Setup page. Multiple emails can be set in that field delimited by commas.

2. When the new team admins receive such an email, s/he should validate if this request is true, not someone plays a hoax or accidental. The best way is probably through email or phone call. Once the admins confirm the request is legitimate, s/he should click on the link that is included in the transfer request email. The transfer is then approved and an email will be sent back to the family.

3. When the family receives the email from new team's admin, s/he should click on the link included in the email to complete the transfer. Note that the actual team transfer is done in the third step. The first two step hand-shake is just to make sure neither party makes any mistakes and the transfer is agreed by both parties.

In the past, all family transferred to a new team would lose their swimmer's past meet results. There is an improvement such that the past results will be carried over with the swimmer to the new team.

TSTM Social Event Signup

This function is to facilitate team social events management. Instead of using external signup web sites, admins can set up social events for team members to sign up within TSTM. Members can specify how many people will attend an event and add a comment along with the signup.

To set up a social event, go to the admin menu Setup->Social event . You can create a new event or delete an existing event.  Each event can have a name, description, a URL and an attachment. It also allows members to specify how many adults and children will attend the event. To view the sign up results, click on the Signup column for the event.

Team members will see the list of available events from their menu after logging in and click on the Social event menu item on the left. They select the events to attend by selecting the corresponding checkboxes and specify the number people will attend the event.

Line up all lanes for a time trial meet

In the past, the auto line up program only used half the lanes when seeding for a dual meet. For a time trial, teams want to use all lanes.  This function has been implemented.  If a meet type is 'Trial', all lanes will be filled.  One limitation is that it only seeds even number of lanes.  So if your team has a 5-lane pool, only 4 lanes will be lined up.

After a season is closed, team admins don't have access to past season meets in general. If you are not a new team using TSTM, you probably have meet results from the last season.  If so, with premium feature turned on, you can take advantage of past season's results when creating the line up for a time trial.

Here are the steps.

Go to the Meet Setup page.

At the lower right corner of the page, you will see two arrows pointing left and right. Clicking on the arrow pointing left will bring back all past season meets. The results from these meets will be taken into account when you do a line up.

When you finished with lining up the trial meet, come back to the Meet Set up page and click on the arrow pointing to the right to hide the meets from the past season.

Caution:
DON'T delete the past season meets. Doing so will remove all result history of these meets from all swimmers.  Using the right pointing arrow on the Meet Setup is the correct way to hide these meets.

Note that new or swimmers who didn't participate in the previous season will be consider having no times and thus will be lined up in the later heats in the events.

Line up will only consider swimmers who select to participate in a meet. You can use the green button "Attend all meets" on the Meet Setup page to make everyone select all meets.  Also, please make sure that the pusher lists are not excluding any swimmers from attending any strokes from last season.  It took me a while to realize that's the reason a swimmer was not seeded in a stroke during my test.

Exporting heat sheets of time trial meet can be used for PGTiming system.  You don't need to do anything special.