One of the benefits of working closely with teams is we often pick up best practices that can be shared with the wider GroupSpot community. One of those best practices helps admins with their roster management. Getting your roster in order when one season ends and a new season begins is important to any team.
Before we dive in, it’s important to know that GroupSpot has seasons. This feature gives admins the ability to archive seasons and rosters specific to those seasons. This means teams can keep a record of their performance by season and preserve their history. It’s also a big reason why many team members don’t leave GroupSpot after they’ve graduated. Alumni want to look back at their history as well as check in on the current team.
Working hand-in-hand with seasons, rosters are a great feature for teams. They are flexible to create and serve all team types (sports, academic, non-profit teams, etc.). They are also helpful in properly archiving seasons so that all the games, results, records, and team rosters are associated with the correct season. Some admins find adding the new roster for the new season a daunting task, so we wanted to share a best practice tip to help make the process more manageable once you have more than one season.
1. Tap on the Roster icon or access your Roster through the group menu.
2. Select the team member you want to edit and open their profile.
3. Tap the pencil icon to edit the team member’s roster profile.
4. Add in all the fields you want to include, but make sure you add the graduation year for Class.
5. For Class, use the graduation year as opposed to the grade name (senior, junior, sophomore, freshman, eighth grader, etc.) since the year stays the same throughout even though the season changes. This is the most important time saver.
6. Then, when it’s time to create a new season, and you clone the roster, all you have to do to update your new roster is sort by Class and delete your graduating seniors by year, and then add the new team members by year. For example in high school, you would delete the graduating seniors and add the incoming freshman.
It’s important to remember that when you delete the graduating team member from the roster, you are only removing them from the current season roster, not from the group. Their membership would still be intact and present in the Member Directory.
Knowing this trick ends up a huge time saver that allows you to navigate and update the new roster faster and more efficiently as you head into the new season.
