Defining athletic team display order

It is possible to define the order that athletic teams will appear on site pages. Athletic Teams default to sorting in alphabetical order, but this can be overridden on the "Team Classification" screen, accessible from the Athletics Manager Dashboard.

Default Team Naming

This screen has a number of sections. The first one, Default Team Naming, is highlighted in blue. The selections made here will affect all teams and all sports. This section defines how your school refers to specific teams on pages, in dropdown menus, and elsewhere on Athletic pages, whether a team is named individually or as part of a list of other teams.

There are three criteria that can be used to determine the order in which your Athletics teams are sorted: Sport, Gender, and Division. Any of those criteria can be used to sort the list of teams; you can sort so that all Girls' teams are listed before Boys' teams, so that all Varsity teams are listed first, or all Basketball teams take priority, and so on.

What's more, you can set the order of priority for each of those criteria, so that teams are sorted first by Gender, then by Sport, then by Division, or any other order of attributes that you choose. Use the dropdown menu to specify the order in which these elements are arranged when referring to teams - do you want to put the gender first, or have it at the end of the team's name? How about the name of the sport, or the division in which the team competes? You can choose from any of the pre-defined options, some of which include all three elements, some only one or two (after all, an all-girls school would not need to specify girls teams vs. boys teams!)

Once you've set the Default Team Naming format, any time a list of multiple teams is displayed, that list will default to sorting alphabetically by the first unique letter in the name. So if you've selected [Gender] [Sport] [Division] as your naming format, then all of the Boys teams will be displayed together, and all of the Girls teams will be displayed together (because all of the boys teams will begin with "Boys," and therefore the first unique letter in each team's name will be the first letter of the sport). Then, all of the Baseball teams will be displayed together, followed by all of the Basketball teams, then the Cross Country teams, etc.

If you have a boys' and a girls' team in each of 3 divisions (intramural, JV and varsity) for each sport, and you select "Soccer Boys Varsity" from the dropdown menu, then the teams will sort first by sport, then by gender, then by division, and the sort might look like this:

By contrast, if you were to select “Boys Varsity Soccer” then the listing would change to sort first by gender, then by division, and finally by sport:

The Default Team Naming selection will affect all teams in Athletics Manager. In addition to setting the name format though, you can also specifically define the order that teams are displayed within each of the three team naming elements. In other words, you can override the default alphabetical naming order.

Sort Order: Sports

Use the "Sports" section to define the order in which each sport will be listed on the site. To do this, find the sport that you always want to be at the top of your lists, and set the corresponding "Order" dropdown menu to "1."

Each sport can be given a specific "Order" number using the dropdown menu in the right-hand column. The numbers are relative to one another, so you can give more than one sport the same Order number; doing so will make them equivalent in terms of how the lists are constructed, and those teams with the same order number will be sorted alphabetically by the first unique letter. Adjust the order by setting the dropdown menus appropriately.

This will ensure that in dropdown menus outside of Athletics (such as in banner elements), sports teams will be displayed in the order that you have specified.

In this example, "Baseball" is set to sort position 1, while all of the other sports have been left alone. In practice, this would result in "Baseball" teams always being listed before "Badminton" teams, despite their being out of alphabetical order. This selection will override the default alphabetical sorting, but the naming convention set in the "Default Team Naming" section would still be respected. In other words, all of the Boys teams would still be grouped together, the only change is that "Boys Baseball" would precede "Boys Badminton," rather than following it.

Sort Order: Division

"Division" refers to the level of competition for each time, such as "Junior Varsity" vs. "Varsity." You can use the "Order" dropdown menus in this section to define how the various divisions are listed with respect to one another. So if you always want your "Varsity" teams to display before your "Junior Varsity" teams (rather than displaying in alphabetical order), use the dropdown menu to set "Varsity" to '1.' (Technically, you just need to make sure that the order number for "Varsity" is lower than the order number for "Junior Varsity;" using '1' just means that "Varsity" will always be the first division listed.)

Again, the Default Team Name format will still be respected, and leaving the order dropdowns blank will default to alphabetical sorting.

Sort Order: Gender

As with Sport and Division, you can set whether Boys teams are displayed before or after Girls teams. 

Sort Order: School

The "School" sort order only applies to schools that have configured multiple locations or campuses. Use this section to define the order in which those campuses are to be listed.

Note that if your Finalsite installation includes multiple schools, the school-level sorting will always take first priority, even above alphabetical! In other words, all of a single school's teams will always be listed together, and then whatever sorting selections you choose will be implemented. There would not be a way to list, for example, all of the various Boys Varsity Baseball teams together - they'll always be broken out by school first.