Linking your rugby federation's competition

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Not every federation uses Sportlink. For the Dutch Rugby Federation, 4planning fetches the fixture list, the results and the pool standings directly from the federation. Your teams see their matches in the calendar, and you can also look at the fixtures and standings of the other teams in the same pool.

If your federation does run on Sportlink, Linking and syncing Sportlink is the article you want.

The link lives under Settings → Integrations → Federation link. Normally the 4planning team sets this up for you — get in touch and we will. Prefer to manage it yourself? We can enable that per club, after which your system administrators can do everything below themselves.

Don't see the section at all? The Matches module is probably switched off. It needs to be on, otherwise there is nowhere for the matches to land.

Step 2: pick your pools

Click Choose pools. You get the federation's full list, with the teams in each pool listed underneath. Tick the pools your club plays in.

Don't search for your club name here. In rugby many clubs play in a combined team together with one or two other clubs, and such a team is called something like CL VWB CU 1. Your club name simply isn't in it. So go by the team names you recognise — the filter searches those names too, so your own team name does work.

Once you have picked one pool, the app helps you with the rest: pools that play at your own grounds show "Plays at Sportpark … — is this one of your teams too?". That is how you find your youth teams, even when their name looks nothing like yours.

Under Link teams you see every team name that appears in the pools you picked. Everything defaults to Opponent, which is correct for the large majority of rows. Switch only your own teams to the right group and click Save.

That link decides who sees the matches: members of the linked group get the fixtures in their calendar. So pick the group the players of that team are in.

What happens automatically after that

  • The fixture list arrives as soon as the federation publishes it, and is refreshed every night.
  • Results are fetched more often on Sunday afternoon and evening, so the score is in by the end of the day.
  • If a match is postponed, it moves itself to the new date. No second match appears.
  • The pool standings come along, including those of your opponents.

For each pool the screen shows when it was last updated, or that something went wrong.

Frequently asked questions

  • What doesn't come along? Pitches and changing rooms, the referees appointed by the federation, and shirt colours. Those aren't on the federation's competition page. You fill in the pitch, the changing rooms and your own referee in 4planning as usual, and they are never overwritten.
  • Does anything change for our membership administration? No. This link only covers the competition. Members keep working the way they do now.
  • We already entered the fixtures by hand. Delete those matches before switching the link on, otherwise you end up with duplicates: a manual match and a federation match don't recognise each other. Get in touch if you'd like us to look along.
  • Our women's teams play competition too. Women's pools have not yet appeared on the rugby federation's competition page. As soon as they do, you can tick them the same way.
  • What about tournaments and festivals? Those don't come along. On such a day there is no opponent facing your team, only a time and a pitch, and that doesn't fit into a match. Add those days manually.
  • Does this work for hockey? Not yet. We are looking into doing the same for the KNHB.

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