Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

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bullmoose20
Posts: 41
Joined: Thu May 21, 2015 3:40 pm

Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by bullmoose20 »

Hello Greg,

As I dig a little deeper every day, I am coming back to the original question of the difference between an affiliate and a franchise.

Here is the dilemma that I am trying to solve.

Affiliate is called DELTA
Teams associated to DELTA are:
DELTA U7M
DELTA U8M
DELTA U12 AA
DELTA U15 AAA

Each team is part of a corresponding DIVISION:
U7M
U8M
U12 AA
U15 AAA

Each DIVISION belongs to a LEAGUE:
U7M belongs to ARS LAVAL
U8M belongs to CLD
U12 AA belongs to LLL
U15 AAA belongs to LSEQ

The leagues table presently has the 4 leagues....and there is no clear way to associate a team to a league and an affiliate. The LEAGUES table would need to have multiple affiliate_id's associated to the four league_id's. Is this permitted in the tables? Or should I scrap the AFFILIATES and just use FRANCHISES. This way all the DELTA Teams no matter what age group belong to the DELTA Franchise.

Looking for guidance here please.

Thanks,
NIck
GregS
Site Admin
Posts: 240
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 4:58 pm

Re: Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by GregS »

I've moved this post to a new topic, as it's a question that comes up from time to time, and should be easier to find this way. I need to put together a graphic indicating how the various terms are used in Zuluru...

"Affiliates" are for related organizations that operate under a single umbrella. They are intended for use in situations such as a parent company operating leagues in multiple cities but running from a single web site, or a provincial or state or even national organization providing Zuluru to local organizations. In these cases, there are "admins" who have full access over all affiliates, and each affiliate can also have "managers" who have administrative access to their own affiliate but are regular users for other affiliates. It doesn't sound to me like this is what you're looking for.

"Franchises" are a loose way of tying related teams together. At the moment, this is almost entirely a cosmetic thing, just providing a way to pull up the list of related teams and easily get to their rosters, schedules, standings, etc. It was originally intended to work across multiple seasons. For example, I captain a team called Nor'easters, so I have a Nor'easters franchise that each year's iteration of the Nor'easters team gets added to. It does also work across multiple divisions. This looks more applicable to what you are trying to do. Note that a team can technically be in multiple franchises, and that what franchise(s) a team is in is controlled by the captain(s) and franchise owner(s).

A "division" is a collection of teams that will be playing against each other. The built-in scheduling system works on divisions, and this is what you will normally see schedules and standings for.

A "league" is a collection of one or more related divisions. If there is only a single division in a league, Zuluru does its best to hide the distinction, treating the two concepts interchangeably, mainly by eliminating the extra levels of headers that you'll otherwise see; the aim of this is to make the UI more compact and user-friendly.

There are different ways to look at how divisions are grouped into leagues, but my recommendation (barring any external reason that overrides this) is that leagues should be comprised of divisions where it might make sense for a team from one division to play a team from another division. For example, adult football and soccer will often have a structure like A, B and C divisions where a top team from B division might move up to play a team from A division, or a bottom team from B division might be relegated to C division. Playoffs for this league might involve teams from all three divisions. That might all be the "Thursday" league, and then there could be a similar structure for the "Sunday" league. This will generally work better than having an A league with Thursday and Sunday divisions, where there is no chance that a Thursday team will ever play a Sunday team (often because some of the same players may be playing in both, but with different teams).

For youth sports, I think it's more typical for divisions to be set up for different age groups. It seems like maybe this is what you've got, but I'm not clear on what the "league" level adds in your example; does the ARS LAVAL league have multiple divisions, or just U7M?
bullmoose20
Posts: 41
Joined: Thu May 21, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by bullmoose20 »

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the detailed response. To answer your question, the ARS LAVAL league will have U7M, but so will the CLD league... but the teams never see each other as they are in different regions in our area of Laval. Our Club has teams playing in all of these leagues at all levels of play.

I think that I need to create Franchises in my situation. But it seems that from the UI, to create a Franchise, you must have an affiliate as well. Am I mistaken? So it looks like I will be creating the DELTA Affiliate, then add a Franchise called DELTA that has all the teams that include the name "DELTA" in it.

Nick
GregS
Site Admin
Posts: 240
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 4:58 pm

Re: Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by GregS »

I don't know that Affiliates are even useful in your situation. It's really a specialized thing that very few Zuluru users use.

I have attached a graphic I did a while back that shows how things are related to each other. It's not totally up-to-date and doesn't include affiliates, but it gives the general idea. Consider "affiliates" to be a container that basically wraps around everything, so they get their own mailing lists, newsletters, questions and questionnaires, registration events, leagues, regions, fields, badges, waivers, the whole shebang. The only thing that they share is the user database, so people can be "in" multiple affiliates (though even that can be disabled as a feature). The main thing that differentiates a single site running with (say) four affiliates and four completely separate sites is that when you sign up at the affiliate site you can see the information for all four on a single page.
data structure.png
data structure.png (33.13 KiB) Viewed 23092 times
I think you are perhaps best off disabling the affiliate feature entirely. Unless Ars Laval, CLD, etc. should be treated as completely separate entities, in which case they are your affiliates, while U7M, U8M, etc. are your leagues, and maybe you don't have divisions? If you have a single waiver for the entire organization, the signing of which allows you to play in any area, or you want to enable people that live between two of these areas to register and pay for teams in different areas in a single step, then affiliates are NOT the way to go. If Ars Laval will never ever have anything to do with CLD except for the fact that one person (you?) is the common administrator and can assign different managers to run each of them, and people should generally not be shown information about one if they are participating in the other, then affiliates may be a good fit.
bullmoose20
Posts: 41
Joined: Thu May 21, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by bullmoose20 »

OK. let me think about it a little... RIght now things are looking pretty good now that I have added the Franchise information.

I presume that by disabling the Affiliates Feature in Zuluru, I would save a step in the import and then would not be required to enter an associated affiliate to the franchise itself.

Nick
GregS
Site Admin
Posts: 240
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 4:58 pm

Re: Terminology: Affiliates, Franchises, Leagues, Divisions

Post by GregS »

Even with affiliates disabled, everything in the database technically still needs an affiliate_id, it's just always set to 1.
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