Problems with Team Unify, swim times, club records and swimmers age

Our club uses Team Unify. I love and hate it with equal measure, which is a bit of an odd thing to say as I was instrumental in pushing the club to use Team Unify in the first place.

Using Team Unify has been great for our membership data. It allows parents, coaches and team managers access to the right information to run the club. This is a big improvement.

However, one area where I think Team Unify is weak for British swimming clubs is in how it handles members swim times. British swimmers are used to having access to the British swimming rankings database. It works, it is simple and all licenced meets are required to submit results. A huge amount of effort behind the scenes by membership secs, club gala entry secs, meet organisers and the rankings database makes this the definitive source of swim times for British swimmers.

Team Unify does not have access to the British Swimming rankings database. This is a shame and something I hope is fixed in the future because it creates all sorts of unexpected issues.

As a club that uses Team Unify to do gala entries, we need it to contain up-to date swim times for our swimmers. This requires the results file (.sd3) from galas to be entered (uploaded) in to Team Unify. The quickest way to get results for any gala a club member has entered is to use the Club Rankings program from British Swimming is to ‘export’ the results file in .sd3 format, and then import it in to Team Unify. I know many club admins and this is how they all do it. It is much quicker than contacting each and every gala organiser and asking for the results file.

However there is a problem, the .sd3 results files from Club Rankings do not contain the swimmers ‘age’, so when the results are imported in to Team Unify the age is set to zero! This has knock on effects throughout Team Unify. The club records don’t work properly (*1), the reports don’t work properly (*2) etc

Now you could argue that Club Rankings should include the swimmers ‘age’ in their results files, but what is the swimmers age? For British swimming we have two ages, “age on the date of swim” (*3) or “age at 31/12”. The two different ‘ages’ are needed for different uses. e.g. open meets can use “age on the date of swim” (more correctly ‘age on last date of event’) but events like regional and nationals use ‘age at 31/12’.

Alternatively you could argue that Team Unify has our swimmers Date Of Birth and knows the date of the swim, so should be able to work out how old the swimmer was for any swim (There is an interesting edge case here working out the ‘age on last date of event’ but that is not beyond the wit of a software engineer).

I raised this problem with Team Unify and the response was “This is because SportSystem files when sent to us for this do not include the age”, to which I would reply “We pay you good money to run a team management system, this problem affects the majority of British users, so go fix it!” And my response is pretty much true. Team Unify is increasingly popular in the UK and there is less and less reason why British users should put up with how Team Unify stores and uses swim times. We need a system that works with how British swimming works and is not based on Team Unify’s US origins.

For British Team Unify users little things make a huge difference, like a swim time having no use without knowing the date and Level gala it was achieved at. Just try entering your regions winter championships without a Level 2 swim time in the correct qualifying period. Team unify does not have gala ‘Levels’ designed it to it from the outset and it should have. Without gala levels you can’t produce a list of who has qualified for particular events.

Ideally we, as swim clubs who pay money to both Team unify and Swim England/Wales/Scotland, need to bang heads together and get Team Unify to stop running parallel times database and link into the British Swimming rankings database. There are vested interests here, but I for one am fed up and just want a system that works properly.

I could go on, but I don’t want this to be a tirade. So I am going to leave it with my conclusion that currently Team Unify is lacking when it comes to swim time management for British swim clubs. If you are aware of this then you can avoid some of the pitfalls and hopefully they will improve in the future.

*1 See my post “Using ‘Club Rankings’ to find club records” for a way to get club records from Rankings.

*2 When the coaches ask for a reports of best swim in each age group to select a team for an event, the reports a meaningless as all the swimmers did their best swims when zero years old 🙁

*3 More correctly “age on the last day of the event”.

8 Comments

  1. Just wondering if there’s been any progress on this? I’m just another parent… but recently discovered that my daughter’s latest PB times (5 × Level X times) are not showing in TU’s OnDeck App…

    1. Hi Lee,
      I think that would be a different problem. TU relies on clubs importing results from events into TU’s own database of times (i.e. there is no direct link or integration with the British swimming rankings database).

      Find out who in your club does this job and offer to help 🙂

      The easiest way to get results in the correct format (.sd3 files) for import in to TU is to get them from rankings with the ‘club rankings’ program. This is a manual process that is done periodically. If the club has been using meet management software to generate the results for rankings, this may be able to create the results in a suitable format to import in to TU, again this is a manual process that needs to be done for each set of results.

      Hope that helps
      Mark

      1. I concur with most of these comments.
        I have managed our swim clubs timing, results and swim data for some time, with ongoing frustration regarding the continued strangle hold that Swim England / Sportsystem have on the same. This makes (particularly for grass roots clubs) for a very poor system of gala entry and gala management and subsequent use of data for club (swimmer, parent and coaching) performance analysis.

        Our Club are TU users. Prior to purchase I knew the limitations of getting swim data / results into their system and in my opinion they were reluctant to clearly inform at the outset that there is no access to Swim England data base and the subsequent associated complications and limitations.

        Prior to our clubs use of TU, I created a simple SQL data base, but this still required the downloading of results files using Swim Rankings desktop application.

        I have started loading results into TU: but this is less than satisfactory particularly for a club like ours, where we have many dual members; some overseas; university and England pathway etc. Consequently, it’s a nightmare to manage the results to keep an accurate and up to date database. The LX competitions (we did 20) have further complicated managing the data.

        In my opinion this situation arises as a result of Swim England failing (yet again) to understand the needs of its grass roots members. My only comment on TU is that they should be clearer at the outset regarding the limitations of the results and swim data management aspects of their system.

  2. For me the Attendance is the worse part of TU although overall TU makes my life as general sec of the club so much easier.
    Attendance is not fit for purpose unless you have the same group of swimmers copming every week on the same evening and same location.

    1. It’s a few years since I was on poolside regularly and using the Attendance part of TU via ondeck. We did have fixed squads who trained at the same time, however it really did not work well with anything that did not match this fixed view of who should be in this session, or if a coach was covering two squads in the pool simultaneously.

      TU has so many issues (particularly with swimming in the UK) and does not appear to improving, we are currently looking at alternatives.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *