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simon baker
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What do you think of FULL TIME?
What League are you from?
How long have you been using FULL TIME?
How good do you think FULL TIME is?
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3 Years 5 months and 27 days and I finally scored.
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26/Aug/2004, 5:28 pm
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Dave Wilson
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hi Simon
I'm doing the Admin for the Halton & District Junior League, we're based up in Cheshire. Teams mainly come from Runcorn and Widnes, but we do have a few teams that travel over from Liverpool to play.
We've been using Full-Time since the middle of last season, although last season was more of a trial run for this season.
I like the Full-Time system, the improvements for this season are good, I'm sure with plenty of input from all the leagues it'll get even better.
I'm building up a wish list of improvements though!
Dave
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27/Aug/2004, 4:35 pm
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Joe63
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hello Simon,
I am the League Administrator for the Essex Sunday Football Combination and have been using the FA website, in trial, since the start of last season. This is the vehicle we have been waiting for, although there is quite a way to go before it is "all singing & dancing." Was frustrated that the fixture enhancement has been so delayed and now have been forced to revert to more manual methods because the season is upon us. I am busy making notes as to what I would like to see for the future and at our next league meeting will be pushing and promoting the website to all of our clubs.
When we pushed for clubs to register a Team Administrator last season, we only had a 10% response. This time we aim to nail the lot. To get the best out of the website you must utilise most of its tools!
It's good that you have taken the initiative to get his forum off the ground, and look forward to hearing what other users have to say.
JOE
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27/Aug/2004, 11:41 pm
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Brockers
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hi guys
I'm the fixtures secretary and one of 3 league admins for the East Cheshire Sunday League and we used the Full-Time system all last season and but for 1 team had no problems with our small 16 team league. The one team used to rely on the admins to do everything for them and wouldn't use the site at all. The one team left the league in the summer and now any new team has to agree to have a genuine team admin as part of their acceptance.
The way to really get teams using it properly is cut down on the paper given out at your league meetings, make the website the final word on all league matters fixture and result wise and get them to read it on Full Time, DON'T DO PAPER FIXTURES OR TABLES and believe me, they soon learn, it's so much easier than any manual methods I used in the past, scores were online by Monday lunch, changes made instantly and then confirmed in the case of late changes by phone!
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29/Aug/2004, 1:48 pm
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John Martin
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hi
John Martin Secretary of the Lincoln Co-op Mid Lincs County Youth League. We have 400+ teams from Under 7 to Under 16 both Boys and Girls with just over 4,000 players registered on the system and I have pushed for us to use this system from this season. Initial interest was 87% but is now rising 2 weeks into our season as more managers want passwords allocating to them. We are using the full range of features, players stats, managers inputting results etc and whilst I have been busy dealing with the odd query most have followed a help file I set up on our League Home page and have got on pretty well so far.
If anyone wants to have a look we are at www.midlincs.com and the help file is in the message below the division tables 'Managers Please Read'
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15/Sep/2004, 7:57 pm
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rgtaylor25
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hi Simon
Firstly, well done on setting up this forum which hopefully will generate a lot of useful debate and ideas on how FULL-TIME can evolve.
I am the Fixtures Secretary of the Milton Keynes & Border Counties Youth Football League which has over 200 teams competing in age groups from U11 though to U18.
We have our own website which we are continuing to use as the main 'tool' for our member clubs to use vis-a-vis obtaining results, tables, fixtures etc as well as other information typical of most Leagues.
I started to look at FULL-TIME in the suumer this year. My initial interest is in the use of the fixtures functionality but as a previous respondee noted, the scheduler came too late for this season and I have had to continue with my manual system. That said, I volunteered to be part of the FA's pilot of the advanced scheduler and it certainly is going in the right direction. I will post a subject soon detailing the changes I submitted to the FA that I would like to see made to FULL-TIME and would be interested in finding out if any other League's would find the changes useful or not. The more we can share our thoughts and ideas the more we can show the FA where changes need to be made which would have widespread support across many Leagues.
I am only interested in the fixtures scheduler at the moment. For example, we would not use the tables functionality as it presently stands. Our League do not use goal difference to separate teams on the same points. The ethos of our League is to have youth football played competitively but in the right spirit and therefore not using goal difference hopefully discourages teams going out to humiliate their opposition. I would therefore like to see an option presented in the system on whether GD is used or not, just as we are able to choose the number of points we wish to use for a win etc.
The functionality of FULL-TIME is vast but we are taking a very 'softly-softly' approach during its early stages of development. That is why this type of forum is so important as we share how we are using the system and how effective it is in the way it is used.
Bob Taylor
Fixtures Secretary
Milton Keynes & Border Counties Youth Football League
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16/Sep/2004, 11:24 am
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simon baker
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Well I guess it's about time I put down some of my experiences of FULL-TIME after getting you guys to go first.
I starting doing league admin 4 years ago at the Bristol Churches FA and the first thing i did was to do away with the filling out of match cards and create some web forms on the web site. This took the place of submitting a result or registering a player. The second thing I did was to get a friend to write a little application in which i could enter scores and it would generate the tables and results in html so I could post it easily.
A few years back the local FA were touting A system called WONFAS that I took a look at but it wasn't flexible or reliable enough for me to make the move.
I happened upon FULLTIME quite by accident when searching on the web for a league scheduling service. I came across league republic and devled deeper into their product. It was quite by accident that I saw that the FA had bought into their product.
I was cautious at first as to wether we would make the jump to using the system. I think the thing that swayed it for me was the fast response times I got from fulltime@thefa.com whenever I had any questions. They seem very open to enhancement requests and admit and fix any bugs that are raised to their attention. FULLTIME doesn't exactly meet the requiremnets of the BCFA however if it did then it would be less useful to all the other leagues out their. It is great that there are approaching 400 leagues using the system however I wonder what marketting they are doing to the leagues that arn't using it. As i say i happened upon it by chance surely there should have been some pro-active marketting towards me as a league admin? Maybe they are still testing out the functionality and don't want too many people using it.
I agree that dictating to teams that they must use the system is the best way forward. I have done so and after many phone calls and a large amount of time spend chatting with team admins they have all (bar 1 team) registered alltheir players and begun registering results. The benefit for team admins is obvious in terms of reduced timefor creating tables, results, getting them up on the web and the most arduous of tasks tallying stats like top goal scorer. The ability to do the admin from any pc is great - I can be sunning myself on a beach in the bahamas whilst approving matches for games played that day (if i could afford the gear and the flight to the bahamas that is). More likely i can do admin from work. Bonus features are being able to tell at a glance if a player is too young to play in the league. Being able to transfer palyers between clubs.
I was slightly disappointed that the new match card functionality was not released in time for the season as it is likely taht i will have to retrain al the admins when it is. however I would rather it was stable and right first time than released early and not working as I would loose a bit of good will from the team admins i think.
I could list all the enhancements i have requested but i may start a new thread for that.
All in all it's an excellent system and one that can be even better if we all input as much as possible into the development. Please do take part as much as possible in the discussions.
---
3 Years 5 months and 27 days and I finally scored.
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16/Sep/2004, 5:06 pm
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Peter George
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hello Simon. I’m Peter George from the Essex Sunday Corinthian Football League. We are full users of the FULL-TIME system and have been so since the demise of WONFAS. Our League is, to my knowledge, the first amateur Sunday football league in Europe (and probably the world) to have a web site. We have been ‘online’ since 1995 in various forms.
FULL-TIME has made strives to become the answer to our problems, but there is still quite a way to go. I’m sure that anyone who has attempted to create fixtures knows that this is without doubt the biggest problem of all. We operate in an area where there are seven or eight other leagues, including the Essex Sunday Combination, who are users of the system. This means teams from our league share pitches with teams from up to seven other leagues and co-ordinating fixtures is impossible.
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but local councils don’t help when assigning pitches to teams. They inevitably give a team a pitch every other week. With luck, you end up with a division with half the teams on one schedule and half on the other. This is fine for half the season, but then you have to place two teams together on the same schedule. This means one team is paying for a pitch they can’t use, because they are away. This continues throughout the rest of the season for half the teams in the division. It is a complete waste of resources and money. And officially pitch hire is not transferable, so teams can’t ‘swap’ pitches with another team.
The answer for us would be as follows:
1. EVERY Sunday league in our catchment area should be using FULL-TIME.
2. Local councils/pitch owners allow free transfer and alteration of pitch weeks.
3. Teams across all the leagues are paired on an assigned pitch.
4. Fixtures become a joint effort between the leagues to ensure maximum use of pitches.
We have some software that calculates fixtures. It is quite old (actually dates from 1992!) and uses DOS software. It would be brilliant, but it falls down when a team within our league shares a pitch with a team in another league. It is called ‘league scheduler plus’ and comes from a company called Danmar Software, who seem to be defunct. If every team in our league shared a pitch with another team in our league, it would work 100%!
We originally paid £100 for this software, but presuming Danmar Software have gone, does this make the program public domain? If so, anyone who wants a copy is welcome to it. It’s only about 500KB but will not run in XP unless you know what you are doing.
The other improvement I’ve asked for on FULL-TIME is to publish the referee assigned to a match next to the fixture on the main screen, but I haven’t met with much of a response to this request. Still, we all live in hope!
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25/Sep/2004, 9:58 am
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Bigger Ron
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 Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
My name is Ron Dangerfield and I'm the Fixtures Secretary for the South Essex Sunday Football League. I think that this forum is a great idea and thought I'd add my two pennies worth.
I've been reading the mailings with great interest and can relate to most of them.
Sadly I was originally left to believe that this service was going to be the answer to all of our prayers, especially my area, so had very high hopes for it. As I have got to use it more and more though I have found that it is just not flexible enough for the demands of grass roots football.
There are so many variables that need to be taken into account when setting up fixtures perhaps we are expecting too much for a system to be able to cope with these. If it's not clubs pitch dates then it's clubs availability. Then there are the cup dates.
I've been testing the Advanced Scheduler and sadly still have to set up my fixtures manually as it cannot cope. This is doubly frustrating as it takes about three hours for all of the information to be entered before the scheduler can be run. Quite funny really as the notes regarding it states that it should take about ten minutes to set up.
I appreciate that the councils don't help with their pitch allocations. Most of my divisions this season have a huge imbalance of pitch dates. One week I'll have 80% of teams with a pitch, the next 20%. But this is sadly just one of the many issues that grass root football has to deal with and as much the tool must be able to manage them to be of any use to us.
I really hope that the FA get this sorted, as I do believe their intentions are honest, but I have been a bit disappointed with the responses received whilst testing the tool. I either had to wait a while for a reply or not received any at all. I have spent a great deal of time testing the Advanced Scheduler in my own time, so would have expected the developers to at least pretend that my observations are of use and valued.
Our league have yet to try using the rest of the tool, but after reading some of the responses about it I think I'll be suggesting they look at it at the next Committee meeting.
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13/Oct/2004, 11:28 pm
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gremlin69
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Re: What do you think of FULL TIME?
Hi
I'm Fixtures Secretary of Southampton Saturday Football League, operating 11 adult divisions with approx 120 teams and this is our first live season utilising Full Time. We have taken the decision to utilise it for information purposes to our teams rather than using it as the main admin tool, as I do not think it is user friendly enough for all to use yet. I cannot see that we would be able to move to team admins inputting results as our media commitments require results to be rung in within 45 minutes of the scheduled end of the match.
Having moved over from Goalnet and also looked into Yellow Jersey, I think there is excellent potential, but as with most am disappointed at the functionality offered within the fixtures section. As with a previous respondent we have historically used Danmar for our fixtures and if only it was a windows package and if only you could drag and drop it would be excellent. This year I am using a bespoke MS Access database as I wanted improved reporting.
The comments above pale my problems into insignificance, as I am only dependant upon fixtures from further up the pyramid before being able to input mine. One particularly useful item though would be reporting on fixture clashes across leagues (which would mean that you would have to select the teams from the leagues that you need to report upon).
Another aspect that would make life easier, would the ability to enter all results for the league in one swoop, rather than having to go through division by division.
Thanks Simon for setting up the forum, and I would be very interested if everyone would input their enhancement requests to a thread, in order to create a debate on which are the most useful to the majority.
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18/Oct/2004, 10:01 am
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