A league is a season, not a weekend. UltiHQ organizes the work into five areas along the left of your event — Overview, Build, Entries, Weekend and After — and you will spend most of a season moving between Entries and Weekend.
This guide follows a season in order.
Setting the season up
Create the league from Run an event, choosing League rather than Tournament. Leagues get tabs a tournament does not: Clubs, Draft, Draft sheet, Ratings and Season.
Then, under Build:
- Setup — divisions, the format, and **whether each division is entered
by whole teams or by individual players**. A hat or draft league is the second kind: people sign themselves up and their team comes from the draft. A division is one or the other, never both — the limit is a number of teams or a number of people, and one number cannot be both. If you run a club division beside a hat division, make two, which is what players will expect anyway.
- How many. A team division needs a team limit. An individual one can
have a player limit or none at all; leave it blank for a pickup night. Once a limit is reached, people join a waitlist rather than being turned away.
- Schedule — when you play. A league schedule is weeks rather than a
weekend, and the generator knows the difference.
- Settings — the things that do not fit anywhere else.
Under Entries:
- Form — the questions you ask at registration. Anything you add here
becomes a column you can export later, so ask what you will actually use.
- Field — the venues you play at. Venues are reusable, so next season you
pick rather than retype.
You cannot open registration until your refund terms are confirmed. That is deliberate: an unconfirmed policy means no refund at all, and nobody should be bound to the strictest terms in the product by omission.
Taking registrations
Applications is where entries land. Waitlist is where they land once you are full.
A few things worth knowing before the first one arrives:
- A waitlisted entry is not priced. Joining a queue buys nothing, and the
price belongs to the moment a spot is claimed.
- Financial aid is decided before the price is frozen. An entry with a
pending aid request sits unpriced rather than priced-and-corrected, so the number a player sees is the number they owe.
- Discount codes are set up on your organization rather than per event, so
a returning-player code survives the season turning over.
Draft night
If you draft, the order is: ratings, then the sheet, then the draft itself.
- Ratings holds each player's self-rating and your adjustment. The
adjustment is yours and is never shown to captains — a captain holding both numbers can see every change you made.
- Draft sheet is the thing you actually read on the night. Pick the
columns you want; anything you asked on the form is available. The sheet can be shared with captains, and what a captain sees is deliberately less than what you see.
- Draft runs the night itself.
During the season
- Live is the control panel while games are being played.
- Arrivals answers who has turned up.
- Messages is how you tell everybody something at once.
- Spirit collects spirit scores where you have them switched on.
Scores take a few seconds to reach everybody — up to about fifteen. On a bad connection the app backs off and catches up rather than hammering a dead link.
Finishing, and starting again
- Report is the season's record.
- Season is the standings and the shape of the season as a whole.
- Roll over builds next season from this one. This is the reason venues
and clubs are worth keeping tidy: a rollover is a copy with the dates moved, not a rebuild.
Things that catch people out
Registration does not open by itself. It opens when you open it, and the event will tell you what is still missing before it lets you.
A player without an account can still be on a roster. Rosters are built from email addresses; the account arrives when that person signs in. This is why a roster of twenty-five can have five profiles behind it.
Ratings adjustments carry forward to the next season by default, so a player you corrected last year starts corrected. You can turn that off per event.
Nothing is deleted quietly. Withdrawn, canceled and superseded entries stay on the record, because "it never happened" and "it happened and was undone" are different answers when somebody asks in March.
Still stuck
Write to contact@ultihq.com. Say which league and what you were trying to do, and if something refused you, quote the words it used — they are written to be specific, so they tell us where to look.