If you have followed my posts on this blog you know that I have been frustrated by Hy-Tek Team Manager and Meet Manager along with Hy-Tek customer support.
While I may not care for Hy-Tek or their products, the fact is they have a dominant market share and a lot of teams use Team Manager, Meet Manager, or both. I was contacted this week by a high school coach who was looking for some SDIF assistance in getting his roster into Meet Manager. Now I don’t have access to Meet Manager but I do have pretty good understanding of the SDIF specification so I was able to help him out with some example SDIF files.
In the process of helping him out I came across an old e-mail regarding importing a roster into Meet Manager. At the time I was interested in Team Manager so didn’t give it a lot of thought. Looking at the old e-mail I realized that if it worked, I could export the file format very easily from wp-SwimTeam. I went ahead an implemented it, now I am looking for someone to try it out.
Sample Reports
The zip file above contains three versions of the same roster – CSV, SDIF (.sd3), and Meet Manager Registration (.re1). Extract the Meet Manager Registration file from the zip file. It is an ASCII file that contains swimmers records, one per line with the following fields delimited by semicolons:
- Registration number
- Last name
- First name
- Middle initial
- Sex
- Birthdate
- Club abbreviation
- Club name
- Preferred first name
- ?? – unknown what this last field is; it’s always “N” in the examples provided
To import the file into Meet Manager, follow these steps:
- Set up a new meet database. You only need to go through the first setup screen, the one where you put in the meet name, date, and length of course. To make my particular file work, select “USA Swimming” for the ID format. If you have something other than USA Swimming numbers for swimmer labels, select “Other”. Normally, for a kids’ meet, you’d select “USA Swimming” for the ID format or “Other” if you are not using USA Swimmer numbers for simmer labels.
- From the main Meet Manager menu, select “FILE”
- Select “IMPORT”
- Select “REGISTRATION FILE”
- Locate and choose the .RE1 file that contains the roster.
After completing these steps, go to the “Athletes” screen in Meet Manager. The swimmers contained int he RE1 file should bYou should see all of the athletes’ names that you saw in the RE1 file.
If this works for you, please leave a comment!
So I just did a quick google to find the following instructions on one club website. I haven’t looked at TM in awhile, but this suggests RE1 file imports. So does that suggest I can take a spreadsheet of registration data and reformat it into an ascii file to the RE1 format you have shown in your example files….and actually import minimal registration data for my team (swimmer info only) and get rolling using TM for this season?
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Using Team Manager to receive a RE1 file
The club registrar requests the LSC Registrar to send the club an RE1 file from SWIMS
Open Team Manager and choose Reports – Administrative – Athletes
Click on Registration ID Exception tab
Choose which TEAM you want to verify and choose if inactive swimmers are to be included
Check any other options that are desired
Click CREATE REPORT
Click on where the RE1 file is and click OK
Exception List will appear on the screen – print or save it
Correct any items on the exception list
The answer is – I think so. Can you download the RE1 file I posted and try it with Team Manager? I received an e-mail yesterday and the RE1 file I posted successfully imported into Meet Manager. You can see the results of the import here. If this works with Team Manager as well it would be good news!!!
OK thanks, I’m in the middle of closing our registration. Taking it to TM is the next step. I haven’t even dusted off that software for this season, I may have an update to do. I will report back.
@Chuck
Thanks, please keep me posted.
Mike, I’m trying this and not getting anywhere. The instructions I cut and pasted above I don’t believe would get the roster into a team even if I wasn’t getting a “Not a USA Swimming File” message. And when I look under import there is no .RE1 option.
Are you trying this with Team Manager or Meet Manager? I did have an e-mail from another person who successfully loaded the file into Meet Manager and sent me back a Roster Report that looks correct to me. Unfortunately I don’t have access to either Meet Manager or Team Manager to test this on my own. Thanks for testing it for me, I appreciate it.
Playing around with this TM software tonight reminds me how much it SUCKS. It reminds me of old code that’s been kludged along for so many years. I’m amazed how many times I have been errored right out of the application while experimenting instead of the SW handling it more politely. I’m not saying they haven’t built a useful application. I’m just saying it looks, feels, and operates like the 1990s. I guess there’s not enough money in the swimming biz for them to take the real leap required to get this into the 21st century.
What Hy-Tek has captured is the process knowhow. Too bad that can’t be leveraged into next generation tools.
Update…. Hy-Tek still saying there is no way currently to do what we’d like to be able to do when it comes to importing swimmer registration data captured and formatted in simple flat formats.
USA Swimming is our only hope…as a standards body for the sport their constant support of any and all OPEN initiatives is vital to breaking Hy-Tek from this mentality.
I am increasingly interested in other alternatives for managing team and meets. We are running a modest summer swim team. It doesn’t require all this overhead!!!
I am not surprised Hy-tek told you there isn’t anyway to do this. Same thing they told me a couple years ago. As for USA Swimming setting the standard – while the SDIF 3.0 standard is old, it seems to be reasonably complete. The real problem is Hy-tek doesn’t support the complete standard and some what of what they do support, they support in a non-standard way. For example, Hy-tek will not read the lane and heat fields from a valid set of registration entries. It reads everything else in the record but ignores the lane and heat fields so there isn’t a way (that I know of) to supply seeded meet entries to another team from a non-Hy-tek source. Bleh.
Sorry, didn’t respond to your question directly. I am trying to get this into TEAM MANAGER but I’ll admit to not knowing that software any more than what a month of use/year offers.
I imported your .re1 file. It gave me 98 swimmers….. no entries though.
Any idea how I can automate .csv meet entry data from active.com into meet manager? I know that active bought out hytek, but so far, it’s all pretty low tech in my opinion…..active gives only a .csv file format. I need a .sd3 format. We are trying to intergrate online masters entries into mm 3.0.
Any thoughts?
Liz –
If you ended up with 98 swimmers that is good news, that is how many are in the RE1 file. The RE1 file does not contain any meet entry data, it only contains names, birth dates, gender, etc. It is essentially a roster format.
I am not familiar with Active Network other than reading the web site where it appears that you can import your roster from AN to Team Manager but there isn’t any mention of Meet Manager at all.
You’re right, Meet Manager needs an .SD3 file for meet entries. I don’t think there is any other way to get entries into Meet Manager without creating them within Meet Manager itself.
Have you guys checked out TeamUnify for your team management needs? This is a web-based replacement for TM, with a boatload of increased communication tools. There are also billing functions, CC and ACH payment options, online registration, and a iPhone/Pod mobile App.
Someone from Team Unify contacted our (MadDolphins) Swim Team chair who passed the information on to me. I checked out your web site and offered to speak with the person who contacted us but they never called me back. A couple of clubs in our league use Team Unify and seem to be happy with it. There isn’t any mention on your web site of collaboration with other products (e.g. Hy-tek or WinSwim) nor any mention of SDIF support which I view as a requirement. The pricing model isn’t clear either – it looks like $300 to get started and $600 after the site is running. Is there an ongoing yearly fee?
With wp-SwimTeam (which is free) we have most of what Team Unify offers and functionality continues to be added. Three years ago when I started this project the only thing available was ActiveNetwork which is (a) too expensive and (b) too closely tied with Hy-tek. So while wp-SwimTeam continues to be a work in progress, it fits our needs pretty well so I think we’ll stick with it.
Re1 file imports perfectly…. so now how do I convert the spreadsheet file into an .re1 file? Thru ‘save as’ or by changing the file name or is there another way I have to do it?
Thanks
Your master roster lives inside wp-SwimTeam. You can export it in a couple different formats:
I am not aware of anyway to convert a spreadsheet into an RE1 file. Hope this helps.
i know this has been asked a few times, how do i import an Excel spreadsheet in to Hytek Meet manager