⚡Creating Athletes

Learn how to upload athletes, manually create one, and modify existing ones.

Overview

Before you can get started creating schedules and entering scores, we need athletes! You can either upload all your athlete data at once or create (and edit) them one at a time.

Upon updating your athletes, the new details will automatically be propagated throughout your gymnastics meet and schedule. For athletes, this also means deleting athletes will automatically remove them from any competitions and rotations they batch-upload, Gym Art Meets will automatically detect categories and teams that have not been created yet and make them for you. It will also create new competitions for each category and add all the athletes to the competitions evenly.

Parameters

The template contains fields for all the parameters of the athlete.

Field	Description
First and last name *	The publicly visible name of the athlete
Category name *	The unique name of the category this athlete will be competing under
Team name *	The unique name of the team this athlete belongs to
Athlete identifier *	A unique number or code to identify this athlete. Typically the affiliation number with respect to their league or federation
Athlete number	An optional number for this athlete, typically their bib number.
Date of Birth *	The date of birth of the athlete (DD-MM-YYYY)
Registration Date	The date this athlete registered for this meet. For internal use only
Coach identifiers	A list of this athlete's coaches' identifiers (or names) For internal use only

Required fields are marked with a *, optional fields can be left empty.

Uploading Athletes

We provide an easy way to batch upload your athletes into Gym Art Meets. Once you fill out the template, you can either copy and paste the data table directly into GAM or upload the entire file.

Here are the steps to upload your athletes. Each step is described in more detail below.

1. Download the CSV template

2. Fill it out with your data

3. Upload the data back

4. Fix any errors if they arise and re-upload

Fig 1: Use the "Upload" button to upload athletes using the CSV

Fig, 2: Follow the steps to upload athletes

Step 1: Download the template

We provide a CSV template that allows you to enter your data and upload all your athletes at once. The file is available to download from the "Athletes" page in GAM, or you can use the link below to download the file.

262B

Athlete Template.csv

Fig 3: The CSV template used to upload your data

Once you've downloaded the template you can open it using your favourite software such as Excel or Numbers. From there you can add your athlete data into the columns of the CSV so that you can upload it back.

Example CSV with data

Last Name *	First Name *	Category *	Team *	Athlete Identifier	Athlete Number	Date of Birth *	Registration Date	Coach identifiers
Doe	John	Senior	Canada	12345	123	2000-01-01	2021-01-01
Smith	Jane	Senior	United States	12346	124	2002-04-01		Coach 1, Coach 2

Step 2: Upload your data

Once you've filled out the template with your data, you can either

1. Paste all of your data (including the header) into the text field

2. Upload the file to Gym Art Meets using the upload button.

Copy your data directly

Fig 4: Paste your data or use the upload button to upload your data

After uploading, the software will check for any formatting issues. If there are any issues, a list of problems and their location in the CSV will be listed instead of the uploaded athletes. Below is an example of a successful upload (left, Fig. 5) and an upload containing issues (right, Fig. 6).

Fig 5: A successful upload will list the athletes in the preview

Fig 6: If issues are identified, they will be listed instead in the preview section

Step 2.5: Categories, teams, and competitions

We've made it extra easy to get started when uploading your athletes. GAM will automatically detect any new categories and teams found in your uploaded data and create them for you. Furthermore, for every new category, GAM will also make a competition and evenly distribute all the athletes from that category into the subdivisions. Magic!

Control whether to automatically create categories, teams, and competitions

Categories & Teams

On upload, GAM will first compare all categories and teams in your new athlete data with pre-existing categories and teams, respectively. Any category or team that does not have a match in the pre-existing data will be displayed in the New Categories and New Teams boxes. When you create your athletes, it will first create the categories and teams and then add all the corresponding athletes to them.

Competitions

For every new category that is going to be created, GAM can also automatically create a corresponding competition. Furthermore, GAM will evenly distribute all of the category's athletes to the competition's subdivisions while trying to keep the teams together. You can control how big the subdivisions can get by changing the Max subdivision size field.

For example: We have a new category Senior with 45 new athletes. GAM will make a competition and create two subdivisions based on the maximum subdivision size being 24. It creates one subdivision with 23 athletes and the other with 22. It will also consider the teams and coaches of each athlete, and try its best to group them into the same subdivision.

You can control this behaviour by turning each option on or off. Make sure you don't end up creating new categories or teams because of a typo!

Step 3: Preview your data

Once you've successfully uploaded your data, you'll see your athletes listed in a table as shown in Fig. 5 above. All that's left is to hit create in the top right and they'll be added to your meet!

Manual Creation

You can also create athletes manually by using the "New" button from the "Athletes" page. This way you can enter the details for a single athlete without using the CSV method.

Fig. 7 use the "New" button to manually create an athlete

Fig. 8 Enter the details to create a single athlete without a CSV

Enter the parameters for the athlete just as you would for the CSV, as outlined in the parameters section.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter a problem you just can't figure out don't hesitate to reach out to us at [e-mail]

Below is a list of common errors you may encounter. We specify what the software is looking for and how to modify your data so it passes through.

Error	Fix
Missing required fields	Make sure you've added the required fields marked with a * in the header.
Incorrect number of fields	Don't add or subtract CSV columns to the template, only use what's there!
Athlete Number must be a number	You must enter a number (integer) for the athlete number such as 1, 123, 0, etc.
Date of birth (or registration date) must be in YYYY-DD-MM format.	The software can only process dates of the formats 'YYYY-MM-DD', 'YYYY', 'YYYY-MM', or 'DD/MM/YYYY'
Could not find a category (or team) with the given identifier	The software was unable to find the cateogry (or team) you're trying to link this athlete to. Double check the identifier is the same as the category (or team) you are targeting.
Athlete identifier must be unique	The software found another athlete with the same identifier. Make sure you make choose one that's unique.

Advanced Import Settings

Since you may use a different language or operating system we provided many settings for you so that you can make sure your data gets imported correctly. These settings are found and described in the upload dialogue under the Advanced Import Options expansion tile.

Error	Fix
Start Import Row	Decides where to start looking for data. Change this if you have headers or empty rows above your data.
File Encoding	The character set your file has been encoded with. This is relevant usually if you are uploading characters with accents (éàèç) or from another language.
Field Delimiter	The character used to separate values in a row. For example: - 1,2,3 has the comma as the field delimited - 1 2 4 has the tab as the field delimiter
Text Delimiter	The character used to wrap individual values so that they don't get confused with the field delimiter. For example: - "2000-01-01", "Coach 1, Coach 2" has the double quote (") as the text delimiter
End of line	The character(s) used to tell the software that this is the end of the row