You can import a standard athletics portal using Suitcase.

This portal is built on the Sport table. Coaches are treated as a Slate user with a role of Coach, which can be narrowed down to specify the kind of coach.

➡️ Import the Slate standard athletics portal with Suitcase.

Once you’ve imported the portal, use this article to configure it.

Things to configure:

• Sport and sport rating prompts

• Custom roles for each type of coach

• The Homepage: Athletes by Sport query

• The portal’s views

Sports prompts

Slate databases come with a standard Sport table, an underlying data structure that stores sport information.

Sport information can be viewed, added, and edited on the person record in Profile → Sports. You can also create custom sport-scoped fields.

The values for the standard fields Sport and Rating depend on specific prompt key values:

• Sports: The list of sports offered should be added as prompts using the key of sport.

• Ratings: The rating options should be added as prompts using the key of sport_rating.

📖 Further reading: Sports

Creating custom roles for each type of coach

The portal requires that you add coaches as users in Slate with roles related to their sport.

You must follow the naming convention for these roles, Coach - SPORT_PROMPT_VALUE, where SPORT_PROMPT_VALUE exactly matches the prompt value.

If your roles begin with, for example, Athletic Director - rather than Coach - , you can update the subqueries to use this naming convention.

Roles for gendered teams

If sport prompts are broken out by sex, you can facilitate the easy matching of athletes to coaches in the portal by setting the sport prompt value to, for example, Basketball Men, and its corresponding role to Coach - Basketball Men.

Some of the filters in this standard portal look for the content in the role name following Coach - . These existing filters are most easily implemented without changes by using sport prompts and roles that do not contain additional dashes. Think ahead while you build out your sports prompts if this will be the case.

Once again, your Coach roles will need to exactly match the sports prompts you've created. If your sport prompts will look like Basketball Women then the role will be Coach - Basketball Women.

Configuring the Homepage: Athletes by Sport query

The portal features a query, Homepage: Athletes by Sport, that populates the merge fields in the Homepage view.

You can customize the exports in this query to return different data, and thus display different data in the portal.

You can also add filters to limit results to specific records. For example, filtering for only recruited athletes, or those in a particular application period.

The Student's Sport Matches Coach's Sport subquery filter

This query has a subquery filter called Student's Sport Matches Coach's Sport that restricts the list of athletes to those whose sport match the logged-in user's (that is, the coach’s) role.

Do not remove this filter: it ensures that coaches see only their athletes.

The subquery filter uses an independent subquery on the Role User base. This base stores all of the role assignments in Slate.

We use a formula to determine whether a role assignment exists that satisfies two criteria:

1. The role name has the format Coach - [name of sport]

2. The role is assigned to the currently logged in user, represented by @identity

This query also has a node, which lets you use Liquid looping in the view to display one row per result. The node can be assigned in the query overview → Edit Parameters.

If your institution uses custom permissions rather than roles, you’ll need to recreated the subqueries using the User Permission base, rather than the Role User base.

Editing the views

You can edit the portal’s views to:

• remove unwanted data

• display the data you’ve added to the queries

• change the layout

Header

The standard Homepage view includes a static content block for user information, which displays a list of coach roles associated with the logged in user.

List of athletes

The Homepage view also contains a table of athletes. This table uses data from the Athletes by Sport query. If making changes to the roles/permissions, remember to edit the subquery filter in the List of Athletes query and the subquery export in the User Information query.

Athlete details pop-up

The portal also includes a view for the athlete details pop-up, which displays a prefilled form when a specific athletic is clicked. This pop-up also lets coaches save a rating value for the athlete.

Changes to the popup can be made by editing the Sport Update Form for Athletics Portals. The standard form uses merge fields to display application and checklist information, but this can be edited to display any record data that needs to be shown.

Testing

To test the Athletics portal:

1. Create an example user with at least one coach role.

2. Create a few records that have sports associated with your example user's coach roles.

3. To view the portal, go to the portal URL. If your account has a coach role, you will be able to access the portal. If you do not have a coach role, impersonate your example coach user, then go to the portal URL.

4. Once in the portal, ensure that you see the expected athletes in the list.

5. Select different athletes to view the pop-up.

6. Test saving the rating.