After years of thinking over this problem and months of development and testing, we are preparing to release customized events to everyone overnight. Website users will begin to see a new "Customize" button on the event information page to change how an event appears on your site as discussed in the earlier blog post.

We also want to give an update on three aspects of customizing events: team names, notes and scores vs. statistics.

Team names across your site and per event

You can customize the team names in an event in this new release, but you are also still able to customize a team across all sports. We encourage you two use both of these ways of customizing team names as they each are useful in their own right.

Customizing across your site is useful if you don't like the official name of a team. This is often used for conference opponents or teams that you play frequently enough to know who they are. For example, Trinity (Conn.) or Trinity (Tex.) or Trinity (Fla.) are fine to use if you hardly ever play them. But if they're in your conference, you may want to just refer to them as Trinity.

Customizing for one event is useful if there is something unique about that game. The most common is if the team is ranked that week and you want to reflect that, for example #12 Trinity.

The customization for an event will always override the customization across your site. For example, if you customized Trinity (Conn.) across all sports as Trinity, and for one event as #12 Trinity, then that event will show #12 Trinity and all other events against that school will show Trinity.

Understanding Shared, Site and Customized notes

You'll still see Shared notes and Site notes for now, and we wanted to explain how Customized notes fits into this picture.

Notes was the first field that we let sites customize for each event. We did not use a great approach, but it worked in some situations. There was a "Shared notes" field that would appear across all sites and a "Site notes" field that would add to the Shared notes.

Because there are lots of sites that have used the Site notes field, we could not remove it right away. We are going to migrate sites to update both the templates and the notes customizations. This could take several months for all of our customer sites — we had one site that had added Site notes for over 5,000 events!

The new Customized notes only affects the Shared notes field. Most of you can stop using Site notes altogether. If you don't like the Shared notes field, then just customize it to what you want. When someone writes "Homecoming" in Shared notes, simply check the box to customize it and leave it blank, and your site will show no notes on that event.

The challenge is for those who asked to customize their schedule templates to show only Site notes or split up where Shared notes and Site notes appear. If your site has been changed this way, then customizing notes will have no impact on your site. As mentioned above, we will need to work with you in this situation on a case-by-case basis to help you move over. Until this happens, you should continue using Site notes.

Breaking apart scores and stats

One thing you might notice once you start customizing event score is that the stats do not change. This is on purpose!

The primary reason we expect you to customize the score of a game is because of a forfeit or some other action that impacts the official result. For example, two basketball teams could play and end in a 73-69 score, and the box score reflects that.  Later on, once it's determined that one of those teams had an academically ineligible player, the score could be customized to 1-0. Such rulings do not affect the statistics of the game. They only affect the way that the score is shown on the schedule and, in certain cases, the standings.

This customization capability also allows different organizations to treat the situation differently. For example, the forfeiting team might want to leave the schedule as is while the conference office determines it's a 1-0 forfeit, and its opponent could decide how it wants to represent it on their site.

Moving forward

Hopefully this gives you some tips going into this new feature. We're really excited about this feature, but recognize it is a fundamental change in how you can share information. It will take some time to get used to.

Please let us know if you've got questions or how we can improve the way this works!