How to Renew Your Event for Another Year

Bringing your contest back for another year is straightforward, but there's one critical thing to get right: create new event dates — don't edit last year's.

Twirlmate treats each year of your contest as a separate set of event dates under the same parent event. This is by design. Last year's event dates hold last year's registrations, contestants, scores, and results. If you change last year's start and end dates to this year's, several things break:

• Returning athletes can't register. They already have a registration for that event date, so Twirlmate won't let them register again.

• New attendees entries might get lost. Their registrations would be mixed in with the previous year's records.

• Last year's results and records are lost or corrupted.

The correct approach is always to create fresh event dates for the new year.

1. Create new event dates

In your event admin, create a new event date with this year's start and end dates. When you do, you'll see three checkboxes:

• Copy last year's registration forms — brings over your custom registration forms so you don't have to rebuild them. They'll be copied as unpublished drafts so you can review before going live.

• Copy last year's affiliations — brings over your organization affiliations (NBTA, TU, etc.) with the sanction ID cleared so you can enter this year's.

• Copy last year's awards — brings over your awards plan from last year for easy updating and reuse.

Check all of these. They save significant time.

2. Review your event content

Before publishing, go through your event details and update anything that's year-specific:

• Event description and overview — remove references to last year's dates or special circumstances

• Registration open and close dates

• Refund request deadline

• Any custom form language — review the copied forms for outdated content or dates

• Fees — if your pricing is changing, update or recreate fees. If prices are the same, your existing fee structure carries over from the parent event. Late fee activation dates need to be adjusted for the current year as well, otherwise all attendees will be charged late fees from the beginning (today's date is past last year's late fee activation date).

3. Review and publish registration forms

Your copied registration forms come in as unpublished drafts. Review each one, make any needed updates, and publish them when ready.

4. Contact Twirlmate to publish

Once everything looks good, contact Twirlmate support to publish the new event date. We'll review it and make it live on the calendar so attendees can find you and register.

These are set at the event level (not the event date level), so they persist year to year without any action:

• Your event name and branding

• Competition disciplines, all-arounds, products, and add-ons (the structure of what you offer)

• High point and twirl-off outlines

Your event's public pages and URLs for general information and registration

These are specific to each event date and start fresh:

• Schedules — you'll build new ones for the new year

• Staff/judge assignments — reassign for this year

• Awards — set up again for the new year

• Twirl-offs - regenerate twirl-off divisions after registration for the new year is closed

• High points - recalculate the results at the end of this year's event

Editing last year's dates. It's tempting because it feels like less work, but it causes real problems. If you've already made this mistake, contact Twirlmate support — we can help sort it out, but it's much easier to start correctly with new event dates.