Help/Frequently Asked Questions

This issue is often caused due a confusion between the concepts between multi-day events and repeating events.

Multi-day events are events that span two or more days. For example, a weekend tournament or a trade show.

Repeating events are events that repeat a "template event" based on a repeating schedule you define.

When creating an event, there are Start Date and End Date fields. These are not for repeating events and are meant for multi-day events as defined above. For most normal events (like games and practices), the start and end dates will be the same. In fact, the end date is completely optional and if left blank, is assumed to be the same as the start date (there are some exceptions to this, like if the event starts very late at night and would normally flow into the next day -- Team Cowboy takes care of this automatically).

Repeating events will take whatever "base" or "template" event you enter and will repeat it one or more times. So if you have an event that you want to have repeat, you first need to determine the details are for the event that you want to repeat.

Here's an Example...
Suppose you have a practice that runs from 7:00pm - 9:00pm every Monday and Wednesday that you want to repeat for two months from April 1, 2012 through May 31, 2012.

You would enter the FIRST instance of the event which has a start date of April 1, 2012, and start time of 7:00pm, and an end time of 9:00pm. Next, you would define the repeating properties to repeat daily starting on April 1, 2012 and repeating until May 31, 2012, selecting Mondays and Wednesdays only as the repeating days.

If you setup a repeating event in this manner, things will show up properly in your event schedule.

To continue this example, a common mistake would be to setup the FIRST event with a start date of April 1, 2012 and an end date of May 31, 2012, then repeat it per the instructions above. This is technically allowed, but is not generally what is wanted. What this would do is create a practice that starts at 7:00pm on April 1, 2012 and lasts for 2 months until 9:00pm on May 31, 2012, then repeats that pattern each Monday and Wednesday (effectively creating dozens of repeating events that each last for 2 months)! This is probably not what you want!

This scenario (over a much shorter timespan) can make sense, however. For example, suppose you have a 2-day Coaching Summit that occurs every 3 months. You would create a single event (which represents the first meeting in the repeating series) that lasts for 2 days, then you would set that to repeat every 3 months. You'd then have a set of 2-day events that repeat on a regular schedule.

The concepts of multi-day and repeating events can be complex but with complexity comes great power! If you have any further questions about this, please contact us at any time.