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The import tools in Play are designed to be as flexible as possible so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time manipulating your files and naming columns a specific way to get it working with PLAY. A template is provided for convenience, but it’s not required.

Note there are a number of different ways of writing dates and unfortunately not all of them are unambiguous. e.g., Is 06-05-2024 in June or May?

By default, the expected format follows the ISO-8601 standard of YYYY-MM-DD, but additional options are provided. The dropdown provides examples using the current date.

Select Columns

The tradeoff of allowing flexibility is the app needs to confirm if it’s on the same page as you. It will try to automagically guess the columns assuming they’re named obviously, but it doesn’t always get them right.

Always make sure you review the selected columns. If you have two team columns, one for the name and the second for the ID, the name may be automatically selected instead of the ID which will become more helpful in the next step.

All columns are optional, since this creates draft games which can have all fields as optional. You can create a bunch of games with only teams, or a bunch of games with only dates and no teams, or whatever you can imagine. It’s your mess to clean up if you don’t like what you created.

Some columns impose a validation constraint. If a date is selected, it must conform to the date format selected in the first step. Times must be formatted as HH:mm (24h). Statuses must match what Play provides, or they'll be ignored as Active.

The teams and surfaces can be named however you like, that’s what the next step is for.

Match Columns

Now that you’ve told Play what your columns are, it can start to parse the rows.

On the left, you’ll see the values from your file, and on the right is what they match to in Play. it’ll

An initial attempt is made to automatically match the teams and surfaces based on the values provided, but this isn’t always 100%. Make sure to always review the values to be sure the right one was picked.

If you don’t see the correct values in the left column, go back to the previous step and check the columns you’ve selected.

It is also possible that you’ll see the same team multiple times if you haven’t written it exactly the same every time. You don’t need to correct your data, you may select the same team on the right multiple times.

If you don’t select a team, it’ll be considered a TBD. If you don’t have any teams (or surfaces) showing up because you didn’t select team (or surface) columns in the previous step, all the games will be parsed as TBD.

Review

This is a preview of the draft games will be created if you continue. Review the data and make sure it’s what you expect because it’s easiest to go back now and correct the columns, otherwise you will need to delete the draft games and start over.