Set up your water polo league, step by step.

Open admin.eggbeater.app and sign in with the account that owns your club: Google, Apple or an emailed sign-in link. Click Purchases in the sidebar (under Club) and pick the right plan for your league:

• Club League, $99/season. Every team belongs to your club. Run an internal or rec league.
• Multi-Club League, $249/season. Teams from multiple clubs (regional leagues, cross-club competitions). Unlocks every Club League feature plus visiting-club spectator access and cross-club standings.
• Both live under “Add more”. Hit Upgrade and Stripe Checkout opens in a new tab. Cancel anytime. The subscription is per season, not annual. Once payment clears, the plan moves up into the Active card with a green badge.

In the admin sidebar, click Leagues. With no league yet, the tab offers one primary action and one fallback:

• Create a league: opens the four-step wizard. This is the path for a brand-new season.
• Already have one? Paste a share code and hit Restore to adopt an existing league onto this club.
• Once a league exists, the setup actions add Import from Sheet (pull a schedule from Google Sheets), Import league JSON (a complete config, used for migrations and seed scripts), Edit league, Build Playoff Bracket and Generate Next Round.
• Live Dashboard, Live Game Console, Standings, Player Stats and Past Leagues fill in as you complete the next steps.

Click Create a league. Four steps, and you can go back at any point. It is a modal, not a saved draft, so finish it in one sitting.

• Step 1, League: the name (for example “Bay Area Adult Water Polo League”), a season label (for example “Spring 2026”), and the tier. Multi-Club is what lets a visiting club import your share code.
• Step 2, Divisions & teams: at least one division, teams one per line. A running count under each box tells you how many it has read.
• Step 3, Format & schedule: pick from six formats, then give the season dates, times and courts (see step 5 below).
• Step 4, Rules & publish: points, tiebreakers, when standings appear, and the director scoring password. It opens with the real game and week count so you know what you are committing to.
• The league ID is derived from the name. The share code is minted for you. It is not something you choose.

Teams are only names at creation time, which is enough to build a schedule and standings. Player rosters load afterwards, on the Leagues tab:

• League Rosters card: paste a CSV with columns Team, Cap #, First name, Last name (and optionally Division).
• Google Sheets link: pull directly from a tab in the same sheet that holds your schedule.
• Roster entries flow into: the Alignments writeback (link to club-cap player photo columns), the cap number to name lookup in the edit modal for each game (so you do not have to remember who #11 is when entering scores), and the player-stat aggregator for W-T-L attribution.

Step 3 of the wizard is format and schedule together. Six formats, all generated for real before you commit:

• Round-robin: every team plays every other once. The default, and what most leagues want.
• Weekly pods: small pods each week instead of a full round-robin. Set the pod size and how many weeks.
• Swiss (round 1): pairs the opening round only. Later rounds come from Generate Next Round, seeded on actual results.
• Single elimination: a seeded knockout, optionally with a third-place game. Teams seed in the order you typed them.
• Double elimination: a loss drops you to the lower bracket, not out.
• Pools to bracket: pool play first, then the top N of each pool into a knockout.
• Then the dates: a first game day, a first start time, a slot length and your courts. Week N lands 7 days after week N-1, and games fill every court at one time slot before the clock advances. Two pools halve your game day. They do not double the calendar.

A league created by the wizard is a single regular season, which is all most need. Phases appear when you add a playoff round (Build Playoff Bracket tags its games) or when you import a config that declares them. They exist so standings and stats segment correctly. Each phase has:

• ID: a slug (regular-season, playoffs)
• Name: a display label (for example “Regular Season”, “Playoffs”), in your league’s working language
• Type: regular, playoff, preseason or exhibition
• Counts toward standings: true for regular and playoff, false for preseason and exhibition
• Each game has a phase field. Use a game’s Edit button to change which phase it belongs to, or mark a game as exhibition so it does not count toward standings.

Step 4 of the wizard. The defaults are sensible (3 for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss, a shootout win worth 2 and a shootout loss still earning 1), so most leagues read them and move on. Change any of the five boxes if your bylaws differ. Tiebreakers resolve equal points top to bottom. Reorder them with the arrows or switch one off entirely:

1. Points
2. Wins
3. Head-to-head record
4. Goals against (fewer is better)
5. Goals for
6. Goal differential (capped at ±10 per game)
7. Team name (alphabetical)

Creating the league already publishes it. Afterwards, the Publishing card’s Publish / Refresh League pushes any later change: a new result, an edited team name, an imported schedule. Either way Eggbeater:

• Mints a 6-character share code (for example LWPL26). It is generated for you, not chosen
• Activates a public spectator address: app.eggbeater.app/?join=league-{code}
• Generates a search-friendly landing page at /leagues/{your-slug}/
• Shows your club’s name and logo on the spectator page
• The spectator page detects the league’s display language and switches the interface to match. French leagues land in French, Spanish leagues land in Spanish.

On the standings card header, click Export to Sheets. The first time, you grant Google Sheets access through Google’s sign-in. After that:

• Eggbeater creates a new workbook in your Drive (titled with the league name and season)
• The initial export populates about 7 tabs: League Overview, Master Schedule, Standings (combined and per division), Player Stats and a Game Sheet for each game
• Additional tabs land on later exports as data accumulates: roster plus stats, player stats per phase, career totals, archives, and one game sheet per played game
• Auto-sync: every finalized score syncs to Google Sheets within a few seconds, with no manual export needed. Use Re-export to refresh the tabs in place.

Three paths to record a score:

• A. Live scoring during the game. The scorer at the desk opens app.eggbeater.app on a tablet and taps Score this game (no code, no game-picking), then starts the clock. Tapping Goal, Assist, Save and so on logs events with the cap number and timestamp. Button labels render in the league’s display language (English, Spanish or French) automatically. Spectators see updates within 5 seconds, and standings re-rank live.
• B. Final score only. In the admin’s Live Game Console, type the final score in each team’s input and click Save. The game flips to FINAL and syncs the score to the Google Sheets workbook within 5 seconds.
• C. Backfill events from a paper scoresheet. Click Log on the game tile, then enter events one at a time (period, time, cap color, team, cap #, action, position). Each submission appends to the game’s action log and refreshes the scoreboard writeback tab for that game. Before flipping a game to FINAL, fill in the two referee names through Edit. Eggbeater warns when the referees are missing on a non-exhibition game.