Custom Federations, Divisions, Ages, and Proficiencies

Overview

Every event in the system is classified along four axes: a Federation, a Division, an Age, and a Proficiency. Together they answer the question every competitor asks when they look at an event list — is this event for me? A Youth Amateur Bronze Latin event tells a dancer, in four words, which governing body's rules apply, whether they're competing as an amateur, whether their age fits, and whether their level fits.

The system ships with a set of standard classifiers drawn from the published rules of the established dancesport governing bodies. Those cover sanctioned competitions well. They don't cover an independent competition running its own system of levels and age brackets — and they don't cover the categories a competition invents for itself, like a sponsored scholarship event.

Custom classifiers close that gap. Any organizer can create their own federations, divisions, ages, and proficiencies. They belong to your account rather than to the shared list: they appear in your event-building forms, and on the competitions you own they're available to your co-organizers too, so a team can build events from one vocabulary.

When to Use Custom Classifiers

There are three common situations, and only the third involves creating a custom federation.

Adding categories to a sanctioned competition

You're running under one of the standard federations included with the system, and its categories are right — you just need one or two more. An age bracket the governing body doesn't publish, or a proficiency level you want to split further.

Create a custom age or proficiency directly under the existing standard division. There's no need for a custom federation or a custom division. Your competition stays properly classified under the sanctioning body, and your extra category sits alongside the standard ones in your event forms only.

Creating named or special events

Some events aren't defined by skill or age at all — they're defined by what they commemorate. A memorial event, a scholarship round, a sponsor-named championship.

A custom proficiency handles these cleanly. Create one named for the award — "Ellery Memorial Scholarship" — and select it when building those events. The events then carry the award's name everywhere the classifier appears: in the event list, in the schedule, and in the filters competitors use. The alternative is to run an ordinary Championship event and rely on the event name alone, which leaves the event sharing categorization with others.

Running an independent competition

Your competition isn't sanctioned by a major body, and its categories don't map onto anyone else's. You may run three age brackets where a governing body publishes twelve, or use level names that exist in no federation's rule book.

Here you build the whole chain: a custom federation, custom divisions under it, then custom ages and proficiencies under those. Forcing an independent competition into standard classifiers mislabels its events; adding every independent organizer's scheme to the shared list would clutter the system for everyone and produce names that make sense at exactly one competition.

Key Concepts

The Four Levels Are a Chain

Classifiers are hierarchical, and each level narrows the next:

Federation  →  Division  →  Age
                         →  Proficiency

• A Federation is the governing body or sanctioning authority — one of the standard ones included with the system, or one you create.
• A Division belongs to a federation and describes the competitive category — Amateur, Professional, Pro-Am, Collegiate. Each division also carries a division type, which is a separate and important field; see below.
• An Age belongs to a division and describes an age bracket — Pre-Teen II, Junior I, Adult, Senior III.
• A Proficiency belongs to a division and describes a skill level — Newcomer, Bronze, Silver, Championship.

This is why the same age or proficiency name can exist more than once in the system: an "Adult" bracket under one federation's division and an "Adult" bracket under another's are separate records with separate definitions. Each federation defines its own brackets, and a "Pre-Teen" who qualifies under one federation may not qualify under another.

The chain also drives the event form. When you build an event, choosing a federation repopulates the division list; choosing a division repopulates the age and proficiency lists. You can't select an age until you've selected the division it belongs to.

Division Type: the Name Is for People, the Type Is for the System

Every division carries a division type — Professional, Amateur, ProAm, or All — separate from its name. The two do different jobs, and the distinction matters most when you're creating custom divisions.

The name is yours. It's what competitors read, and you can call a division whatever suits your competition: "Regional Amateur", "Community Open", "Collegiate Team". Names vary between federations, get abbreviated differently, get renamed between years, and occasionally get typos.

The type is what the system reads. Whether a couple is competing professionally, as amateurs, or as a pro-am partnership is the single most consequential fact about a division — it's what decides whether a given couple is eligible to enter a given event. A pro-am couple entering an amateur event, or an amateur entering a professional one, is a registration error that ought to be caught rather than discovered on the floor.

The system can't reliably determine that from the name. A division called "Community Open" gives it nothing to work with, and inferring category from text would break the moment an organizer picks a name that doesn't contain the expected word — or misspells one that does. So the category is recorded explicitly, in a field with a fixed set of values, and the name is left completely free.

This is why you're asked to choose a type even when your division's name already seems to say it. Set it to the honest answer for how couples in that division actually compete, regardless of what you've named it.

The fourth type, All, means the division is open to everyone — amateur, professional, pro-am, whoever. Use it for divisions where professional status genuinely doesn't matter. Events under an All division are never restricted by professional status, no matter what a competition's settings say.

Important: Division type is now enforced at registration, if the organizer turns it on. The Enforce Division Restrictions setting in Competition Settings is off by default; when enabled, an entry is rejected when the entrant's professional status doesn't match the event's division type. See Division Restrictions at Registration below for the exact rules. Because custom divisions can't be edited after creation, setting the type correctly the first time matters more than it used to — a wrong type can only be fixed by deleting the division and starting over, and only while nothing is using it yet.

Division Restrictions at Registration

When Enforce Division Restrictions is enabled for a competition, every entry is checked against its event's division type before it's accepted:

Solo events check the entering athlete's professional status:

Partnered events check the partnership:

A dancer's professional status comes from the Professional checkbox on their affiliation. If your competition relies on these checks, it's worth reminding competitors to keep that field accurate before registration opens.

Note: Never give a solo event a division typed ProAm. Entries into it will be refused outright when enforcement is on. If you need a solo event open to everyone, use a division typed All.

Custom Classifiers Attach to Standard Ones

A custom classifier can hang off a standard parent, at any level. A custom age or proficiency under a standard Amateur division works exactly like a standard one — it simply appears on your competitions rather than on everyone's. A custom division under a standard federation works the same way.

You only need to create a custom federation when your competition genuinely isn't running under an existing body's categories.

Standard vs. Custom

Every classifier record has an owner:

Custom classifiers are owned by a user account, not by a competition and not by an organization. Once you create one it's available to you on every competition you build, past and future.

So an organizer who defines a "Masters III" age bracket under a standard Amateur division sees it in the event form on every competition they run. Another organizer, building their own competition, never sees it, and would have to create their own if they wanted the same bracket — unless they're working on a competition of yours, which is what the next section covers.

Which Classifiers a Competition Can Use

A competition's classifier lists don't follow whoever happens to be signed in. They follow the competition's Owner — the account that created it. Anywhere you pick a federation, division, age, or proficiency for a competition, the options are:

• every standard classifier, plus
• the custom classifiers belonging to that competition's Owner.

Your own custom classifiers are deliberately left out when you're working on someone else's competition. Two consequences, one in each direction:

As the Owner, the custom classifiers you created are available to every co-organizer you add to your competition. You don't have to build the events yourself to keep the naming consistent, and your co-organizers don't have to recreate your categories under their own accounts. Anything you add later shows up in their forms too.

As a co-organizer on a competition someone else owns, you're building events from the Owner's vocabulary, not your own. Your custom classifiers won't appear in that competition's forms even though they appear on your own competitions. If a category is missing, ask the Owner to create it; it becomes available to you as soon as they do.

This is why a competition's events stay coherent no matter how many people work on them: every event is classified from the same list, whoever built it. The rule holds when an event is saved and not only in the dropdowns, so a classifier from outside the competition's list is rejected rather than quietly accepted.

Note: The one place your own list still applies is the create competition form. There's no competition yet, and you'll be its Owner, so the federation dropdown there offers your own custom federations. Once the competition exists, editing it shows the Owner's list like everywhere else.

What Competitors See

Custom classifiers are scoped for authoring, not for display. Competitors and the public see them wherever they're actually in use:

• Event listings for your competition show each event's federation, division, age, and proficiency by name, whether those are standard or custom.
• The event filters on your competition page are built from the classifiers your events actually use. If your events use a custom "Masters III" age, that appears as a filter option on your competition — and only on your competition. Standard classifiers you never used don't appear at all.

The result is that competitors filter your competition using your vocabulary, without your vocabulary appearing anywhere else in the system.

Note: Filter labels are prefixed for clarity — divisions appear as federation abbreviation + division name, and ages and proficiencies as division abbreviation + their name. Short, meaningful abbreviations on your custom federations and divisions make these lists much easier for competitors to read.

Creating Custom Classifiers

All four are managed from the Custom section of the Organizer Center sidebar, which has a page for each: Federations, Divisions, Ages, and Proficiencies. Each page lists the classifiers you own, with a button to create a new one and tools to search, sort, and delete what's there. You need the Organizer role to create them.

These pages are about authorship, so they list only what you created. A classifier belonging to a competition's Owner is usable in that competition's event forms without appearing here — if you co-organize and can't find one on this page, that's why.

Start at whichever level you actually need. If you're adding a bracket to an existing federation, go straight to Ages or Proficiencies and pick the standard division as its parent. If you're building a whole classification system, work down the chain — a division needs its federation to exist first, and an age or proficiency needs its division.

Custom Federation

1. Open Custom → Federations and select New Federation.
2. Choose the Country the federation operates in.
3. Enter the Name — the full name competitors will recognize.
4. Enter an Abbreviation.
5. Save.

Note: Federation abbreviations used to be reserved system-wide, so the first organizer to claim one kept it and everyone else had to work around a name they couldn't see. That restriction has been lifted — pick whatever abbreviation suits your competition, even if another organizer somewhere is already using it.

Abbreviations are still worth choosing carefully, because yours is what competitors read in event listings and filters. Something distinctive to your competition is easier to recognize than something generic.

Custom Division

1. Open Custom → Divisions and select New Division.
2. Choose the Federation — standard or one of yours.
3. Enter the Name and Abbreviation.
4. Choose the Division Type.
5. Save.

Note: Division type is a fixed set of four values, not a free-text label, and it's how the system determines entry eligibility when enforcement is enabled. If your division doesn't map neatly onto Professional, Amateur, or ProAm — a collegiate or community category, for instance — choose the type that describes how those couples actually compete, and put the distinguishing word in the division name, which is what competitors see. Some of the standard divisions included with the system do exactly this: a collegiate division is named for the circuit but typed as Amateur, because that's how its couples compete. Reach for All only when the division really is open to every competitor regardless of status.

Custom Age

1. Open Custom → Ages and select New Age.
2. Enter the Name and a Description.
3. Choose the Division the bracket belongs to — standard or your own.
4. Enter the Minimum Age and Maximum Age.
5. Save.

Important: Minimum and maximum age are descriptive, not enforced. The system stores them and shows them to you, but it does not check a competitor's age against them at registration. Eligibility remains something you communicate in your competition rules and verify yourself. Use the description field to make the rule unambiguous.

Custom Proficiency

1. Open Custom → Proficiencies and select New Proficiency.
2. Enter the Name.
3. Choose the Division it belongs to — standard or your own.
4. Save.

Proficiencies are ordered within their division in the sequence they were created, and that order is what competitors see in filter lists. Create your levels in the order you want them displayed — easiest to hardest — rather than in whatever order they come to mind.

Managing What You've Created

Each of the four Custom pages lists everything you've created of that kind, and a working organizer accumulates a lot of them over a few seasons. The pages give you three ways to handle that list.

Searching

The Search box above each table filters the list as you type. It matches on the text the table is showing, column by column — so searching a division's page for regional matches rows whose name, abbreviation, or federation reads "Regional", and searching an age page for 60 matches a bracket whose minimum or maximum age is 60. If nothing matches, the page says so rather than showing you an empty table.

Sorting

Select any column header to sort by that column, and again to reverse it. Numeric columns — the minimum and maximum age — sort as numbers, so 9 comes before 10 rather than after it.

Selecting a header a third time clears the sort and returns the list to its default order. That default is meaningful for ages and proficiencies: it's the order they appear in for competitors, grouped by division and then in convention order. Coming back to it is how you check that a division's levels read in a sensible sequence.

Deleting

Every row has a Delete action. Selecting it asks you to confirm, and the deletion is permanent — there's no undo and no archive.

You can only delete classifiers you created. Standard classifiers belong to the shared set and aren't yours to remove; another organizer's custom classifiers aren't either, and neither ever appears on these pages to begin with.

A classifier that's in use can't be deleted. If any event, dynamic event, or competition still points at it, the deletion is refused and the message names what's holding it — for example, that three events still reference it. That's deliberate: a competition can never lose the categories its results were recorded under. To remove one anyway, first change or delete whatever refers to it.

Delete from the bottom of the chain upward. A division can't be deleted while ages or proficiencies hang off it, and a federation can't be deleted while it still has divisions. So to remove a custom federation entirely, delete its ages and proficiencies first, then its divisions, then the federation itself. The refusal message tells you which level is blocking you.

Deleting a custom federation also releases its abbreviation, so an abbreviation claimed by mistake can be freed and reused.

Note: Dynamic event templates are worth a look before you delete. A division, age, or proficiency listed among a template's allowed values — but not yet used by any event the template has generated — doesn't block the deletion; it's quietly dropped from that template's allowed list instead. Athletes then can no longer register for combinations that used it. If you run dynamic events, check the templates that reference a classifier before removing it.

Editing

Custom classifiers still can't be edited after they're created. If you got a name, an age range, or a division type wrong, the fix is to delete the classifier and create a replacement — which works cleanly as long as nothing is using it yet. Once events depend on it, deletion is blocked too, and correcting it means contacting support.

This is the practical reason to get names and division types right the first time: the window in which a mistake is cheap to fix closes as soon as you build events on it.

Using Custom Classifiers

Once created, custom classifiers behave exactly like the standard ones:

• Competitions — the federation dropdown when you create a competition includes your custom federations. Editing an existing competition offers the federations of its Owner.
• Events — the federation, division, age, and proficiency dropdowns include the Owner's, cascading down the chain as you make each selection.
• Dynamic Events — the Owner's custom divisions, ages, and proficiencies are selectable as allowed values on a dynamic event template, so they work with automatic event generation too.
• Filters and listings — as described above, they appear to competitors on the competitions where they're used.

On your own competitions the Owner is you, so these are simply your custom classifiers. On a competition you co-organize, they're the Owner's — see Which Classifiers a Competition Can Use above.

Rules and Limits

Custom classifiers can be deleted, but not edited. There's no way to rename a classifier or change its settings after creation. An unused one can be deleted and recreated, which comes to the same thing; one that events already depend on can't, and correcting it means contacting support. Name them carefully the first time.

Classifiers in use can't be removed. Once an event, dynamic event, or competition points at a classifier, the record is protected, and the refusal names what's holding it. Even an administrator can't delete it while anything still references it. This is deliberate: a competition can never lose the categories its results were recorded under.

You can only delete your own. Standard classifiers and other organizers' custom ones are never yours to remove — including on a competition you co-organize, where the Owner's classifiers are usable but not manageable.

Abbreviations matter. They're what competitors read: division abbreviations prefix age and proficiency names in competitor-facing filters, and a federation's abbreviation identifies it in event listings. They don't need to be unique across the system, so choose for clarity rather than availability.

Division type is load-bearing. It's the field the system uses to tell professional, amateur, and pro-am competition apart, independent of what you named the division — and it's enforced at registration when Enforce Division Restrictions is enabled. Because custom divisions can't be edited after creation, a wrong type is worth catching before you save.

Age ranges are informational. See the note under Custom Age above.

Ownership is per account, but scope is per competition. Custom classifiers follow the account that created them, across every competition that account runs — and on those competitions they're available to co-organizers as well. The reverse doesn't hold: a co-organizer's own custom classifiers are not offered on a competition someone else owns, and are refused if submitted anyway.

Worked Examples

A scholarship event at a sanctioned competition

A competition running under an established governing body wants to offer a scholarship round funded by a longtime sponsor, judged alongside the usual championship events.

1. Open Custom → Proficiencies.
2. Create one named "Ellery Memorial Scholarship" under the standard Amateur division of that federation.
3. Build the scholarship events selecting that federation → Amateur → the appropriate age → "Ellery Memorial Scholarship".

Nothing else about the competition changes. The events sit under the sanctioning federation like every other event, and competitors can filter the schedule down to the scholarship rounds by name. Next year the same proficiency is already there to reuse.

An independent competition with its own system

A regional series sanctioned by nobody runs three age brackets and its own level names.

1. Custom Federation — "Mountain West Dancesport Series" (MWDS), United States.
2. Custom Divisions under MWDS — "Regional Amateur" (type Amateur, abbreviation RegAm) and "Regional Pro-Am" (type ProAm, abbreviation RegPA).
3. Custom Ages under RegAm — Youth (1–17), Adult (18–49), Masters (50–100), each with a description spelling out the rule.
4. Custom Proficiencies under RegAm, created in order — Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Open.

The organizer then creates the competition under the MWDS federation and builds events from these categories. Competitors registering see "RegAm Adult" and "RegAm Intermediate" in the event list and in the filters. Co-organizers added to the series' competitions build events from the same categories without setting anything up; no organizer sees any of it on a competition of their own.

Where to Find This

Custom classifiers live under the Custom section of the Organizer Center sidebar: Federations, Divisions, Ages, and Proficiencies. Each page lists what you own and lets you add more, search and sort the list, and delete the ones nothing is using. They then appear automatically in the competition form, the event form, and the dynamic event form wherever a federation, division, age, or proficiency is selected — on the competitions you own, and for the co-organizers working on them.