MSHSL: Minnesota State High School League
The Minnesota State High School League provides educational opportunities for students through activities and athletics. With 500+ member schools and 240,000 high school participants across Minnesota, MSHSL impacts all high school students in the state that participate in interscholastic competitions. The League is responsible for the management and monitoring of these activities at all levels, ensuring that they provide the safest and best possible environments for their students.
Gravity Works created a modern web design to elevate their brand and place more focus on publication content like news articles and student spotlights. We rebuilt the public-facing website on a Drupal CMS and created custom tools to help MSHSL provide a better user experience for everyone that relies on the website, both internally and externally. The new website provides public users with all the latest information and insights on the activities and athletics they care about – with data pulled from multiple sources into a single location. League staff and school activities directors have access to custom tools that help them conduct their work quickly and efficiently, so they can spend more time serving the needs of their students.
Creating a Unified Brand
MSHSL wanted to use this website redesign as an opportunity to evolve their brand, while paying homage to their 100+ year tradition and history. Our design team introduced a more dramatic color palette and used large visual pieces, including photography, to create an online space that felt more engaging and impactful. The new homepage design puts students and their activities front-and-center by showcasing their accomplishments through news, video, student spotlights, and more. Most users are coming to the MSHSL website to access some type of data, whether it’s scores, schedules, rosters, or tournament information. It was critical to the success of this project that the design supported this data by presenting it to viewers in a way that’s easy to access, visually appealing, and simple to understand.
Creating a Publication Platform
MSHSL wanted to use this website redesign as an opportunity to evolve their brand, while paying homage to their 100+ year tradition and history. Our design team introduced a more dramatic color palette and used large visual pieces, including photography, to create an online space that felt more engaging and impactful. The new homepage design puts students and their activities front-and-center by showcasing their accomplishments through news, video, student spotlights, and more. Most users are coming to the MSHSL website to access some type of data, whether it’s scores, schedules, rosters, or tournament information. It was critical to the success of this project that the design supported this data by presenting it to viewers in a way that’s easy to access, visually appealing, and simple to understand.
Additional Features
We built this website to pull in data from multiple sources, including Arbiter, and built clean interfaces to display this information publicly. Schools were already using Arbiter to post results, schedules, and rosters. We were able to pull in this data and display it on the MSHSL website, removing the need for schools to enter this information in multiple places. The score ticker and schedules on the website are pulled directly from Arbiter to display data at both the school and team level.
The new website makes it easy for fans, participants, and media to follow schools and teams. Each sport or activity has its own page with tournament archives, news, resources, brackets, and ticket info. Schools have profile pages with admin contacts and hosted activities. MSHSL can promote news and media to boost visibility, while Activities Directors and coaches can update profiles anytime—for example, a coach adding team photos or a director updating school information.
Management Tools & Member Dashboard
We built the tools and dashboards within the website to meet the functional needs of internal members, including MSHSL staff, coaches, region secretaries, activity directors, and tournament managers. These members rely on the website to perform their work, so it was important that they had easy access to the resources and tools they needed to do their job. To help MSHSL manage member accounts, the new website allows them to assign every member with a unique user role. These roles determine what members can access and what they have permission to control on the website, all of which is visible from their personalized dashboard. Member roles are as follows.
Administrators
MSHSL administrators have the highest level of permissions, including the ability to manage content throughout the site and keep track of all other members. They have unique tools, like the ability to review and approve student transfer requests and reviews. MSHSL staff add modules for required education and assign them to specific subsets of users. Staff are able to pull reports and information that facilitate tournament and activity management.
Activity Directors/Assistants
MSHSL administrators have the highest level of permissions, including the ability to manage content throughout the site and keep track of all other members. They have unique tools, like the ability to review and approve student transfer requests and reviews. MSHSL staff add modules for required education and assign them to specific subsets of users. Staff are able to pull reports and information that facilitate tournament and activity management.
Region Secretaries
Region Secretaries manage more than 700 section tournaments across Minnesota. We built custom tools, such as the competitive sections map, to help region secretaries create section tournaments and communicate with a variety of audiences. The winners of these tournaments are what eventually determines who advances to state tournaments.
Coaches
Coaches use the website to update their teams’ profile information and manage their own education requirements, like general rules meetings and training courses, which must be completed every year. Additionally coaches request permission from their activities director to work with students during the off-season and create and submit Emergency Action Plans.
Tournament Managers
These members have access to update tournament information for the sport or activity they manage and place that information on the dashboards of those teams involved in their tournaments. This includes maintaining bracket scores, general resources, and more.
Rosters
Visitors to the website can easily generate rosters by picking the activity, squad (JV, Varsity, etc.), and school they want to follow. These rosters display data about each athlete on the team, which is pulled directly from Arbiter. This integration allows coaches to continue updating their team’s roster in the system they are familiar with and ensures that data is shared on the MSHSL website. Visitors can view printable rosters and export as a CSV file. We also made it possible to pull information from multiple schools to create a program.
Brackets
MSHSL staff can build tournament brackets to help fans keep track of competing teams as the tournament progresses toward the championship. The data is entered into Drupal by tournament staff and displayed on the tournament page as a styled interface. Throughout the tournament, staff members can easily edit the bracket to remove teams. Fans can view a printed version of the bracket and download as a CSV file. Additional information for each game, such as summary or a PDF of stats from the game can also be added. Additionally, the team name on each bracket links directly back to their profile page which provides photos, rosters, schedules and results.
Student Transfers
Visitors to the website can easily generate rosters by picking the activity, squad (JV, Varsity, etc.), and school they want to follow. These rosters display data about each athlete on the team, which is pulled directly from rSchools Today. This integration allows coaches to continue updating their team’s roster in the system they are familiar with and ensures that data is shared on the MSHSL website. Visitors can view printable rosters and export as a CSV file. We also made it possible to pull information from multiple schools to create a program.
Interactive Mapping Tools
The competitive sections map is a valuable tool for both public users (students, parents, media) and internal members (school administrators, region secretaries) to see what schools a team is going to play in post-season tournaments. The data is available in both interactive map and list form to support the preferences of the user and multiple use cases. Administrators heavily rely on this tool while creating sections to ensure that each section has an equal number of competing schools and meets geographical requirements. The tool allows them to export a spreadsheet of all teams, sections, and enrollment numbers, which helps them more easily evaluate a large amount of data. The spreadsheets can be edited and re-imported to create a new set of teams, or administrators can make edits directly through the tool.