Of course, we are here to help you as much as we can via weetabixwildcats@thefa.com, justplay@thefa.com, squad@thefa.com, and faevents@thefa.com - whether it be a direct reply back by email, your query sent onto our IT support team, or advising you to go back to your County FA.
However, there are quite a few things which you can do yourself in your application to get a quicker resolution that doesn't involve us, and five of these key things will be highlighted below.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Changing Your Provider Name
If you need to change your provider name - perhaps if you are merging or linking with a grassroots club or if you simply just want a new name to entice your participants - you can do so in your application.
Assuming you are an approved provider already, you can use the pencil icon on the summary page when you go back into your application to get to the 'Provider Name' section. You may also see this on other programme applications within the 'Delivery Partner Contact Details' section (top line is provider name).
Where it says 'Provider Name' or 'Delivery Partner Contact Details', click the pencil icon to edit this to whatever your new organisation name is and once finished, save the change and re-submit the application back to your county for re-approval. You have to re-submit the name change or this won't go through.
2. Number Of Booking Places
The minimum number of booking places on a Weetabix Wildcats application needs to be 30, and the minimum number of booking places on a Snickers Protein Just Play and Age UK Walking Football application is 16. Squad has a maximum number of places set by the provider organiser. Please consider this when filling in or amending that number accordingly, as you will get an error message in red text on the system if the numbers aren't met.
The reason for the numbers are based on any given venue's capacity and the football programme being done, meaning the venue you choose needs to be able to accommodate for 30 Weetabix Wildcats, 16 Snickers Protein Just Play-ers, and 16 Walking Footballers (and a suitable number of Squad girls appropriate to space available). You can edit this booking place number in your application by again going to your summary page and clicking the pencil icon next to the relevant section.
Choose a minimum or maximum number appropriately based on your predicted or current session attendances and interest. If you select the minimum number in your application, you will only open up that amount of booking spaces for people to book onto your sessions. So, if your sessions are popular but you've only got 16 places up for grabs, you might have a list of people wanting to get involved and you can't let them because you're all booked up.
Any changes you make to the booking spaces will come into effect from your next newly-created session and not any existing sessions that are listed in your event. When done, save and re-submit the application back to your County FA for re-approval.
3. Documents
As long as you upload one of each document required by your programme, this part of an application should be quite simple. We can provide templates of some - not all - of the documents needed but some you will have to source yourself, such as public liability insurance. These can be dependent on the venue you choose within your application so if you end up editing the venue, you may have to re-evaluate your documents too. Use the application summary and pencil icon to modify.
On the whole though, you can use your own style of documents if you wish. When uploading them onto the application, PDF tends to be the best file that the system likes but others do work as well. Any special characters or punctuation within the file name or the document itself usually result in a red text error message so be mindful of that in your documentation text.
You can add extra supporting documents if necessary and also remove documents that need to be replaced on the application, and then saving and re-submitting the application back to your County FA for them to re-approve it.
4. Venue
If you cannot find your venue by name in the search box, a good option is to put in the postcode of it in as this should hopefully bring up more accurate results for you to select from. First though, you will have to go to the pencil icon of the venue section to bring up the desired information.
If entering the postcode still isn't the answer, then it may be that your venue is not actually listed on PitchFinder, which is the site that we use to pull venue information across the country from. You can add your venue to PitchFinder by clicking on the URL link below the venue search box. This will take you to a form where you can input all of the details of the new venue on and then submit it to PitchFinder, who should then get it up on their site as soon as they can.
At this point, if your venue cannot be found on the list, either pause your application and come back another time to change it or insert the closest possible venue to your intended unlisted one. You may just have to tell your participants the right place to head towards in the meantime so they don't get lost trying to find your session!
5. Qualifications
There may be a coach, volunteer, or designated safeguarding officer (DSO) who doesn't have the correct qualifications needed for their role on the application. Please ensure that all staff members are qualified to be in the positions they get listed in and they meet the criteria for the role. The qualifications will be associated to the FAN of the person and red error message text will show on the application if there needs to be some action taken for expired or invalid qualifications. You can edit staff on the application by using the summary page and the pencil icon towards the bottom of the application page.
Things such as this will mostly need to be taken up with your County FA, as they are the ones who will organise coaching courses, tell you how and where to complete DBS checks, and get you onto your next Safeguarding Children workshop. Once a course is completed, please allow some time for the qualification to sync onto one's FAN and then you will be able to input that person on the application again without a error message. If the person has got a certain qualification showing on their FAN but this still results in an error message on the application, this may be something on our side which we'd have to check.
It is advised not complete your application until the qualification issue is sorted with the person you want listed as coach/volunteer/DSO. However, we understand there may be deadlines for applications - and we also understand people leave things until the last minute. So, if you haven't prepared and urgently need to submit the application to your county but realise your intended coach hasn't got their FA Level 1 for example, you can instead temporarily list someone else on the application who is qualified as a coach whilst your intended coach attends a course and then submit the application. You can then go back into your application after approval and add in the newly-qualified coach when the award is showing on their FAN, as long as this is done before your session delivery start date.
