We have added several new features for Groups or Teams.
Event Soft Caps
The first one is “Soft Caps”. This is very useful for wave races, for example, obstacle course races. The basic idea is that you may have a cap of the number of people in a wave, but you want their friends to be able to join them in that same wave – so you need a “soft cap” to prevent new people from registering unless they are a part of a team. In a wave race example, you would set the cap for a wave to 300 and the soft cap for a team to say 5. After 300 people registered, no new people could join on their own or create a new team. However, a person could join an existing team as long as that team was under say 5 people. This means the wave will likely have over 300 people.
Users would see an event was full:

If they go to the Team page, they can still join from that page:

The cap for an event, or wave, is set up in the Race -> Registration settings:

The guaranteed team slots is set up under Participants -> Groups/Teams -> Settings:

Auto-Event and Team Selection

When registering more than one person, if the first person selects an event and creates or joins a team, we will automatically select the same event and team for the additional registrants IF:
- The group/team type is valid only for that event OR
- There is a required minimum number of people with forced group signup at one time.
This should save a lot of time for most participants that register together. Here is an example that shows the 5K auto-selected and the second participant auto-joining Bob’s Team:

Obviously, you can choose another event and/or team for the second participant. This only happens if there is only one event for that team type – for example, there is a 5K and Fun Run and the team type is only available for the 5K. If there are team types that cross the Marathon and Half Marathon, then the event and team is not auto-selected.
Tooltip for Team Pricing

We offer a lot of capabilities for team pricing. We have added a tooltip that helps explain it to participants – hopefully encouraging more to take advantage of your race’s special pricing. Here is an example:
Team Captain Report Improvements
We have added some options to the Team Captain Report. The biggest new feature is adding the Team types as well as a convenient way to show teams that have fewer than the number of minimum team members signed up:


Team Joining Dates
You can now specify team joining dates separately from event dates. This is under the Advanced Settings for Group/Team Setup:

Summary
Groups and Teams are a powerful way for races to get more viral promotion for their races. With these new features, we give races a lot of flexibility to meet their unique needs to make their races special.