ThereFor
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Finding your calendar link

Where the Subscribe link hides in Crossbar, SportsEngine, and Google Calendar — and why a downloaded file is not the same thing.

What you are looking for

ThereFor needs a subscription link — an address it can check again tomorrow. Most sports and school calendars offer one, usually behind a button called Subscribe, Calendar Feed, or iCal. It is a long, ugly URL, and that is the right one.

You only do this once per calendar. After that the season keeps itself up to date, including the game that moves to a different rink on a Tuesday night.

Finding the link in Crossbar

  1. Sign in to Crossbar and open the team whose schedule you want.
  2. Open the Schedule tab for that team.
  3. Look for Subscribe — it is usually near the top of the schedule, sometimes behind a calendar icon.
  4. Choose Copy link rather than Download. The link normally ends in /ical.
  5. Paste it into ThereFor and pick Crossbar as the provider.

Crossbar also offers a family calendar feed that covers every team your kids are on. If you have more than one child in the same club, that one link may be all you need.

Finding the link in SportsEngine

  1. Sign in to SportsEngine and open either your team page or your MySE calendar.
  2. Find the calendar view, then look for Subscribe to Calendar or an iCal option.
  3. Copy the address it offers. It usually contains ical.sportngin.com and a long uuid.
  4. Paste it into ThereFor and pick SportsEngine as the provider.

SportsEngine sometimes hands out a link with the uuid escaped as uuid%3D. ThereFor repairs that for you, so paste it exactly as copied rather than editing it by hand.

Finding the link in another calendar

  1. Open the calendar you already use — Google Calendar, a school portal, a dance studio, a church.
  2. Find its sharing or integration settings.
  3. Copy the secret address in iCal format. In Google Calendar it sits under Settings for that calendar, in the Integrate calendar section.
  4. Paste it into ThereFor and pick Another calendar link as the provider.

In Google Calendar, take the secret address, not the public one. The public address only works if the calendar has been made public to the whole internet, which most family calendars are not.

Why a downloaded file will not work

Next to Subscribe there is almost always a Download button. It hands you an .ics file — a photograph of the schedule as it looked the moment you pressed it.

That file imports perfectly. Every event lands, the times look right, and nothing ever changes again. When the league moves a game, your file still shows the old one, and there is no warning at the moment it stops being true.

If ThereFor can tell that a link is a download rather than a feed, it says so before importing — and lets you add it anyway. Nothing is blocked. But a snapshot has to be re-imported by hand every time the schedule changes, so it is worth going back for the Subscribe link first.

After you paste it

ThereFor fetches the season straight away, so the events are already there when the page loads. The address itself is encrypted and never shown again, including to you — a calendar feed URL is a secret, and anyone holding one can read that calendar.

If you ever need to change it, open the calendar from Calendars and paste a new link under Paste a new link. There is nothing to unpick first.