How To... Set Up A MyFantasyLeague.com League

While there are countless ways to define a fantasy league using MyFantasyLeague.com, there are a number of basic steps that all new commissioners should take.  The following should be used as a guideline to help you to define much of your league's setup in a short amount of time.

1. Define the initial 2008 league parameters using the For Commissioners > Setup > General League Setup screen.

At a minimum, you'll need to define a league name, league email, password, and the number of franchises and roster spots for your league.  If you plan on holding an online draft, be sure to select this (final) option.  Go to our Draft How To to determine which type of draft is right for your league.

Once you click on the Save League Setup button, the system will generate a new league for you.  There's absolutely no purchase obligation for setting up a league. 

NOTE: Upon completion of this step, you will be taken back to your home page.  The "League Setup - Next Steps" message will appear only for the commissioner account.  At the top It will include your 5-digit league ID which corresponds to the last 5 characters of your home page web address (URL).  Please use this number with all correspondence to MyFantasyLeague.com support.

2. Define your franchise (team) information using the For Owners > Franchise Setup menu item.

The first time you access this (or any other setup menu item), you will be prompted for your league password.  Use the password you had defined in the General League Setup above (in step #1).

At a minimum it's a good idea to define the email addresses for all the owners in your league as soon as you can.  If you don't have all the addresses now, this isn't a problem as you can always come back to this screen in the future.  You might also want to define a team name for each franchise.  Notice that each team will already have a system-generated password defined.  You can either keep these initial random passwords or overwrite them with new passwords.  Click on the Save Franchise Setup button to store all your changes.

3. Define your league's scoring rules using the For Commissioners > Setup > Scoring Setup screens.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish this task as detailed in the Scoring Setup How To topic.

4. Define your league's fantasy schedule using the For Commissioners > Fantasy Schedule Setup screens.

Either choose a canned, system schedule from Select A Packaged Schedule, manually define a schedule one week at a time via Weekly Schedule Setup, re-order the weeks in an existing schedule with the Randomize Fantasy Schedule, or swap two weeks of an existing schedule via the Switch Schedule Weeks screen.

5. Define your league's starting lineups using the For Commissioners > Setup > Transactions Setup > Weekly Lineup Setup screen.

Get step-by-step assistance on this setup using the Starting Lineups How To topic.

6. Define your league's waivers (player adds & drops) using the For Commissioners > Setup > League Calendar Setup screen.

See more information on waiver setup from the Waivers How To topic.

7. Additional Setup using the many For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup screens.

At this point your league is fully defined and ready to use.  However, we've spent a lot of time to give you some extra bells and whistles.  The majority of items used to customize the appearance of your menu are found in the Appearance Setup screens.  Go to our overview on home page setup topic to learn more.

8. Invite franchise owners to your league.

Finally, use the For Commissioners > Setup > Invite Franchise Owners screen to invite owners to your newly-created league.  At this point, you can simply allow all the owners go continue their team setup individually.