Child competitions as different stages of the parent rather than separate divisions/groups

[Toronto Blizzard]

I have been playing around with a few different options for setting up child competitions.  I have a parent with two child divisions with a playoff between top teams in the two children that determines a champion and promotion,

Ideally, I'd like matches between the two divisions, which led me to create it as two groups.  But I can't seem to get group names the way I want (the groups are sorted regionally, but they don't match the east/west labels - they're reversed).

So I was wondering if it would be possible to have each division as a stand alone stage in the parent competition and then use a hidden group stage to add inter-division matches.

My thinking was that I could create two separate league stages and use 'get all teams from division' selecting the child division from each.  But I'm not sure if this would actually work as the child divisions won't be set up in a traditional way.

So it would look like this:

Parent Competition 

Stage 0 - league - get all teams from division 'east'

Stage 1 - league - get all teams from division 'west'

Stage 2 - group - all matches are generated in this stage with get all teams from division 'east' and then get all teams from division 'west'.

Stage 3 - playoffs - get qualified teams from stage 0, 1

Does anyone know if this would work?

Would an alternative option be to keep the two child divisions and then have a hidden stage in one of them that actually plays the matches and sends the results into stage 0 of both competitions?

Many thanks.

[themodelcitizen]

Those look like stages and not full-blown child comps, why not build it and test it? Sounds a lot like how MLS is set up. Might work most cleanly if each team has "division" set to the parent comp and a "secondary division" set to the east/west comp, wouldn't do anything functionally but allow them to be split in groups that way. Alternately (or if secondary divisions are already used for something else) I think you could sort the teams by longitude, max it at 12 (or however many play in each child comp) and do the same thing in the other stage but just click "reverse teams" (doesn't always work mind you)

[Toronto Blizzard]

I started with a standard group stage.  I can get the group names I want, but I can't seem to get it to assign clubs to the right groups.  Doesn't matter if I set secondary divisions or regional divisions, use east/west group names, regionalize groups, et cetera, the teams are assigned to the two groups in ascending order by ID number.

[Toronto Blizzard]

The other possibility I'm considering is to get all child competitions listed as stages under the parent competition (so that you don't have to search for both child competitions seperately if you want to see one after another).   I tried using 'other comps to add stage to' (to add the child comp league stage to the parent) and 'stages from other comps' (in the parent comp)  but when I try to verify I get an error that it cannot add a stage from one competition to another when the other competition has no stages yet.