Can I split pre-season around the Christmas break?

A season can hold as many pre-season phases as it needs. If your build-up starts in November, stops for the school holidays and picks up again in January, that is two pre-season phases with the holidays labelled between them, not one long phase stretched over the top.

The long-phase version looks tidier on the timeline and is wrong in the ways that matter: it tells families you are training through Christmas, it makes the break invisible to anyone reading the calendar, and it hands the FNSW Annual Plan a pre-season length your club never ran.

1. Open your program's Season Plan and add your first phase with Type set to Pre-season — say 16 Nov to 20 Dec.
2. Add a second phase, also Pre-season, for the resumption — say 4 Jan to the week before round 1.
3. Add a Break phase across the gap and name it for what it is ("Summer holidays"). Breaks only label a period, so it will not interfere with either pre-season.

Name the two phases so the shape reads at a glance. Pre-Season 1/2 and Pre-Season 2/2 is the convention other programmes use, and families see those names on their own timeline.

Pre-season always comes first. Every pre-season phase has to start before your first in-season block. If you try to wedge an in-season block between two pre-seasons, Clubhouse refuses the save and tells you why — put the block after the last pre-season instead.

Phases can't overlap. Dates snap to whole weeks, and each phase has to finish before the next one starts. If two phases clash, the message names the pair so you know which dates to move.

Player plan cycles only run in in-season blocks. Pre-season phases carry no reviews, however many you have, so splitting one never affects a player's plan or the "Block 2 of 4" count families see.

Both pre-season phases appear on the season timeline in order, with the break between them. Coaches see the same shape on their Season plan page. Nothing needs re-publishing — the timeline reads straight from the Season Plan, so the change is live as soon as you save.

The FNSW Annual Plan picks the split up too. Its pre-season window spans from the first phase's start to the last one's end, and where the phases are not continuous it says so, printing the weeks actually programmed alongside the overall window.