Federations

A federation is a sanctioning body. On MatComp it controls two things, and they are the whole reason the concept exists:

• Who may run its events. An event organiser needs the federation's approval before they can publish an event under its banner.
• Who may compete in them. A federation's events are open only to its current members.

Everything else a federation does — defining belts, defining divisions — follows from those two.

Membership

Joining is self-serve. There is no approval queue, no waiting for a committee. You open the federation, press join, and a membership exists from that moment with its own membership number.

What varies is whether it works straight away.

How long it lasts

A federation chooses one of three:

• Twelve months from joining — a membership bought on 14 March runs to 14 March next year.
• To 31 December of the year joined — a membership bought in November expires six weeks later. This is common, and it catches people out.
• Never expires — a life membership.

Your membership number and expiry date are both on the Federations tab of your profile. The number is what an official at the desk will ask for.

Joining for a child

If you manage a child's profile, the join dialog lets you choose who is joining — yourself or any of your children. Each child needs their own membership; yours does not cover them.

The platform never takes your money

MatComp records what is owed and lets a federation mark it received. It runs no payment gateway and stores no card details. Every federation collects however it already collects — bank transfer, at the door, through its own website — and records it here afterwards.

Belts

A federation may define its own belt ladder for a sport. When it does, that ladder replaces the platform's default for the federation's own divisions rather than merging with it.

That is deliberate. Federations that grade differently need their divisions to mean exactly what they say, and a half-merged ladder would produce divisions nobody could grade against.

Divisions

A federation builds division presets the same way anyone else does — see Divisions and weight classes. What is different is authority: a federation's presets are the reference its approved organisers copy from, anyone may read one, and its choice of age rule (age on the day, or age at 31 December) is the one its events run on.

For event organisers

To run an event under a federation you need an approved standing with it.

1. From your organiser company, request approval from the federation.
2. The federation approves, or does not.
3. Once approved, the federation appears as an option when you create an event.

Approval can be revoked later. Revoking does not disturb events that have already been published — it stops new ones.

For federation owners

Your federation was created from an approved verification application, so its name and registered address came from documents an administrator checked. Those are fixed; everything else is yours to set from Manage:

• Members — the roll, and where you record payments. Recording a payment is reversible.
• Organisers — the requests waiting on you, and the approvals you have already granted.
• Settings — your abbreviation, whether membership is paid and how much, how long it lasts, and which age rule your divisions use.

Your abbreviation is worth setting early: it becomes the prefix on every membership number your federation issues.