I’m a huge fan of the Kansas City Royals and would like to add the team’s schedule to my Google Calendar. I probably won’t be able to watch all the games, but I like knowing in advance what big games are coming up. How can I do that with Google Calendar?
One of the great things about Google Calendar is that the company offers up hundreds of public calendars you can add to your own with just a few clicks of a button. This includes a wide variety of religious holidays along with team schedules for hundreds of sports teams across four very American sports: Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Hockey. Very handy!
What’s even better is that they’re free to add and are updated during the season to ensure that if there’s a rain delay or some national event that messed up the schedule, that will be automatically reflected in your personal subscription to the calendar in question. If you wanted, you could add dozens of teams and then never have a day without twenty or more events listed. But let’s dial that down, cowboy!
I’m a fan of my local baseball team the Colorado Rockies and while they might not be quite as good as the Royals over the last 20 years (I’m trying to be charitable here) that’s the team whose calendar I’m going to add in this tutorial. I like the KC Royals, though, and have enjoyed the games I’ve seen at Kauffman Stadium. ⚾️
HOW TO ADD A CALENDAR
The easiest way to start is to go to calendar.google.com and click on the “Settings” icon (the gear) on the top right. You’ll see:
There’s no indication that it includes external calendars, but click on “Add calendar” on the left and you’ll see a few options listed:
If you know the URL or subscription address of a calendar, you can paste it into the appropriate option, but for our task, click on “Browse calendars of interest” and prepare to be amazed!
GOOGLE CALENDARS OF INTEREST
This is typical Google where there’s far more data and information available in one of its tools than is apparent. With Calendars of Interest, there are hundreds of calendars…
Many, many people like the ability to subscribe to religious holidays; even if you aren’t practicing, it’s good to know what other members of your family or community are celebrating or honoring. Below Global Religious Holidays is the section we seek, however, Sports. Baseball, Basketball, and Football are but three of the many options listed.
Click on Baseball and you’ll find that there are over a dozen different baseball leagues listed! For the Colorado Rockies or KC Royals, choose “Major League Baseball” and a list of teams appears:
Scroll down as needed to find your team, click on the checkbox and you’re done! It’ll typically take a minute or two for the events to fully populate your calendar and none of them might be visible depending on the date. I’m writing this in February but MLB doesn’t start until the last week of March. When I move to April, my calendar is fully populated with Rockies games:
Notice that on double-header days there are two games in the schedule (see April 7, 10, or 21, for example). Easy enough, right?
WORKING WITH INDIVIDUAL GAME EVENTS
It’s important to recognize that all of these events are still on the master MLB calendar, not on your own personal calendar. This becomes obvious when you view the details on a match:
You can move it to your own calendar easily enough, however, simply click on “copy to my calendar>>“. The event will remain the same, but now instead of it being on the Sports calendar, it’s your own which means you can update it, annotate, even invite people to join you!
You can add the location if you want (this game will be at the iconic Wrigley Field stadium):
You can also add guests if you’re going to be lucky enough to be at Wrigley for the game!
When you view the newly copied calendar entry it shows as being on your own calendar and the correct location for the event too:
This makes it really easy to share this event with friends and family if you want to have your posse show up to cheer on your team too. And that’s it. Google is completely sports agonistic so whether you’re a big fan of the Chinese Baseball League or NCAA college football, Google’s got you covered. Now they just need to add soccer, both MLS and world leagues like La Ligua and British Premier League… 😎
Pro Tip: I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail and Google services. Please check out my Google Docs, Chrome and Gmail help library for plenty more tutorials while you’re visiting!