Invite Friends Video

If this is your league's first year on Yahoo, you'll need to invite all your friends and league mates to our platform. Use the Send Invites tool in commissioner settings or your league's overview page to keep track of which managers are in your league.

Finalize Your Team List

Finalizing your team list is the first step to start your keeper process. This step prevents managers from joining or leaving your league, and this step allows you to edit your league's draft order and manually assign keeper players.

Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players Video

If you're coming from another platform, you can use the Custom Draft Order to manually assign keepers. Once your league completes this season on Yahoo, you'll be able to renew your league next year and managers can select keepers from their roster.

1. After setting a custom draft order, the commissioner can set the order of team picks in each round. This is essential for leagues that want to base the draft order on the order of finish from the previous season or some other custom method.
2. Once the base order is set, decide whether the draft order repeats each round, or "snakes", reversing direction each round. Keeper leagues often use a repeating rather than snaking draft order.
3. The commissioner can reassign any individual pick to a different team as needed. This allows for any amount of customization for leagues with rules we can't automatically support. For example, if your league allows trades and trading of draft picks when the Yahoo fantasy game is offseason, the commissioner can reassign those traded picks that Yahoo is unaware of.
4. The commissioner can then pre-select any player into any pick. Since any player can be slotted into any pick, it allows the commissioner total control over how the selection of keepers impacts a team's draft position.

Keeper Player Status Video

Since leagues may have rules designating when a player loses his salary or keeper status, the Keeper Player Status tool allows a league to automate some of that management problem. It first allows the commissioner to decide whether keeper status should be visible throughout the game. If visible, then it allows the commissioner to designate whether several conditions should remove a player's status as a keeper player, and stop displaying them as a keeper. In particular, a league can be configured to remove keeper status if a player:

• Is traded
• Is dropped from a team and claimed off waivers by another team
• Is dropped from a team and clears waivers, becoming a free agent

Allow Draft Pick Trades Video

Since many keeper leagues are enriched by the ability to trade draft picks, we now allow leagues to be configured to allow the trading of draft picks for the following season. Whether or not this is allowed is configured by a single setting in the League Settings tool. For leagues that allow traded picks, the following items apply:

• Any trades involving picks must involve an equal number of picks going in each direction
• Picks can only be traded for the following season
• Once any picks have been traded, the feature cannot be turned off
• A new page/tool is available to summarize which picks have been traded

Viewing Keeper Information During the Season

There are several things the commissioner can do to help communicate keeper details during the season. For example:

• The commissioner can use the Keeper salaries tool to enter keeper salaries for individual players, can indicate that keepers should be designated as such throughout the league, and can show salaries for the keepers where appropriate throughout the league.
• The commissioner may be able to use the Keeper Player Status tool to match the rules of your league and to automatically maintain the keeper status of players across transactions such as trades and drop/adds.
• Keep track of keeper player salaries throughout the season. Hover on the K icon next to a player's name to see these details for keeper players.

The Tools

Because keeper leagues mean different things to different leagues, there is no setting to signify being a keeper league. Simply use the tools that help you and don't use the others. If a commissioner would like to manage the process of declaring keepers within the game, they can do so as follows:

• Renew the league from the previous season
• Populate all teams by reinviting managers or inviting new users to own the teams via the Invite Friends Tool
• Finalize the team list
• Enable keeper management tools using the Edit Keeper Settings tool
• Set a Keeper Declaration Deadline leaving enough time to process the submitted keepers before the live draft
• Once the Keeper Declaration Deadline passes, review all submitted keepers using the Approve Keeper Players tool. Make any changes necessary to adhere to your league's rules
• Keepers can then be automatically added as the first or last draft picks or manually added anywhere in the draft when setting up a custom draft order using the Invite Friends tool

Invite Friends Video

If you renew your Yahoo league instead of creating a league from scratch, all teams from last year are retained. The Invite Friends tool helps you keep track of the managers invited back to own their teams and potential managers invited to take over existing or new teams. This franchise model is essential for some of the keeper-related tools; by retaining last year's teams, we can reliably associate things like last year's rosters and traded draft picks. This also makes renewal quicker for returning managers since we'll already know their team settings.

Edit Keeper Settings Video

Use the Edit Keeper Settings tool to allow teams to select keepers on their own. When you select the Enable Keeper Management Tools checkbox you will be prompted to pick a deadline date for the league to select their keepers. If your league uses a live draft, this date must be prior to the draft. Be careful to give yourself enough time to review and confirm keepers and give your league ample time to prepare for the draft once available players are known. After selecting the keeper deadline, you can add a note to explain your league's custom keeper rules which will appear on the Choose Keepers page described below.

Choose Keepers Video

Once a keeper deadline is selected, each team may view last year's roster and select players on their Choose Keepers page. Selections will not be publicly viewable until the commissioner approves the declared keepers after the deadline date. Keep in mind that since Yahoo doesn't know exactly what rules your league uses, we can't enforce those rules. Instead we display the commissioner-provided note to remind owners of the rules and allow the commissioner to review and change declared keepers if necessary.

Approve Keeper Players Video

After the keeper deadline passes the commissioner can use the Confirm Keepers tool to review the keepers submitted by each team, change them if needed to comply with league rules, and approve the league's keeper selections, publishing the results. The commissioner is required to complete this step prior to a live draft, or the draft will fail to run. If the commissioner changes any of the team's keepers, this change will be noted in a transaction to improve league communication and discourage unethical changes by the commissioner.

Adding Traded Draft Picks Into Your League Video

If your league enabled the trading of draft picks in the previous season, when you use the Invite Friends tool, you'll be given the option to add the traded picks into the draft order. You do need to avoid conditions that would make it impossible to safely and cleanly import traded draft picks. Those include:

• If you shrink the maximum roster size such that one or more traded picks no longer exist, we cannot import picks. For example, if someone has traded a 25th round pick, and you shrink the maximum roster size to 23, then there will not be a 25th round, and we cannot import the picks
• If you remove a team from the league that had traded picks in the previous season, we cannot import the picks
• If you create a new league rather than renewing the previous league, we won't have knowledge of the traded picks
• If you switch to a salary cap draft format, then the notion of a draft order becomes irrelevant, and there will never be an opportunity to import the picks

Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players Video

Perhaps the most important keeper-related tool is the Custom Draft Order tool. Any keeper league eventually ends up depending on this tool, even if they did not choose to use the previous tools on our site to declare their keepers. It serves purposes:

1. After setting a custom draft order, the commissioner can set the order of team picks in each round. This is essential for leagues that want to base the draft order on the order of finish from the previous season or some other custom method
2. Once the base order is set, decide whether the draft order repeats each round, or "snakes", reversing direction each round. Keeper leagues often use a repeating rather than snaking draft order
3. If a renewed league allowed for draft pick trading the previous year, the commissioner can choose to import those traded picks and apply them to the base draft order
4. If a league used our keeper management tools to select keepers, the commission can choose where keepers will be placed in the draft. Keepers can be automatically added as the first or last picks for each team or the commissioner can manually apply keepers to any picks
5. The commissioner can reassign any individual pick to a different team as needed. This allows for any amount of customization for leagues with rules we can't automatically support. For example, if your league allows trades and trading of draft picks when the Yahoo fantasy game is offseason, the commissioner can reassign those traded picks that Yahoo is unaware of
6. The commissioner can then pre-select any player into any pick. Since any player can be slotted into any pick, it allows the commissioner total control over how the selection of keepers impacts a team's draft position

Keeper Player Status Video

Since leagues may have rules designating when a player loses his or keeper status, the Keeper Player Status tool allows a league to automate some of that management problem. It first allows the commissioner to decide whether keeper status should be visible throughout the game. If visible, then it allows the commissioner to designate whether several conditions should remove a player's status as a keeper player, and stop displaying them as a keeper. In particular, a league can be configured to remove keeper status if a player:

• Is traded
• Is dropped from a team and claimed off waivers by another team
• Is dropped from a team and clears waivers, becoming a free agent

Assign Salary Cap Keeper Players Video

While the custom draft order tool lives at the heart of keeper leagues that do a standard draft, it doesn't apply to leagues that do a salary cap draft, which has no notion of draft order. For salary cap leagues, there is a separate tool to Assign Salary Cap Keeper Players. This allows the commissioner to add keepers and their salaries to teams before the salary cap draft begins.

Keeper Salary

While Yahoo does not have a particular idea what it means for a player to have a salary and does nothing to try to enforce or do calculations based on those salaries, it can still be very useful for a keeper league to see such salaries in-game. The Set Keeper Salaries tool allows that to happen. For standard draft leagues, the commissioner can enter any numeric value for all keeper players, and indicate that these values should be visible within the game. This includes places like the full roster view, the trade flow, and so on. For salary cap leagues, the tool can be used in the same way, or a special option can be chosen to simply use the salary cap amounts as the player salaries within the game.

Any or all conditions can be selected/unselected.