Category Links on Product Listing Page

I have multiple categories which have subcategories beneath them.
Example:
Sports

• Football
• Baseball
• Hockey

If there are no products in the Sports category, when I click on Sports from the menu tree, the main product area shows links to the three subcategories and the New Items box.
However, if there is a product in the Sports category, when I click on Sports, it only shows the products in Sports, and does not show the subcategory links.

To be clear, when someone clicks on Sports in the category tree, I'd like to see Football, Baseball and Hockey links listed at the top of the page, if there are items in Sports or not.

Search as I might, I cannot find a setting to address this. Perhaps I'm not using the right search terms, but I cannot find any posts on this specific topic either.

I am willing to go in and modify the code if I have to but I have a sense I'm just overlooking the proper settings to change.

Thanks

You are not supposed to mix products and subcategories in the same category - remove the products from Sports.

Kim:

You are not supposed to mix products and subcategories in the same category - remove the products from Sports.

That's great if the store only has a handful of products. I'm dealing with over 15,000 products that are updated with datafeeds every few weeks. To manually move products on every inventory update would take days.

Let's look at another example:
Tools

• Hammers
• Screwdrivers
  __-Electric Screwdrivers
• Wrenches

Using the logic of your response, I would have to create a new subcategory: Non-Electric Screwdrivers and move all screwdrivers that are not electric into that subcategory. That really doesn't make too much sense.

Anyone else run into this issue that has a solution?

I'm Looking for this also :(

Sorry, but like Kim states, the system isn't designed to handle this situation and I was never able to come up with a solution other than rearranging categories to fit my needs. I'm sure there's a way to make this work with some significant programming changes but that's beyond my level of expertise.

If you don't have too many products, you may consider using read-only attributes and using the "Product Filter by Attribute and price range" add-on. I haven't used it myself, but it may be a workaround your situation.