Encouraging Discouragement

It’s a little ironic. One of the most encouraging aspects we experience while designing and building teamloop is the discouragement of others (and ourselves).

It happens every time I start sharing the teamloop story. Coaches get frustrated at tracking player availability. For parents, it’s usually when I mention having to pick apart the many emails to find the important details, especially when they are “Reply To All”.

The one that continues to fuel my encouragement is the “here’s the schedule” email. Here’s an example I just received a couple of weeks ago.

First, here is the “we aren’t trying to be mean to coaches” disclaimer. We love our coaches.

The link below will take you to the schedule of games for the month of Dec. Look under the 4th Grade Boys league column under the Bruin tab. This webpage will also provide you a weather hotline.

And the ensuing routine for each person on the team:

1. Click the link
2. Find the correct schedule link
3. Download the schedule
4. Find the correct times and locations and enter them on your calendar
5. Track the other important details: weather hotline, which jersey to wear, when we need to provide the scorekeeper

Contrast this with teamloop:

1. The coach will enter the schedule

The great thing about teamloop is that by helping the coaches, we’ll be helping the team.

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Team Schedules: What, When, and Where

One of the first priorities for a coach at the start of a season is to get the schedule out to the team. As you’ll see from these examples, this simple task becomes a big chore for the team.

Example #1

I finally got our practice times and they are Tuesdays, 4:00-5:00 at BlueValley field #2 and Sundays, 6:30-8, at the Kenneth Road softball field #5.

Tuesday 3/30 4:00-5:00 BV field #2
Sunday 4/4 6:30-8:00 Kenneth Rd #5  (this is Easter so we will NOT practice here)
Tuesday 4/6 4:00-5:00 BV field #2
Sunday  4/11 6:30-8:00 Kenneth Rd. #5
Tuesday 4/13 4:00-5:00 BV field #2
Sunday  4/18 6:30-8:00 Kenneth Rd. #5
Tuesday 4/20 4:00-5:00 BV field #2
Sunday  4/25 6:30-8:00 Kenneth Rd. #5

Remarks

This email contains an “inline” list of practices and is pretty easy to move over to a calendar. Practices usually occur on regular intervals so they are pretty easy to setup as recurring events.

Example #2

Here is the schedule of basketball games for the boys. Our first game is this Sat., morning Jan. 10th at 10:00am. We are team #9. Please have the boys at the gym at least 20 minutes before game time.

Jan. 10   Jan. 17   Jan. 24
8:00 5 v 6  8:00 1 v 2  8:00 5 v 8
9:00 4 v 7  9:00 10 v 6  9:00 6 v 7
10:00 2 v 9  10:00 7 v 5  10:00 2 v 10
11:00 1 v 10  11:00 9 v 3  11:00 3 v 1
12:00 3 v 8  12:00 8 v 4  12:00 9 v 4

Jan. 31   Feb. 7   Feb. 14
8:00 8 v 6  8:00 4 v 3  8:00 4 v 10
9:00 10 v 7  9:00 2 v 5  9:00 8 v 9
10:00 2 v 3  10:00 9 v 7  10:00 7 v 1
11:00 9 v 5  11:00 1 v 6  11:00 6 v 2
12:00 1 v 4  12:00 10 v 8  12:00 5 v 3

Feb. 21   Feb. 28
8:00 7 v 3  8:00 10 v 9
9:00 9 v 1  9:00 1 v 8
10:00 10 v 5  10:00 2 v 7
11:00 2 v 8  11:00 3 v 6
12:00 4 v 6  12:00  4 v 5

Remarks

This is another example of an inline schedule but this time for games. I refer to it as “Find Your Own Way”. It’s pretty common for coaches to copy and paste a schedule like this from a spreadsheet they receive from the league.

You can see the added complexity right away. You have to find each instance of team #9 and then get the date and time and enter it into your calendar.

Example #3

Remarks

This example is similar to Example #2 but the schedule is an attachment and you have the additional step of first downloading the file from the email attachment.

Example #4

Attached is the girl’s soccer schedule. Hopefully the email comes out. If not refer to the attachment. I don’t have a ton of confidence in my cutting and pasting skills.

Remarks

When I saw this email I knew something had to be done to help the coaches who are helping us. This very well intentioned coach filtered the list for us by finding each entry for our team #251, took a screen capture of the section, and then attached all of them to the email.

What is wrong

This is time consuming and prone to entry errors. It’s 2010. All of us shouldn’t have to go through the exact same process sifting through the schedule using a coach’s number as a code to find the dates and times needed to enter on a calendar. Too many possibilities for an incorrect entry or missing an entire event.

And don’t forget about sharing the schedule with family and friends. What do you do now? Just click “Forward” and enter an email address?

Solution

All of the team’s events pass through the coach. That one person can enter the events in teamloop, a single, authoritative location, and ensure an accurate schedule. The rest of the team can view the schedule online, export it in a common format, or sync with your online calendar with an iCal feed. And your family and friends? Just send them the link to the team’s public schedule.