Phase 4: Lesson 1
Return to the full Roadmap to Success.
With registration closed, one of the next steps includes putting together teams. There are a few pretty common ways that this happens:
A recreational league that puts kids together based on non-skill based criteria like grade, school, neighborhood, or any combination of these.
A competitive program where kids go through an evaluation process and are placed on teams based on skills.
Of course, there are probably a few other ways out there, but no matter how you identify which teams your athletes will play on, the next few steps will help you successfully set up the teams in SportsEngine HQ.
Determine Teams
Clubs are usually similar, but rarely the same. Our hockey club has in house leagues for 8U, where we have evaluations to even out teams. For 10U and up, the kids tryout and are placed on teams based on their tryout evaluation.
Complete Player Evaluations
There’s no magic bullet here on how you do evaluations. I know plenty of clubs that do tryouts with inhouse staff and others who hire independent evaluators. Some allow parents to watch, others have them stay away.
Being objective is the best way to avoid the inevitable cry of “politics.” I’ve used TeamGenius in the past, which is a great way to log objective scores for the tryout. It’s also integrated with SportsEngine, which is an added bonus. I would highly recommend giving it a try before you are actually running your tryout.
Organize and Build Teams
After getting through tryouts, you’ll need to organize and build your teams. Again, there are a few ways you can do this, but a couple of ideas are:
Use your member directory to identify grades and schools for your athletes. Download them into a convenient spreadsheet and organize them for your recreational league. You can add any evaluation scores to your sheet to add some flexibility to make teams even.
An online draft is another fun way to put teams together. OnlineDraft is also integrated with SportsEngine HQ registration and gives you the tools to build teams like a fantasy football draft. Best of all, it’ll also push your rosters back to SportsEngine HQ when you’re done.
Create Rosters
After you’ve gotten your teams organized, it’s time to put them into SportsEngine HQ. The drag and drop mass rostering tool is an incredibly fast and straightforward way to put the kids on rosters from registration. The best part is that the team is then automatically added to their parents’ SportsEngine mobile app. Sharing schedules for the WIN! It’s also the time to use the same tool to place staff and coaches on the team. This will automatically give them the administrative access rights they need to manage the team for the season.
Finally, be sure to make your teams public or private so that parents can access the team in the mobile app. If the team is public, anyone can find it and follow. If the team is private, only those on the team can have access.
Next time…. communicate and invoices
In our last chapter for the Roadmap for Success, we’ll look at how to access rosters in SportsEngine HQ, send out messages, and how to send invoices. Until then, happy team building!
