Club soccer scheduling evolved
One of the most painful aspects of being a (volunteer) team manager for a youth club soccer team is scheduling. Club (competitive) soccer, at least in Northern California, is run through a couple of leagues — NorCal (www.norcalpremier.com) or CYSA. The problem tends to be that everything from field coordination and availability to managing coaching staff schedules to scheduling games with other teams at a mutually agreeable time requires a lot of coordination and planning. Even though a template schedule is provided by NorCal — suggesting game dates between clubs, this is only a starting point. Its entirely up to the team managers to work out all the logistics of field and coach planning, which can be an absolute headache for even a moderately-sized club.
I had started to think about how to get a simple database and web-based application in place for this purpose for this past spring, but ran out of time with a bunch of baseball-related volunteer commitments. I’m quite thrilled to present ‘clubsoccer’ — a team management and administration portal, which rolled out this past weekend to the team managers and coaches at Red Star Soccer, that helps solve this problem.
The alpha release of this application answers some key questions for team managers in their schedule planning process:
- Is there a field available at 9am for my age group to schedule a game?
- What is my coach’s schedule on a particular date for all the teams he/she is coaching, so I can find a good slot for the game I need to schedule?
You get the idea … if you’ve had some exposure to the problem of team management and scheduling, this becomes fairly obvious. Its not going to replace Teamsnap or anything like that, nor is it intended to, its really designed to provide a club with a easy way to manage their field availability, game times and coach schedules.
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After looking around for a solution to the problem, I just decided that a simple custom web-application would be good.
Happy to announce v1.0 of Clubsoccer — Team Manager Portal — first launch available at http://connect.redstarsoccerclub.net
Lovingly built with Ruby on Rails 3, MySQL, ActiveAdmin and using the wonderful Mango theme from Themeforest, running on Apache/Passenger on CentOS at RailsPlayground.
A special thank you to Daniel Doezema’s blog post on implementing a single user model with Devise and ActiveAdmin.
If you are a soccer club and would like a demo — please drop me a note.
