Current Missing Features needed for League Management

[Rich Woytowich]

Here are the issues our league has seen, for context we are located in Central Florida and run a Fall Program from Aug - November and a Spring Program from Feb - June. We have three different levels Travel, Advanced Baseball and Rec with over 700 kids ages 4-18. We were forced to use this inferior product when they purchases SIPlay and Babe Ruth Cal Ripken sold their soul to them.

Deal Breakers:

• Background Checks are not compliant with local state and county mandates in Florida. We require an annual FLDE 1 background check which SE and Babe Ruth do not offer. We have utilized the county system to perform at a cost of 27.50 per volunteer (over 150) and then are told we must utilize SE to run the check thru their system (which is lesser standard then the FLDE 1 check) and pay their charge.
• Inability to lock registration for those that have outstanding invoices or payments due. We have about $4,000 outstanding in receivables from parents who had a decline on the billing payment plan, we have been told by SE there is no way to lock registration for those that owe funds (SIPlay had this feature) and have had to pull manual reports and cross reference the 700 plus registrations to make sure those owing funds pay
• Bulk Upload feature for Practices. We have over 60 plus teams across 6 fields which we schedule practices on as a league admin, we do not want managers to have the ability to change this or schedule their own as double booking has occurred and is confusing to the parents. We currently must enter over 1200 practices manually in the system instead of a bulk upload function similar to games (another SIPlay feature gone)
• Scheduling in app creates a duplicate field if the exact spelling and punctuation is not used. We end up having 43 Field 3s. 
• League Age calculation must be put in as a rule for Birth Date between this date and that date. SI Play auto calculated based on the leagues affiliation (Babe Ruth Cal Ripken is April 30 cutoff) we would have a drop down for registration season (League age 2024 etc.)
• Child Membership unable to merge by admin staff. Divorce parents create an account for John Smith using dads email and then mom does the same. Now have 2 players with same exact info but all data is separate based on which one was used.
• Admin unable to fix errors such as incorrect Birthdate or merge duplicate accounts for child (The duplicate button on membership does not work)
• Pitch Count tracking - While there is a Web Module stating there is one it is no longer active and does not work. We follow Pitch Smart guidelines in this park and have multiple players playing on 2 teams. Would be nice to have a way for a manager to input the pitch count for the child and a team manager (with team admin access) can see his rostered players previous counts and date. This way if John Doe plays for travel and rec team each manager can go into the app and click the rostered player and see his pitch count for both teams which would include Date, Count and required days of rest 
• Registration Withdrawals - Currently when a player request to withdraw from registration we have to refund the amount and then set the Entry to Inactive, however this does not update in registration reports unless we specifically filter by Entry Active. SE recommended we just delete the entry however we then lose the refund data
• Integration with Gamechanger, we currently use Gamechanger for our official scorekeeping (all star qualifications etc) however we have to manually create each team and roster. Competitors offer this integration (sportsconnect)
• League Standings are bugged as mentioned above where the scores would randomly drop one team to 0 runs and change the standings.
• No way to schedule single or double elimination tournaments in Sportsengine, why would you integrate with Tournymachine for us to pay another fee?
• EMail needs to have a way to change the sent from name so when a parent hits reply it can go to the league admin not the person who is sending the message.
• Product enhancements are based around Profit Generation for Sportsengine and not to improve the leagues experience. For example the push for live streaming.
• Way to turn off our opt out of the Add-ons at the cart in registration. For example the league registration insurance (not needed as our league refunds 100%) or the NCSI college recruiting sign up (this is a scam and waste of money based on personal experience and reviews online) 
• Public calendar option for scheduling. We have 3 different divisions and would like a Web Based Calendar which integrates each Fields schedule. Current work around is to have a dumy Admin account on each roster and subscribe to a Google Calendar thru ical, however when a manage schedules a practice in app it only shows Practice on google calendar (no location, field or even the team)
• Download of a master schedule in .csv or .xls form so we can double check conflicts etc (You can only do this for Games not practices)
• Umpire scheduling No way to integrate this into system. We use a program called referee scheduler which stated they can interface via API with sportsengine, however SE has turned API support off. This API interface would port games over to the referee scheduler and allow for games to be approved for umpires. Currently need to enter over 500+ games seperately.
• Sales Item reporting ( I would love to create a custom report for Sales Items by selecting which to include)
• A way to archive Sales Items so they dont appear in drop down menus as we utilize a new sales item each season so we can restrict registration
• WAIT LIST for registration - Currently when a sales item is sold out, we have to create a separate entry for a wait list. SI PLay would allow a way to automatically sign up for a wait list, and the league could then accept off the wait list and would add the charge (sale item) into the cart to pay for. Currently we need to send a separate invoice which is confusing to parents especially if there are addons in registration like uniform fee or volunteer opt out fees. SIPlay would then send an email to the parent their child was approved off the wait list and sale item added to their cart.
• Season Management no auto update, currently after entering the scores, a league admin must go to setting and publish changes, this should be auto updated as games are played each night and at various times on weekends, standings should update in real time.
• A way to add divorced parents to the childs profile from the league admin (we have had several divorced parents specifically ask this as the parents did not get along) We actually had a court order to allow both parents to access information, which SE has no way of doing on the league admin area
• Help Files need to be updated as there are several items in there that are no longer functional (IE Pitch Count tracker, API Integration etc)
• DIBS - Would like to see a little improvement on ways to mark completed (maybe have an app for admins) as login to website is not practical by admin for each shift.
• Late Fee for registration - Add a late fee to be applied to all registrations after a date of X, currently we are told to change the Sales Items cost, which does not help for record keeping. 
• Sense of urgency needed, while my experience has been most employees are based in a northern climate, the Southern states which play year round cant wait for these issues of "Next Season". We have been using Sportsengine for two years now and several of the "features" which we were told would be here next season have yet to come. Alot of these features were in SIPlay which is owned by SE and the coding is there. Most of the time I get a message response stating that they cant help, or a link to the help file (which no longer applies)

[freezinKT]

This is fabulous. We are a similarly sized club with 3 levels of play and very similar needs. This list is incredibly useful and comprehensive. The two big ones that stand out as incredibly true to our experience and incredibly disheartening are:

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Sense of urgency needed, while my experience has been most employees are based in a northern climate, the Southern states which play year round cant wait for these issues of "Next Season". We have been using Sportsengine for two years now and several of the "features" which we were told would be here next season have yet to come. Alot of these features were in SIPlay which is owned by SE and the coding is there. Most of the time I get a message response stating that they cant help, or a link to the help file (which no longer applies)

(Though my assumption is that code from SIPlay and League Athletics won't help because what they are doing now is in entirely new languages against entirely new data stores with entirely new programming paradigms, so they have to resolve all the same problems - but they still don't care if all of us have to sit around experiencing pain while we wait).

And

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Product enhancements are based around Profit Generation for Sportsengine and not to improve the leagues experience. For example the push for live streaming.

+100 to this one.

[freezinKT]

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Way to turn off our opt out of the Add-ons at the cart in registration. For example the league registration insurance (not needed as our league refunds 100%) or the NCSI college recruiting sign up (this is a scam and waste of money based on personal experience and reviews online) 

You can do this. We had to do it for League Athletics, SportsEngine HQ, AND a different unnamed competitor. You just ask the help desk people in all cases and it can be turned off.

They don't like advertising that fact, but it is a fact. Ask and you shall receive.

[Rich Woytowich]

21 hours ago, freezinKT said:

You can do this. We had to do it for League Athletics, SportsEngine HQ, AND a different unnamed competitor. You just ask the help desk people in all cases and it can be turned off.

They don't like advertising that fact, but it is a fact. Ask and you shall receive.

Would be nice if they put it as a toggle switch under Website admin or even when creating the registration. I know for some things we dont mind the registration insurance, as we lose money after uniforms have been ordered refunding. (but for our travel org, we dont want to offer it since its a commitment fee)