Season Management Is A Failure

[Pat Anderson]

I have managed several websites on SE since the beginning. The move to Season Management has been a forced, abject failure. As an experience developer and programmer, who also runs a large, state-wide youth sports organization, I was able to deal with the quirkiness in the past, but the required move to Season Management has lost a great deal of vital functionality while adding items that are not needed. For instance, a normal sports organization has age classifications, or classes. Under each class are normally divisions. In the past, you could create a league page with divisions below each and teams were able to play all teams in their league (class) regardless of what division they were in. The site kept divisional standings as well as overall standings. Now, we are being told that you cannot play teams outside a division. If a cross-divisional game is scheduled, it only appears in the home team's schedule, while the visiting team does not have it appear in their schedule. So now teams cannot rely on a schedule from the website and must revert to paper schedules (or GameChanger) to know who they are supposed to play. I also assume that these games will not be appearing in standings. I have asked why this basic functionality was removed and support has no answers and tries to send me Help articles. Also, families have been able to use schedules to get directions to games. Now, you must create and reserve specific locations (i.e. a ball park and all fields) in order to have similar functionality. Most users do not care about resource management through SE; they just want to get to their kids' games. Other backend features such as importing teams, rosters, etc. do not work. They have a generic template that is not even accepted, even when the data is perfectly formatted. So now it takes hours to create teams and rosters (unless you make kids register through SE.)

The other main issue is their support; it is non-existent. There is no working phone to call and no way to get in touch with an account manager. The only thing close to a human contact is a chat. You might get a chat response after several hours, but most times you get a canned response with no solution or commitment to work on an issue. I even went so far as to schedule a support call. The time came and went with no call. This is all going on while they have increased their fees over 100% and penalize you if you do not collect money through your site.

There are other items that have gone away as well as simplicity, but it appears that Sports Engine does not care about their customers, their needs. They do not conduct any research for their product and appear to let people with no experience with youth sports make determinations that defy common sense and logic. They are unwilling to accept suggestions or address real customer needs. Most everyone is a volunteer that run and use their services, but as long as they keep getting paid, they simply do not care about their consumers.