Does anyone actually enjoy using Season Management?

[coachdan13]

I'm working on getting our registration setup for Spring 2024 and trying to figure out how in the world Season Management will actually work for our league.

Please be honest, does anyone actually enjoy the new setup? I feel like so many of our standard workflows have been completely ruined. So many features are now stripped out. I can't be the only one legitimately shopping other providers with the changes that are being forced on us.

[freezinKT]

Here's what it would take for me to enjoy the Season Management part of this product:

In the admin view:

• Scheduler should work exactly like League Athletics. Actual quote from the sales guy at a competing product "As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone was happy with the League Athletics scheduler. I'm not sure what NBC thinks they are doing killing it."
  • This means recurring events (for practices).
  • This means conflict checking between events and events or events and games, not just games and games.
  • This means when I mark an event as "cancelled" or "postponed" it disappears from families' iCal feeds. Only "scheduled," "completed," and "in progress" should show up.
  • This means blackout dates for fields on a field-by-field basis. This also means hours on a field-by-field basis. I sometimes have 3-4 fields at a given location with different hours permitted to me. I should be able to set this.
  • The conflict checker needs to respect blackout dates and hours. There should be a visual indicator in the add event/add game view when you try to add something at a conflicting time (League Athletics used grey for non-available hours and red for conflict in the hours slot itself).
  • Conflict checking should occur across seasons if the dates overlap. That way I can run our year-round teams in one "season" and our fall and spring teams in another "season" without worrying about double-booking a location.
• The "Sync Changes" button needs to die. Changes just get pushed to the website via code...that's the way the web works.
• Data integrity matters. I shouldn't have to wait minutes for "eventual consistency" in the data. If a coach publishes a score, the standings should update in near-real time. It shouldn't take forever or require me to re-score the game.

On the web:

• When a division in a season has active (private or public) teams in it, then a part of your site - "Current Teams" or "Team Center" or something should auto-populate with that season, division, and the teams. The team pages if public should show a roster.
• There should be an option for making a team to have a private roster but public events and standings. This would affect the page, not the app (app I assume would have the same features).
• That division should show standings for the division, if enabled; stats, if enabled.
• Any team that is set to the right setting (whether private roster or not) should automatically have events and games on a master calendar that is actually your Calendar webpage set up by HQ. That means everyone can see the master calendar with no work from the webmaster.
• When a division/season no longer has active teams, the Team Center/Current Teams page doesn't show them any more.

For coaches/families:

• Coaches need to be able to email their team the way that groups for teams worked under Sports Management
• RSVP reminders need to come back! My coaches hated not having this feature automatically and the manual reminders didn't always work. My bug reports on this were repeatedly ignored.
• Adding guardians/emails needs to consistently work. We had issues where coaches removed their own team admin permissions merely by adding their spouses as guardians to their kids (or teen kids as "guardians" for themselves). Why? How? And issues where adding guardians didn't always "take." And issues where coaches couldn't access contact information for a family to text them when that family had never downloaded the app. Basically team communication if anyone tried to use this system was a wreck.
• All app features need to come back for Season Management.

Basically it should just be League Athletics with a modern look and feel. If they did that, without all the bugs, they'd have a solid product. And they need to make sure the things people who used Sports Management relied on still work. I've told them all this repeatedly. For the sake of anyone who is actually sticking around I hope they do it and stop introducing new bugs every time they make a change.

[coachdan13]

@freezinKT - my list is pretty similar. I'm now dealing with not getting any meaningful responses from support on any of this. Instead of being willing to look through my recent support tickets they wanted me to list out all of my issues for them. After compiling a basic starting list and sending it back to them on Tuesday, I have yet to get a response back.

Being someone that works in the SaaS industry, with a decent customer support background, I'm definitely not impressed with the way they have rolled these changes out or the manner in which they support their customers through it.

[riseatl]

The rollout was a year to early in my opinion, but they needed to justify the pricing increases.  Speaking with some of the back end support  alot of these features that are missing/removed are still about 6-8 months away give or take.  Which for some orgs might be too little too late....

[freezinKT]

10 minutes ago, riseatl said:

The rollout was a year to early in my opinion, but they needed to justify the pricing increases.  Speaking with some of the back end support  alot of these features that are missing/removed are still about 6-8 months away give or take.  Which for some orgs might be too little too late....

Six...to eight...months???

So after both winter and spring seasons have concluded? And they declared this product no longer beta already?

I don't know how their site builder and registration form builder can be so beautiful, and this product and the app be what they are.

[coachdan13]

Six to eight months is a deal breaker for me. Knowing their history, six to eight months means nine to twelve months. I'm actively shopping other options and very excited by some of the things I am seeing.

[Felzani, Matthew]

20 hours ago, freezinKT said:

Six...to eight...months???

So after both winter and spring seasons have concluded? And they declared this product no longer beta already?

I don't know how their site builder and registration form builder can be so beautiful, and this product and the app be what they are.

If I had to guess the Registration Form was built off an existing point-of-sale system, hence the need to attach Sale Items to options from the Form. I expect someone said, "Hey, we have this point-of-sale system that's super-easy to configure so it must be the perfect bedrock for a League Administration platform. How hard could it be to build the rest?" I expect they're building everything else from the ground up in a mad scramble as they didn't realize what they bit off.

[riseatl]

That is just my professional opinion, with what I'm seeing and speaking with some folks the other day,  We are 5 months in and have still not been able to load stats on top of all the littles issues that pop up here and there, i.e.  games missing, times being wrong, microsite won't reflect correct records etc...  My understanding is that alot of the features will eventually be added back in like standings in the app etc...

[riseatl]

1 hour ago, Felzani, Matthew said:

If I had to guess the Registration Form was built off an existing point-of-sale system, hence the need to attach Sale Items to options from the Form. I expect someone said, "Hey, we have this point-of-sale system that's super-easy to configure so it must be the perfect bedrock for a League Administration platform. How hard could it be to build the rest?" I expect they're building everything else from the ground up in a mad scramble as they didn't realize what they bit off.

Seems that way, I really wish I knew how some of the larger organizations besides the ones on this board are dealing with it.  This should have been a carefully planned roll out with a 3-6 month testing phase.  Thats why I stated it should have been rolled out sometime next year with riguorous testing taking place thoroughout 2023.  Reminds me of the situation with WB and Justice league movie.  High end execs wanted their bonus and no matter what the movie had to come out before the end of the year quality be damned.  This reeks of that somewhat.  How do we justify raising prices while cutting the cost on league athletics we do this and roll it out.

[riseatl]

21 hours ago, freezinKT said:

Six...to eight...months???

So after both winter and spring seasons have concluded? And they declared this product no longer beta already?

I don't know how their site builder and registration form builder can be so beautiful, and this product and the app be what they are.

Can't speak for anyone who runs the back end, but being in IT, its clear there is an issue in the coding language used to communicate from website, app, etc..  I dont think they realized how intricate it was and what It would take to overhaul the system.  I thnk they couldve gone with a smaller changes first i.e.  the financial tools then small changes to season management to make the transition easier.  Instead they realized they couldnt make everthing work in time and went with the bare minimum which is what we are dealing with today.

[freezinKT]

9 minutes ago, riseatl said:

Can't speak for anyone who runs the back end, but being in IT, its clear there is an issue in the coding language used to communicate from website, app, etc..  I dont think they realized how intricate it was and what It would take to overhaul the system.  I thnk they couldve gone with a smaller changes first i.e.  the financial tools then small changes to season management to make the transition easier.  Instead they realized they couldnt make everthing work in time and went with the bare minimum which is what we are dealing with today.

Yes, I assume (as a programmer) they either went with a data store they aren’t familiar with or that the gotchas of cloud based programming/micro services are catching up to them.

But also as a programmer I have switched languages, data stores, and entire programming paradigms multiple times in my career. It’s something professionals should be able to handle. And they also said their app was buggy due to performance problems. So the problems go further than Season Management.

SportsEngine has been around a long time - in the range of organizations like League Athletics, Team Sideline, and Demosphere. They should be able to handle this. They once had a product good enough to be bought by a major corporation. What changed?

[riseatl]

18 hours ago, freezinKT said:

Yes, I assume (as a programmer) they either went with a data store they aren’t familiar with or that the gotchas of cloud based programming/micro services are catching up to them.

But also as a programmer I have switched languages, data stores, and entire programming paradigms multiple times in my career. It’s something professionals should be able to handle. And they also said their app was buggy due to performance problems. So the problems go further than Season Management.

SportsEngine has been around a long time - in the range of organizations like League Athletics, Team Sideline, and Demosphere. They should be able to handle this. They once had a product good enough to be bought by a major corporation. What changed?

I think that part I bolded answered your question, instaed of the smaller agile company who treated it like it was something precious, it became another line on a long line of balance sheets of which the only question is how is the bottom line looking.

[LaxNOVA]

I was one of the people who held onto LeagueAthletics until the last day and switched when I had to.  I was on the phone with SE yesterday expressing my frustration about the lack of auto-rostering the was SIMPLE in LeagueAthletics.  This was a poor business decision to sunset LA and not have the basic features it had.

We have a fall even which can have close to 3000 registrants.  How in the world can I effectively add players to roster with that volume. I can't!

Has anyone found a platform that has more functionality to LeagueAthletics??

I hope the management is listening!!

[freezinKT]

26 minutes ago, LaxNOVA said:

I was one of the people who held onto LeagueAthletics until the last day and switched when I had to.  I was on the phone with SE yesterday expressing my frustration about the lack of auto-rostering the was SIMPLE in LeagueAthletics.  This was a poor business decision to sunset LA and not have the basic features it had.

We have a fall even which can have close to 3000 registrants.  How in the world can I effectively add players to roster with that volume. I can't!

Has anyone found a platform that has more functionality to LeagueAthletics??

I hope the management is listening!!

I'm sure it's against the forum rules to sell other products, but my suggestion is to look around at local leagues in your area across different sports, see what they are using, and if possible ask their webmasters. Also when you reach out to sales people, don't even CONSIDER their app unless they will let you access a trial site. Most good platforms will let you try before you buy.

[coachdan13]

5 hours ago, LaxNOVA said:

I was one of the people who held onto LeagueAthletics until the last day and switched when I had to.  I was on the phone with SE yesterday expressing my frustration about the lack of auto-rostering the was SIMPLE in LeagueAthletics.  This was a poor business decision to sunset LA and not have the basic features it had.

We have a fall even which can have close to 3000 registrants.  How in the world can I effectively add players to roster with that volume. I can't!

Has anyone found a platform that has more functionality to LeagueAthletics??

I hope the management is listening!!

Without possibly breaking any forum rules, you can absolutely contact me directly. dan@wasatchbaseball.com

Edited January 25 by coachdan13