Sports Connect

Great product for our special needs little league

Pros:

It allows us to collect information for both players and volunteers in one area. The ease of use to update players information from an admin standpoint is super easy as well. Exporting of spreadsheets is simple and thorough. Best is it's free to us.

Cons:

Designing the website site is very clunky and not as user friendly as it should be. You can also only attach one file to a bulk email which is annoying.

Sports Connect - Best Customer Service!!

Comments: Very satisfied. It beats every other software out there in functionality. They all have their challenges.

Pros:

Their customer service is second to none. I work with many software companies and used to work for one. SC does a terrific job at providing timely support to their customers. At least that has been my experience in the last 5 years I have used them.

Cons:

I dislike their newest update which causes the system to kick you out every so often even if you are in the middle of your work. It is frustrating when doing accounting because you are deep in transactions and the system kicks you out...even when you are actively working. It is possible another window may be open, but we use multiple windows. it should acknowledge we are currently working in the system in any window.

May be good for youth sports, overly complicated for everything else.

Comments: Blue Sombrero was very exciting when we first started and their was hope of it being able to work for adult recreational leagues. We've become disenfranchised with the over complexity of the system as it adds more features and tools for youth leagues and never fixes the issues for adult recreational leagues. Also, it greatly needs a UI simplification. Our users are lost on the volunteer registration process, but it also doesn't make sense for recreational league. It has become overbuilt on features and no longer user friendly. Slow down the development and focus on the end-user and administrators experience (SIMPLICITY). And the new team manager app doesn't appear to be connected at all to bluesombrero, which was very confusing. You have a power house of useful tools that could be leveraged better if you could develop a way for admins to customize the tools to work for them. GIve us more control and it could still be fantastic. Another feature to consider is adding a rewards or gamification for repeat playing. Giving admins the ability to disable multiple registrations per account (our adults aren't signing waivers, because their girlfriends/captains are registering on their behalf, creating a liability issue). At present, we're looking at shifting to an in-house simplified registration system, since we don't think Bluesombrero is going to work for our expansion plans. ---The support staff has always been fantastic and super responsive. That is definitely fantastic!

Pros:

-Free -game scheduling and game notification emails -discount codes -donation option on checkout

Cons:

-over built (it needs a major simplifying UI overhaul). We had to spend hours creating an in-house training manual for our staff on how to setup a league and manage it. -sold by support on implementing use for adult leagues, it never happened after 3 years and assume it is dead now -simple fixes could make this work for everyone. For example, I recently set up foxy cart for donations and they have a whole configuration section on language. I asked for two UI changes more than once years ago that are still important #1 discount codes and team codes need different names...team "ID" makes more sense. Users get confused between the two. The other is changing the name of "coaches" to "captains" for recreational leagues. We also have numerous users get lost on the volunteer/coach section altogether and then they give up. -no support for alternate payment accounts (Stripe for example would be helpful) -Verifying standings is hard to get to. I have to go to team central, which isn't always easy an admin. Then look for any ties and manually break them, since the system doesn't usually get them all right. -It would be nice if discount codes could have a percent off or a giftcard option.

Abington Youth Lacrosse

Comments: great! job well done sports connect, keep up the great work

Pros:

once I got comfortable with sports connect it was quite user friendly

Cons:

nothing much, at first I would have trouble but through the support team, training, and videos I learned the product

Succeeds On The Basics But Leaves Me Wanting More

Comments: Overall Sports Connect gets the job done. It feels like I'm using a dated platform that gets small, infrequent updates, but it does a good job with its core competencies.

Pros:

Registration is probably the strongest aspect of this platform. Setting up new seasons and managing registrations as they come in works very well. There are some opportunities for improvement, but there are not any 'soft lock' glitches that cannot be worked around.

Cons:

I have shared a lot of feedback with the team. Wait list activations cause a problem since they allow a child to be placed on a team without payment, which is different than the typical registration process and results in missed payments (or increased collections efforts at best). Sharing reports works, but you cannot share by security role, and the users don't have a way to access their shared reports unless they save the link. The front end is VERY dated and has a way of sanitizing the HTML that results in very weird results, sometimes that seem impossible to work around. Uploading pictures has a different size limit for each upload input box, and I constantly have to use 3rd party software to compress images just to get them to go onto the site. That's just to name a few.