ScheduleBuilder Performs the Heavy Lifting for You
August 14, 2012
From time to time I’ll post here to talk about new and upcoming features. Most recently I gave you a teaser about Korrio’s new look and feel, something we’ve been working on for a while and are very excited about. Now I want to talk about Korrio’s new ScheduleBuilder, an important new feature for administrators who need to create practice and game schedules for their club.
Who, what, where, when? Aren’t those the fundamental questions for youth sports organizers, as well as the coaches, parents and players? From our beginning Korrio has been a leader in making it easier to organize games and practices. With our new ScheduleBuilder we’re automating that whole process of finding times for games, making sure there aren’t field or coach’s conflicts and then publishing the schedules to every team, coach, parent and player.
Why
Before I get too far into what ScheduleBuilder is and does, let me talk about why we built it. As you can imagine, as a rapidly growing leader in the youth sports space, there are lots of ideas and customer feeedback about how we can improve. Sometimes the best feedback is hearing from customers (and potential customers) what would make their administrative tasks easier. Time and again we heard that automating the event creation process would remove hours of frustration for each club.
Trying to use spreadsheets or note cards, or even to delegate the task to an army of “coordinators”, just makes the risk of double booking or missing an event even greater. Our goal with ScheduleBuilder was to create something that was almost “wizard-like” in how it would step administrators through the process of creating a schedule without a lot of complicated overhead.
What It Does
ScheduleBuilder is an administrative only feature. It doesn’t change every Korrio user’s ability to create individual events but instead gives administrators new tools. Coaches can still create events for their team, and parents can still manage the schedules for themselves and their children.
For those with Administrator privileges, ScheduleBuilder is launched from the Schedule tab. Once you’ve launched the tool it’s easy to set the times you have available, how many practices or games you want each week and even each day.
It depends on how you’ve organized your club as to whether you’re going to create a practice or game schedule. Practices are easy. By launching from your Club’s page you’ll be able to see all your teams, select as many teams as you want, and as I’ll explain, the tool will then create a unique practice schedule for each one.
In order to create game schedules, with all the important Korrio features like standings and score reporting, you need to have worked with Korrio to organize your teams into divisions. Launching from the division hierarchy will let you pick and choose which divisions you want to work with. This lets you work with just one division at a time, or several. You can also work across genders and ages since the ScheduleBuilder will make sure not to schedule boys vs girls or to mismatch team ages so your U7′s aren’t playing your U17′s.
After picking the dates and teams, you then select which teams to work with and which fields you want to assign to those teams. Finally, you can create “blackout days” to prohibit any events from being schedule on holidays, or at times when you know your club is hosting an event or away playing in a tournament.
The ScheduleBuilder takes all this information and generates a series of events. Because ScheduleBuilder doesn’t treat each schedule as unique, but builds upon what has been done before, it will not put new events for a team, coach or field on top of a previously scheduled ones. Keeping track of this (so administrators don’t have to) is a huge benefit for everyone. Once the schedule is generated and approved, one button publishes it to the appropriate teams so that everyone in your club instantly has the most up-to-date scheduling information.
This release of ScheduleBuilder is just a first step. There are lots more schedule management features that Korrio plans to build into the product, including more dynamic drag and drop schedule management and the ability to reschedule all events by field, date or time. That said, this is a huge step forward in Korrio’s continued effort to be the best possible youth sports platform for your club or organization.
