3 June 2008

Who can make next week's training?

Ultimate teams are far easier to manage when you have simple ways to communicate. How did we do anything before email and mobiles?

Its worth thinking about a website for your team - not necessarily a public place for outsiders to see a few photos and your roster, but a private hub for organising trainings and attendance, sharing tactics, discussing uniforms and upload photos.

The simplest comparison is Facebook (uh-oh, half my readers just went to play Scrabulous or throw a zombie...) Facebook is a starting point for a user: your friends' details, photos, news and latest actions all come to you. And are easily found with one search box.

Here are some ready-to-go team website tools on offer:

Google Sites
Only been out for 2 weeks. We Dingos are using it. The pages are editable by anyone, and you can put in many widgets, tables, videos and photos. Limited integration with all the other useful google tools (calendar, groups, docs, gmail).

Teamtastic
Used Tested by the Firetails, used by Iceni and even UK Ultimate. Free, but ad-supported and there are limits on photos and pages. Designed for sports teams. You can manage news, photos, polls, roster, schedules, and more.

TeamSnap
Looks slick, but I can't find any ultimate teams using it yet, unsurprisingly. Free for now, but down the track they will have free and paid options. You can manage pretty much the same things as Teamtastic, plus team stats, who has paid and even the roster for who is bringing the esky. Who wants to test-drive this one?

FreeTeams
Looks outdated.

MyTeamCaptain

Ditto

7 comments:

  1. Firetails aren't actually using teamtastic - signed up to see what it was like but it wasn't really what we were after. Instead we are using a website I threw together where we have our fitness reports, fitness programs, pre-tour schedule, flights, strategy and whatever else needs to go up. It is great to have it all in one place - you don't have to hunt through all the emails to find the PoJ roster or that key strategy document.

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  2. Anonymous10:25 pm

    I'm experimenting with TeamSnap for this season of men's league in Brisbane, now that your post has pointed it out. Not sure whether I'll get the same engagement from a league team as a Nats club, but if I think it's got potential, I may step it up and road-test with Firestorm next season.
    Will see how it goes for league first...

    What do you think of Google Sites, O Shep?

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  3. So far, google sites looks ok.

    Check out the Dingo site now:
    http://sites.google.com/site/australiandingos/

    We would like to have more blog functionality in there, i.e. an option to integrate with blogger, or an option for the public to leave comments on our news posts.

    But for photos, rosters, editing, tables, it seems solid.

    We also have our own google site (not public) for internal team stuff, e.g. tactics, scouting, tasks.

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  4. Mark,
    Good job on the Dingo site. I know this post is a couple of months old, but I am the owner of FreeTeams and I was wondering what about FreeTeams you found outdated? The front page of the site, or the individual team sites, or the overall feel, etc? If you or your readers had any suggestions as to what could be improved, I'd love to hear them. I definitely have a laundry list a mile long of changes and new features I'd like to implement, with graphics design being one of them. We've striven for ease of use and features over flash & style (at least on our side, teams can customize their sites to look as flashy or ugly as they'd like) as we've gotten started in our first year, but I'd love to hear about what other teams are looking for. Thanks!

    Will

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  5. I meant to address that to Owen, don't know where I came up with "Mark" - it's been a long day, heh.

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  6. Will,
    Send me your email and I'll offer some feedback if you like.
    Owen

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  7. Owen,
    I'm at support@freeteams.net

    Thanks.

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