Team Website and Team Communication
A few years ago I reviewed many platforms for communicating and building a youth sports team website. You can find the articles here at http://coachparker.org/tag/team-website/. In the Fall of 2010 I stumbled on Shutterfly. I started using Shutterfly as our main team website and also use Facebook along with my smartphone’s email & text features to communicate with my youth football teams. The simplicity of Shutterfly and the ease to set up a team sport site keeps me from going elsewhere. What do I like about Shutterfly?
- It is FREE
- Easy to use Sports Team Templates / Colors
- Manageable and Multiple Site Layout Options
- Drag and Drop Layout Sections for unlimited Customization
- Picture & Video Sharing
- Calendar with eMail reminders
- Roster with Player info
- Parent Listing & Contact Info
- Snack Scheduling
- Player Availability Scheduling
- eMail Listserve / Message Board
- Scoreboard Feature
- Share YouTube Video to Set Up a Video Training Area
- Private or Public Access
- Weather, ScoreBoard, Volunteer Sign-up
- and much more……
I do wish Shutterfly included CMS texting set up along with the email reminders but everything else makes Shutterfly so easy to use. Because of the texting issue, I set up my smartphone to text the team by setting up a text group. I can text the entire team at once. I usually text my teams on Sunday nights to give them the week schedule and also text them the day of games or practice around noon if not earlier.
Since many parents are on Facebook everyday, I also set up a public team page on Facebook to communicate to the parents quickly. I will just repost much of the same material from texts or Shutterfly on FB as a good reminder. We may also pick a few pictures from our typical 300 to 500 game picture sets on Shutterfly to post on Facebook. You can also have FB post to a Twitter account if your parents and players like Twitter. Most of my parents prefer FB.
This Team communication system has worked well over the last 2 years for our teams, so I have not seriously reviewed other sites like I did back in 2009. And no I am not an affiliate of Shutterfly or being compensated by them at this time.
If you have a team building site that you really like, send me a link and I will take a look.
Thanks,
Coach Parker
Keller, Texas
.
Good article
I’m currently using Facebook for a private group for my spring team. I always thought shutterfly was just some place to store photos. I’ll have to give it a look.
I wish I could find someway to store all parents cell phone numbers or home numbers in a call tree for times when practice is cancelled or other events an instead of making 25 individuals calls, just one call the the “tree” and have the message sent to all phones….any idea on how to do this.
Thanks in advance,
Coach Matthews
Thanks. Yes, I set up all the cell numbers of parents in a group on my Blackberry and send text messages. Since Blackberry does not like more than 10 in a group, I usually set up 3 or 4 groups and forward the main text to the other groups. Works great. Coach Parker
Hey Coach great article, I’ve only been coaching youth football for about 4 years now and have really notice something. I’ve always said that you can tell how someone keeps their house by looking in their car, if it’s messy then most likely they keep a messy house. You can also look at a teams website to tell how the organization is run. I kinda peruse all the locale teams websites and the ones that keep the sites updated with pertinent information are usually the ones that are at the top of the standings.
I tried to convince our president to have a dedicated person to be the web master that way parents and others can go to the site and get team updates instead of each team coach having to relay everything.
Some people just haven’t caught on to how much easier social media can make their jobs.