If you are an sports administrator that has to deal with the tedious tasks associated with sports registration and administration, an online registration system can have a huge impact on how you manage your league.
1. Save time.
Processing paper registration forms may not be rocket science, but it does still take time. Instead of having someone in your department spending 6 hours a day adding new players to your system, why not let parents add information themselves? With an online registration system, sports parents can register (and pay) from their home computer, or even smartphone or tablet. They can fill out the form on their time (instead of racing to get a paper form to your office before it closes) and your department can spend more time actually running the league and less time processing paper work and paper checks.
2. More accurate data.
Even the best typists make mistakes. How many times have you misspelled a name, email, address, or some other vital piece of information because one letter was off or a period was missing? Or what happens when mom or dad has pretty terrible handwriting and you can’t even figure out who they are? With online registration the data is much more accurate because it doesn’t have to be transcribed. With an online database of registrants, there is no need to shuffle papers around to various people – reports have all the information anyone needs. You can easily give coaches the contact information they need for their team and not worry that someone’s email address got left out.
The system can check for missing data too, so parents can’t accidentally skip a critical box on the form. And that registration information can be saved from session to session so families don’t need to re-enter it next season.
3. Customize your registration forms.
With an online registration system YOU decide what information you need and create custom forms for each sport. For instance, in football you need to know what size helmet a player needs, but in soccer that information isn’t necessary. With custom forms you get exactly the information you need from each player without overloading the parents with giant registration forms they have to pick their way through to fill out properly. And unlike paper forms, you don’t have to worry about squeezing everything onto an 8 x 10 printable page. You can make the form as big or as little as you need it to be.
4. Better communications between parents and coaches.
With an online registration system, you as the administrator can send mass emails to everyone in the league, or niche it down and send a direct email to a selected group of participants, players, volunteers or coaches. This makes it easy to ensure everyone has the information they need when the need it. After all, if you cancel a game because of weather conditions and only half of the parents get the memo that doesn’t make you look too good. The online system makes it easy for coaches to communicate with their team directly as well, helping improve communications for everyone across the board.
There are a dozen other reasons why an online registration system could make your league run smoother: run volunteer background checks, manage and track finances with 100 percent transparency, create teams and schedule tournaments, track player statistics and more.
