Do any of these problems sound familiar?
Registration
You are about to begin taking registrations for your next season. You need to
find volunteers to work registration and someone has to be identified to enter
all the player and volunteer registrations into WinAYSO or AYSONAT. The problem
is that the computer resides at someone's house, and you have to rely on that
one person to do all the data entry.
Parent Communication
Registration is complete and now the registrar's phone is ringing constantly,
"I registered in April and here it is June and I have not heard anything
about my child's team. What team is Johnny on?"
Finding Coaches
You are a division coordinator and are feverishly trying to round up coaches
but you are short, way short. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see what parents
in your division have coached before? How the parents rated them as coaches?
What parents are already volunteering or are coaching in other divisions?
Team Formation
Do you find that keeping your division/age group coordinators from year to year
is difficult? In most regions this is a very heavy task and typically requires
shuffling piles of player applications, coach evaluations of players, trying
to balance teams by any number of criteria, player ratings, size, school, etc.
It is no surprise these people only hang around one year and move on to another
task, or drop out. And when they move on they take the experience with them
so their replacement starts from scratch.
Game Schedule Distribution
The season is about to start. Schedules have been distributed but there was
a problem. Now how are we going to make sure everyone gets the new schedule
and that all the old ones are destroyed? You know it is going to come back to
haunt you in week 6.
Scheduling Referees
Referees,
who are they, what level games do they like to work? Are they in town this weekend?
Bob wants to watch his child play, she is U12G, he likes to work U16 matches,
how can I get this referee scheduled so that he gets to watch his daughter.
Oh my, I have 200 referees with similar problems, I will surely go crazy before
this week is scheduled. And there are 9 more weeks after this.
Team and Player Statistics
At mid-season things are going pretty well, but you get a phone call from an
angry parent. "My Sam is not getting to play as much as the coach's child.
Why?" Ah, but is he? Where can you go to find out? The game cards! Now
who collects those and how am I going to dig through them all to research this
issue?
End of Season Player Evaluations
We made it! The season is just about over. Now we need to remind the coaches
to get their player evaluations done. They will surely do them at the last minute
and in hurry so that they can pick up their trophies and pictures. And after
we get the evaluations, we have to do something with them. Do we enter them
into a spreadsheet or just copy them to hand out to the division/age group coordinators
next year and let them worry about it? Add to this problem that every coach
rates players differently. Notice how the coach of the U10B team that finished
in last place has rated his players higher than the coach of the team that went
on to the area tournament? Argh!
These are just a few examples, I am sure you have dozens of these headaches each season.
What is the result?
With improper resources, each of the volunteer jobs is hard, every year you have to reinvent the wheel. Burnout. The bottom line, volunteer retention suffers!