The Spreadsheet That Eats Your Season
If you run a hockey club - or even one team within it - you know the ritual. The league fixtures are published, you log into England Hockey's GMS, and you start copying. Dates, opponents, home or away, push-back times, venues, pitches. You paste it all into a spreadsheet because the spreadsheet is the only place you can actually see your season laid out. Then, every single week, you copy the relevant rows again into a team message so players know where to be on Saturday.
That is before anything changes. And in hockey, things always change. A pitch gets double-booked and the venue moves. A push-back time shifts by an hour. An away game swaps to a neutral water-based pitch. Each change means another trip into GMS to spot it, another edit to the spreadsheet, and another message to the squad - hoping nobody misses it and turns up at the wrong ground. None of this is coaching. It is admin, and it is the quiet reason so many fixtures secretaries quietly hand in their boots.
This guide is about getting that time back. We will walk through how league hockey fixtures actually work through GMS, the real weekly job that creates, and how to handle availability, squad selection across your XIs, umpires, teas, transport and results - without retyping everything by hand.
How Hockey Fixtures Actually Work: GMS
In England, league hockey runs through England Hockey's Game Management System - GMS. It is the central platform that handles club affiliation, membership, leagues, fixtures, results and discipline. When your league sets its season, the fixtures are published in GMS, and that is the official record. The push-back time, the venue, the pitch, the home and away designation - if it is in GMS, it is what counts towards the table.
Crucially, GMS is also where changes are made. If a fixture moves venue, shifts time or swaps pitch, that change is recorded in GMS first. The same goes the other way: after the final whistle, results and any cards go back into GMS, and that submission is what updates the league standings. So GMS sits at both ends of every match - it tells you what is happening before, and it records what happened after.
What GMS does not do well, on its own, is run your week. It is a governing-body record, not a team-communication tool. It will not message your players, collect availability, help you pick a squad, or remind anyone they are umpiring. That gap - between the official fixture list in GMS and the dozen jobs each fixture creates - is exactly where the spreadsheet and the manual chasing grow up.
The Weekly Grind, Step by Step
To see where the time really goes, it helps to lay out what a fixtures secretary or team manager actually does between Sunday and Saturday. Almost none of it is the match itself.
Your fixture-week checklist
- Read the fixtures from GMS: open GMS, find this weekend's games for each team, and note opponent, home or away, push-back time, venue and pitch. Check nothing has changed since last week.
- Publish to the squad: copy those details into a message so every player knows the ground, the time and the meet. For a multi-team club, that is several messages, several times over.
- Collect availability: ask who is in, against this specific fixture - not a vague "free Saturday?" poll - then chase the half who do not reply.
- Select squads across the XIs: confirm who plays for the 1st XI, the 2nd, the 3rd, making sure a shared player is not picked twice on the same day.
- Sort umpires: hockey games need appointed umpires; work out who is officiating and confirm they know.
- Teas and hospitality: home games usually need teas organised - who is on, and what are they bringing.
- Transport: for away games, sort lifts and a meet point, especially for juniors and anyone without a car.
- Submit and check results: after the match, enter the result and any cards back into GMS, then check the table updated correctly.
Run that list once and it is an afternoon. Run it every week, for three or four teams, with changes landing throughout - and it is a part-time job done by a volunteer for free. The maddening part is how much of it is pure re-keying: the same fixture typed into a spreadsheet, then a message, then a selection sheet, then back into GMS as a result.
Availability Against the Fixture List
The single biggest time-saver is collecting availability against the actual fixtures, not as a generic weekly poll. When players can see the real fixture - "1st XI away at Saturday, push-back 14:00" - and tap available or not, you build your squad from real answers rather than guesswork. Do it as a vague "who's around this weekend?" and you spend Friday night cross-referencing replies against a fixture they could not see.
Across a season, season-long availability is even better: players flag the dates they already know they are away - holidays, weddings, exams - and you plan selection weeks ahead rather than scrambling on a Thursday. Our guide to hockey team selection and availability goes deeper on building a fair, predictable system that does not rely on you chasing replies one by one.
Confirming Squads Across Your XIs
Multi-team clubs have a problem a single team never sees: the same players are eligible for more than one side. Pick the 2nd XI without checking the 1st XI sheet and you can name the same player twice, or strip a lower side of its best available player at the last minute. The only reliable fix is to select across all the XIs together, in one place, so the whole club's selection is visible at once and nobody is double-booked.
This is also where clear communication pays off. Once squads are confirmed, every selected player needs to know they are in, where to be and when - and the players not selected this week deserve a straight word too. A scattered set of WhatsApp groups makes that fragile; a single, organised channel makes it routine. Our guide to hockey club communication covers keeping selection, notices and the weekly chat from turning into one endless, missed-message scroll.
Umpires, Teas and Transport
The jobs nobody lists on a recruitment poster. Hockey fixtures need umpires appointed and confirmed; home games need teas organised; away games need lifts and a meet point sorted. On their own each is small. Stacked across every fixture, every week, every team, they are a genuine load - and they are exactly the kind of recurring, assign-and-remind task that a spreadsheet cannot do for you. The aim is not to make these jobs disappear, but to stop them living in your head and your thumbs.
Submitting and Checking Results
The week does not end at the final whistle. Results - and any green, yellow or red cards - go back into GMS, and that submission is what updates the league table. Miss it, mistype it, or forget which side reported, and you can end up chasing a correction with the league. Building a habit of submitting promptly, and a quick check that the table updated, closes the loop cleanly and keeps you on the right side of the fixtures secretary at the other club.
The Bridge: Stop Retyping What GMS Already Knows
Here is the honest crux of it. Almost every job above starts with information that already exists in GMS - and most of the pain is moving that information by hand into a spreadsheet, then into messages, then into a selection sheet. So the real win is not a better spreadsheet. It is not having to retype GMS at all.
This is where a club platform that talks to GMS directly changes the week. Teamo syncs fixtures automatically from England Hockey's GMS - when a fixture is published, or a time, venue or pitch change is made in GMS, it pulls through to your club automatically, and results flow back the same way. There is no weekly copy-and-paste out of GMS into a spreadsheet and then into team messages, because the fixtures arrive already loaded. On top of that sync you get season-long availability collected against each real fixture, squad selection across all your XIs in one view so nobody is double-booked, and automatic reminders for availability, selection and match-day details. For hockey specifically, that GMS sync is the standout: it is the one integration that removes the single most repetitive job in the fixtures secretary's week.
To be fair about what this does and does not do: GMS remains the official system of record. Your league fixtures, your affiliation, the results that count towards the table - that is GMS, and it stays GMS. Teamo complements and syncs with it; it does not replace it. You are not choosing between them. You are simply ending the manual copying between the official record and your players. And a brief, honest aside: Teamo is made by Sportplan, the same team behind this site, so weigh that as you would any recommendation - but the GMS fixture sync is a real, hockey-specific feature, which is why it is worth flagging on a fixtures piece. If it sounds useful, you can see how Teamo syncs your GMS fixtures.
Putting It Together
Managing hockey fixtures well is not about working harder at the spreadsheet - it is about removing the spreadsheet from the loop. Let the fixtures, changes and results live where they officially belong, in GMS, and let availability, selection and reminders run off that single, accurate source rather than off something you retyped on a Tuesday. Get that right and the role stops being a weekly data-entry shift and goes back to what it should be: running a hockey club.
Once the fixtures admin runs itself, the evenings go back into coaching. Our guide to running a junior hockey team walks through the whole season from first session to finals day, and when you are ready to plan a training night you will find hundreds of practices sorted by skill in the full Hockey drills library.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do hockey fixtures work?
In England, league hockey is run through England Hockey's Game Management System (GMS). Each league publishes its fixtures in GMS, and that is where venue, time, pitch and result information officially lives. Clubs read their fixtures from GMS, then communicate them to players, sort out squads, umpires, teas and transport, and finally submit results back into GMS after each match. Friendlies and tournaments may sit outside GMS, but for league hockey it is the system of record.
What is England Hockey GMS?
GMS stands for Game Management System - England Hockey's central platform for affiliation, membership, leagues, fixtures, results and discipline. It is where leagues publish their fixture lists, where time, venue and pitch changes are recorded, and where match results and cards are submitted. GMS is the official record for league hockey in England, so the fixtures and results it holds are the ones that count towards the table.
How do I manage hockey fixtures across multiple teams?
The challenge with several XIs is that each team has its own GMS fixture list, its own availability and its own squad, but players overlap between sides. The reliable approach is one club-wide calendar so you can see every team's fixtures together, availability collected against each specific fixture rather than a vague weekly poll, and selection done across all sides at once so the same player is not picked for two teams on the same day. A platform that syncs every team's GMS fixtures into one view removes the weekly copy-and-paste and the double-booking that comes with it.
Can I sync GMS fixtures automatically?
Yes. Teamo, the club platform from the Sportplan team, syncs fixtures directly from England Hockey's GMS, so when a fixture is published or a time, venue or pitch change is made in GMS it pulls through to your club automatically - and results flow back the same way. That removes the weekly job of copying fixtures out of GMS into a spreadsheet and then into team messages. GMS remains the official system of record and your affiliation; the sync simply means you are not retyping it by hand.
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