Why we built teamo!

Solving the problems in team management!

Running a business such as Sportplan, where we pride ourselves in using the latest tech to empower coaches, we are faced time and time again with the questions we haven't answered in other areas of sport. The biggest one being, 'Can you recommend a tool for tracking player availability?'.

As a former team captain, coach and team manager, I have first-hand experience of running sports teams. I sit in an office surrounded by current and former team captains of Rugby, Netball and Hockey teams. Having all experienced similar headaches of time consuming off-field administration, we have finally decided to do something about it.

So why did we decide to create teamo? In short, because we believe nobody else has produced a satisfactory solution. Other websites and apps promising to help team captains and managers seemed to be lacking in some way or another. Most are clunky and full of adverts, with spreadsheet like user experience and lacking essential tools. We know we can do it better - read on to find out more!

Putting player experience first

We wanted to place player experience first, for every team there is one captain and numerous players, lots of solution providers put either their own-interests first; making information slow to find so they can serve you more ads. Or they focus so much on the user experience of the manager, the players stand to gain very little from signing up to yet another piece of software. teamo is designed to solve team managers headaches but also surface the relevant information for all team members as quickly and easily as possible.

Communicating as a team

Communicating with a team should be easy however for some reason it is a total mess. Most teams exist through endless message threads either in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Email. All important details are discussed in these threads causing team captains/managers the stress of scrolling through ticking off who responded to what. Even the apps that claim to solve availability have no decent messaging solution so as soon as there is a slight variation to answering yes or no, you need to open another app or send an email.

Fixtures / Player availability

The biggest headache for a captain/manager is not selecting a team, but knowing who is available to select the team from. teamo allows you to create fixtures with all the details from location to meet time. You can even import all fixtures for the whole season in just a few clicks. With automatic prompts to players to confirm their availability for the fixture and a simple overview of availability, it's never been easier to select your team.

Email is dead

Email really is dead, we all have email overload. The average open rate of a broadcast email these days is less than 30%. If you are trying to get important messages out to club members that simply isn't satisfactory. We are pleased that we are already seeing clubs using teamo experience a 96+% engagement rate with members opening the app at least once every 3 days therefore never missing important messages. However we know sports club still rely heavily on sending email, many spending good money on services each year. So we built teamoMail a broadcast email service allowing emails to be sent to the entire club, team or group via their unique email addresses.

Club payments

Often the most time consuming part of any admin role is collecting and chasing your players for money. We figured, why not keep everything in one place and ensure all club payments are accepted via and recorded by teamo. Players can settle subs, match fees and other payment all in-app. With live finance reports for the whole club, team or individuals and automatic reminders for payments, club finance has never been so easy!

What's next?

We have a lot more to come. Building member engagement in both junior and senior clubs is a key goal for us. Making sure players feel part of a club or team in between games and training sessions strengthens clubs and keeps juniors involved in sport. We already offer coaches the ability to share video and links securely with players, creating a safe community space, so they can continue to engage and learn away from the club. Over the next few months we will be adding more tools to teamo to build on member engagement further.

Don't take our word for it, check out how our FREE teamo app can work for you here!