sports team/match organiser based on pledgebank engine

What NEED does this meet?

organising grass roots sports teams and fixtures is a nightmare. getting 22 or 30 people plus a referee to a muddy field at 1000 on a sunday is an absolute pig of a job for the team captains. the hassle of organising teams eventually gets the most public spirited people down. and then everyone loses out as the fixtures fall apart. in some sports (rugby, rowing) if enough people don’t turn up the whoel fixture is lost. the parallels to pledgebank are obvious. the technology can be turned around to help team captains organise games and confirm that the fixture will happen

What is the APPROACH?

users receive a message –

‘we shall all turn up at pitch 4, muddy marsh, midfordshire to play scrugby against the ‘old scrots’ at 1000 – you will get a text three hours before the game to confirm that we have enough people. if you can’t make it reply to this’

a modifed pledgebank engine could make it look more like the normal signing up process for a team, storing address lists for club pools to make the captains’ lives easier. A lot of team organisers use email but pledgebank cuts over into text/SMS hugely increasing the reach into demographic groups who are not online

What are the BENEFITS to people?

Lowers the barrier for hard-pressed volunteers who organise sport. This is an area that the web curiously has not yet been unleashed.

one of the reasons individual sports (gyms etc) do well is the sheer hassle of takign part in team sports in a post-industrial-sports-team era. anything that lowers the barriers and uses modern media can only help

It stops people getting fat

What is the COMPETITION?

There are rumours of sports teams organising sites but run on a commercial basis. Though i can’t readily find them. This would be completley new and have international appeal. I think the world is gagging for this

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

it should be quite cheap not a full project – a rework of the pledgebank engine with a new front end(s) and appropriate messaging for say rugby, cricket, football etc. and some niche ones perhaps – croquet, rowing. Some of the major sports governing bodies should be willing to fund or at least advise on this. I shoudl think that the big web companies would leap at it (google, yahoo etc)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 9:06pm and is filed under Proposals 2006. Follow responses to this entry (RSS2 feed). Both comments and pings are currently closed.