The Diamond Softball Club cuts one-off products for TeamSnap’s all-in-one platform

When a previous travel club disbanded, several of the coaches came together to form the Diamond Softball Club. In the years since, the eight-team club has grown from 30 to 120 players and uses softball as a platform to develop strong, confident, independent women, as well as to grow the sport by allowing them to play year-round.

“We really try to get the kids to own this club. I tell them all the time, ‘This is yours. We’re here to keep it going and we’re here to give you opportunities to grow and play the game you love,’” says Alison Rossi, who directs the club outside of her fulltime work in technology. “It’s really a place for them to belong to a community of strong women playing the sport that they are passionate about. We win a bunch of tournaments, too.”

While supported by a team of about 15 volunteers, this traveling softball club’s socalled ‘back office’ is managed by Alison and her assistant director.

Point solutions need not apply

When it came to managing the club, Alison may have had several tools to do everything, but she didn’t have that one tool that does everything.

“Before TeamSnap, I had like 16 different systems. And as one person running a club, it was a complete nightmare. Because I work in technology, I knew that we had to find something that we could grow into, adding features as everyone adopted the tool. We started with email and communication, added rostering and uniform size management, and then integrated the website into the full solution.”

One of the clearest examples was communication. If you needed to reach everyone in the club, that was one distribution list. If you needed to reach a specific team, that was another. All of these were managed by different coaches and in different places. And once you had the right list, you still had to figure out the right way to address it.

“Our first year, we were sending out mass emails and you would have to Bcc someone or the whole group or you could copy everybody—and then everybody would have everybody’s contact information and the email threads would go on forever. We also tried text messages. Coaches had their own apps. Everyone was in their own little world. Everyone managed their own team distribution lists.”

For Alison, getting a simple email out was anything but simple. It was a logistical nightmare.

Enter TeamSnap

What the Diamond Softball Club needed was a single tool that could tie everything together, one that would be used by everyone, for everything. Before that could happen, it had to be adopted.

“I needed to make sure that the tool was easy enough from a coach’s perspective that it wasn’t going to slow them down at all. I needed it to be really easy for them to use. I work with a bunch of volunteers, so how do I make sure that a coach doesn’t just go off and use their own system?”

A tool that would get in the way or take time from coaching simply wasn’t an option. By delivering an integrated platform, TeamSnap for Clubs & Leagues made life easier for Alison and her coaches by consolidating different lists, apps and methods into a single, all-in-one solution.

“TeamSnap had to become our system of record. As soon as we went live, coaches had to communicate on here. Kids were going to communicate on here. Everybody was going to use this. I had to have one place where I could get everything. I wanted TeamSnap to be the engine that helped us grow. And it’s worked!”

Everything lives in TeamSnap

As the Diamond Softball Club has learned, when you bring together an all-in-one tool, a single system of record and an engine for growth, you get more than efficiency or simplicity. You get time.

“To say that it’s a time savings is a complete understatement. If I needed to send out a communication that was organization wide, I could do it. If I needed to just send it out to a group of parents, I could do that, too. If I have one parent that I need to reach out to, all of their information is in the system. I could call them right from the app. All of that saves me a substantial amount of time. And it makes a big difference for me. Everything is seamless. Everything lives in TeamSnap.”

For Alison, as well as for most of our users, the reward is bigger than spending less time on administrative work. It’s about what she can do more of as a result.

“Because of the time-savings I’ve had with TeamSnap, I can spend more time with the kids. Before, 70% of my time was working on administrative tasks and only 30% of my time coaching the kids. Now, I would flip it, which makes a big difference.”