For the Bulldog Ball Club, bringing in TeamSnap means bringing in more revenue

With 1,000 players, 50 rec and travel teams, and yet more teams in after-school programs, the Bulldog Ball Club is a big club in the big city. And if its size wasn’t enough, it’s also a multi-sport club. Baseball and basketball are the largest programs, but it also organizes flag football, softball and soccer programs.

Its goal, according to full-timer Andrea Johnson, who oversees their after-school programs, is to offer “as many programs for as many kids as possible. And they have to be quality programs.” When it comes to managing such a large organization, the need to simplify is apparent, even with a full-time staff. “There are six of us, so it’s a pretty small office. We all do a lot of things,” says Andrea.

A huge headache

When you have as many players and year-round programs as the Bulldog Ball Club, registration can be a daunting undertaking. The existing process was to create forms in SurveyMonkey, export them to Excel, copy them into Google Sheets and create teams and class lists from there. The challenge, as Andrea describes it, was that everyone signed up on different forms. “You couldn't have one form because you have 50 or 60 different options, and you don't want parents to have to scroll through that.”

What’s more, staying on top of who’s paid and who hasn’t was another struggle, since nothing was integrated and an option to collect payments wasn’t built into registration. “It didn't force everyone to pay before they got to the checkout. So, we would get their information regardless, and a lot of people were slipping through without paying.”

Yet another area where the existing process was taking its toll was communication. The information was all there, but it was all over the place, which didn’t help when they needed to get news out in a hurry. “If there was a rainout or a location change, you had to go into the right Google Sheet, copy all the emails into Gmail and send it out.”

The whole process was a “huge headache” that left everyone wondering, “How can we make this easier? How can we make this better? How can we streamline and simplify and automate as much as possible?”

Enter TeamSnap

The Bulldog Ball Club had been using TeamSnap for Clubs & Leagues for its travel teams when Andrea came on full time. “It was going well, and when it became clear that I was going to have a more active role, I said, ‘I am NOT going to do after-school registrations the way we’ve been doing it. It’s going to be on TeamSnap. End of story.’ So we brought everything over.”

From collecting registration information and payments to dealing with Mother Nature, TeamSnap’s integrated platform has made an enormous difference. “Things change so frequently with the weather. We’ve had such a rainy season this year, and we’re able to make a couple clicks and inform a group of 20 people that their location’s been moved or game canceled. And if it’s been moved, they have a map they can see and navigate. It’s huge!”

Doing more in less time

The scale and variety of Bulldog Ball Club’s programs meant that jumping from tool to tool and managing independent spreadsheets was unmanageable. That’s why TeamSnap has made such a difference.

“The amount of time we saved makes it beyond worth it,” says Andrea. When two staff members left, the efficiencies and time savings the club got from using TeamSnap made up the difference. “We had eight full-time staff members and now we have six. We've essentially replaced two full-time employees with TeamSnap.”

One other benefit: TeamSnap’s integrated payments makes it easy to collect money up front and on time. “We're capturing more of the revenue that we're bringing in—not by an increase in the number of players, but an increase in our ability to see who’s paid and who hasn't. On our old registration platform, you could have figured it out, but it was not easy. This is so straightforward!”

For the Bulldog Ball Club, the ability to bring everything under one platform to collect registrations and payments, and to communicate with parents on game days, has saved the club both time and money. They’re continuing to bring more and more programs onto the platform and rolling out new products in the upcoming seasons.

“I love TeamSnap. That’s it!” says Andrea.