To manage the scheduling for an athletics department, you have to coordinate multiple factors at once. For example, to schedule a home game for the baseball team, you need to know availability for the stadium, the team and coaches, trainers, umpires, and the opposing team. If the team is playing away from home, you need to coordinate transportation. Every practice, game, or event means comparing and coordinating several elements. We call this multi-dimensional scheduling, and it can be quite a challenge. Let’s take a look at how you can set up a streamlined athletics scheduling system that simplifies the process, reduces administrative load, and still keeps everyone updated.
The challenge of scheduling an athletics department
Any school with an athletics program faces the challenge of coordinating all the factors involved. Typically, the folks who handle scheduling also have plenty of other responsibilities. But the task of athletics scheduling can expand into a full-time job all by itself, especially if you don’t have a streamlined system in place.
What’s involved in athletics scheduling?
At minimum, athletics scheduling needs to prevent double-booking and ensure that teams, coaches, and staff members know about each practice, game, or other event. Ideally, a scheduling system also makes it easy to share event info with others, like bus drivers who provide transportation and parents who want to attend games.
There are many separate “pieces” to put together just to set up the who, what, when, and where of an event. Then there’s the informational layer: from the player roster to info on ticket sales and details like where the bus will drop students.
And, of course, there’s also a lot more going on in an athletics department than games and practices. Coaches may need to have designated office hours. Athletes need to know when they can see the trainer or physical therapist. Staff members need to share their availability and plan meetings. Adding a new event to the calendar means considering the events already scheduled.
The benefits of an integrated scheduling system
Often, all these pieces are handled separately. But the separation creates silos. Information silos make everything more complicated for creating, sharing, and documenting athletics events. Scheduling silos means there’s a very real possibility of creating conflicts you don’t even know about until it’s too late and a fix, if possible at all, can be costly. Much of the extra work could have been avoided if the conflict can be prevented at the first place. Plus, the burden of checking separate systems and chasing down calendar details takes a lot of time.
Scheduling an entire athletics department in one system can help reduce this administrative load; it’s easier to make decisions when you have all the factors in one place. This doesn’t mean that one person is responsible for the whole thing. With customized calendar access, each group coordinator, department scheduler, or office administrator can update the schedule for their team on the same calendar. Each group contributes their part to one system. So everyone has visibility, and it’s easier to prevent conflicts, make schedules accessible, and easily provide event information outside of the department.
A coordinated scheduling system for athletics
For a college athletics department, you can manage coaches’ office hours, staff availability, facility reservation, and team scheduling in one place. You’d do this by creating sub-calendars that represent the primary scheduling dimensions. In this example, the sub-calendars represent coaches, staff members, and facilities; plus, there’s a set of sub-calendars for each team.
Automatically prevent double-booking
To schedule an event, assign it to all the relevant sub-calendars. Overlapping events are not allowed, so none of the sub-calendars assigned to this Practice Session event can be scheduled for anything else during the same time period.
See what matters for each task
Folders keep everything organized, and can be collapsed or expanded depending on what you need to see in each moment:
Plus, you can toggle individual sub-calendars on and off from view. This ability to control what you see means you can have all the scheduling factors in one place, for the entire athletics department, without being overwhelmed by irrelevant information.
Customize access for each person or group
You can add staff members, coaches, and others who use the calendar regularly as account-based users. For each user, you can choose which sub-calendars they see and what permissions they have. Here’s how the calendar looks for Coach Bob:
And you can create shareable calendar links to provide group or even public access, with read-only permission. These secure links make it really easy to share game schedules with parents or coordinate with other departments. Here’s a link for “Baseball Parents” that includes only the baseball team’s game calendar:
Capture and track information
The basic layer of information for a scheduled event is who, what, when, and where. Beyond this information, there can be many more layers. You can customize event fields to easily capture the relevant details.
Even better: you can filter by keywords and custom fields to quickly find what you need. And, it’s easy to include images or attach files to any event. So you can upload a parking map, a team roster, or a photo of the school mascot. Having all of the information in one place, kept in context, has a lot of benefits: It’s easier to find what you need. It’s easier to share with others. You don’t have to go digging through folders and inboxes to find the PDF you need when it’s right there, attached to the event. And you don’t have to answer the same questions over and over when you’ve provided all the details on the event itself.
Try Teamup for your athletics scheduling
This scenario is just one example of how you can use Teamup for athletics department scheduling. There’s no one right way to set up the calendar structure; you get to decide what makes sense and customize the scheduling system to match. Try a live demo to see how easy multi-dimensional athletic scheduling can be with Teamup, or get started with your own calendar now!
