HomeTeamsONLINE Press Release

Any fan of professional sports knows that even with all their technology and resources, when a league puts out their schedule it's full of "What were they thinking when they scheduled THAT!?" moments. If you are responsible for actually creating a league schedule you know what a difficult chore it is and understand just how seemingly impossible it can be to put the puzzle together.

 

In the  21st century, you'd think this problem would have already been solved with an easy-to-use solution available to everyone. Not until now. Enter Dave Schmitz, co-founder and partner at HomeTeamsONLINE.com , who explained "We were surprised when we researched to see what kinds of tools were available there were very little. In fact, there are few books that really cover the subject of scheduling."

 

While HomeTeamsONLINE.com continues to offer their round-robin scheduling program online for free, they've upped the ante with their new "copy-and-drop" schedule importing feature.

 

"I found it very interesting", said Dave "that scheduling is a favorite topic of graduate school papers. But those papers all try to produce a perfect solution to a messy problem. My background as an Engineer for a major utility company taught me how to solve messy problems, so I was able to hammer out a workable concept with my partner, Ben Downey, that involved coming up with a schedule that assigns a "quality factor" to the result – you can even try recalculating the schedule. The method we use is proprietary, but let's just say it's messy. We keep the scheduling program on a separate server because it's very intensive. We get a huge amount of traffic using the scheduler and it's been very interesting to see the kinds of problems we've helped folks with – we get a lot of feedback along the lines of "Thank you so much, I looked everywhere for a scheduler and your program saved the day!".

 

The HomeTeamsONLINE.com scheduler does half the work for you so that the schedule is done and available in time for the teams to check it, and then updated in time for the fans to make it to the games.

 

Once it's done, you can import the schedule (or any schedule) into a HomeTeamsONLINE.com website. Ben Downey, co-founder and Director of Software Development, says it was quite an undertaking to come up with an import tool that really gets the job done.

 

"Importing schedules has always been a top priority for our customers, and over the years our support team has seen just about every situation you can imagine. We put that experience to work and what we came up with is a very flexible and powerful tool, unlike anything else that is available."

 

He says he knows this because they've researched available products and found nothing that could handle serious sports scheduling. "We even developed our own in-house scheduling for our support team; online scheduling is something software developers avoid but it's a core feature for managing sports. So it was up to us to build these tools for our customers."

 

David said, "When we began testing the program with actual spreadsheets sent by our customers, it was very exciting. We dropped in huge, messy spreadsheets with notes in the margins, mixed up data, and missing labels. It cleans up as much as it can, then highlights rows or columns for you to throw away, or explain what the data is and what matches what."

 

The tool lets you copy and paste a schedule from a spreadsheet, or even from another web page. It displays your data and highlights anything that isn't clear, so you can select from a drop down list of options or simply discard bad data. Once the data is in, the "team matching" step lets you clean up misspelled teams, or even create missing teams from the data if needed.

 

"This was a big, big feature for us." says Ben. "When our customers realized they can drop their schedule into our import feature and easily create their entire league in a few minutes, they are stunned. Even with all the great apps that you can get these days, I think it's hard for people to imagine that you can drop in a schedule - maybe attached from an email - and basically create an entire online calendar with dozens of teams." Likewise, if you don't have a schedule at all you can create one from scratch with the free scheduler.

 

With the Schedule Import feature and the new People Import feature (both based on the same engine), getting all of your player, coach, and schedule information published online is a snap. Hours and hours of work has been trimmed down to literally minutes.

 

"Well, this is nice and all," you may be thinking, "but why do I even want to get all this online?"

 

Dave Schmitz says "There are so many tools and features, honestly, trying to market a product that covers so much ground and fills so many different needs is very challenging. It's kind of like the old joke about how car commercials only talk about the coffee holders. Being an athletic director or league manager is a classic example of one person doing a dozen different jobs. Those are our customers."  HomeTeamsONLINE.com focuses on one thing - sports websites - that offer dozens of tools, like the scheduler, for any sports-related job.

 

Want some examples of what a site can do? Aside from the ability to create a schedule, import it, and automatically create teams for an entire school or league, you can also:

• Export the Schedule to Google or iCal.
• Send out schedule-related text alerts and notification emails.
• Update game scores using the mobile Scorekeeper app.
• Organize ball field and gym locations.
• Track stats for major sports using the stats engine.
• Manage score conflicts with a few clicks.
• Build custom online registration forms.
• Provide banner ad space for your sponsors.
• Easily expand your site as you grow from a single team, to a league, and even into a multi-sport organization.

And there's more. A lot more.

 

Almost anything with these sites can be customized. The team at HTO takes their customer's input and requests seriously.

 

"Our customers keep coming up with ideas and we are very proud of the number of features that were added through customer feedback and requests." added Ben.

 

Basically, this tool takes the daunting task of importing a schedule and shrinking it down to a simple, time-saving process, which is always good.

 

For more information, go to www.HomeTeamsONLINE.com and sign up for a free trial.