years ago with about 20 of us guys playing basketball, just for fun. As we started improving our game, we thought “wouldn’t it be even more fun to make this ‘real’ and play against other teams in an official league?” We decided to enroll in the local division and were excited to get started. It became evident pretty quickly that our communication methods left a lot to be desired. We never knew whether we had enough players for the next game.
We were scheduled to play a visiting game out of town. We blithely went on our way, and when we arrived, we had only four players – and it takes five for a starting lineup. The opposing team really had its act together: They had booked the court, they came with a full team of players plus referees, timer and stats recorder. All we could do was apologize, give up the game and go home with our heads held low.
That’s when we decided to make some changes and get the tools we needed for proper team management. This was around the year 2000 and, surprisingly, we could find nothing that would meet our sports team management needs. Luckily, we had guys with technical expertise and we decided to build our own system. Now everyone knew the schedule and got notified in case of changes. And most important: Everyone knew who would be attending a practice, a game or a night out.
We realized we had a tiger by the tail with a software program dedicated to managing recreational sports teams. For a few years we tried to keep up with further development and maintenance of the system in our spare time.
By 2007 it had become a full-time job. We pushed on improving the system further and launched to the general public in 2008. We began to get a lot of positive feedback and word-of-mouth advertising from coaches and team leaders and the rest – as they say – is history.
It certainly was gratifying to have built something that is so useful to so many people, but we have no intention of sitting on our laurels. We receive many great suggestions from our users and will continue to work on the program. Once you are using PlayerLineup, we invite you to send us feedback and suggestions of how we can make it even better.
We look forward to counting you among our many satisfied users.
