Why I Built FieldSlate

Like a lot of parents, we couldn't plan anything. Swim lessons, after-school activities, a weekend away. All of it had to wait until we knew when baseball was, and the schedule always came out the week of our first games.

Last year I joined the board of the league my kids play in and I coach for. I thought this would mean I got the schedule sooner. I was mistaken.

What I found out as Player Agent was how the schedule actually got made. It was too complicated on spreadsheets. Our scheduler had to remember to send out every change to the whole league. There were multiple "active" schedules going at the same time, so nobody knew which one was real. Games got missed. Pick a problem and it happened.

We lost three games to rainouts that never got rescheduled. Nobody decided to cancel them. They were just forgotten. That's three Saturdays those kids didn't play because the rainout was sitting in somebody's head instead of in a system.

I figured we were just bad at this, so I started asking around. Other leagues told me the same stories with different names on them. We weren't an outlier. This was normal. That's when I started building FieldSlate.

This fall my league built schedules for 54 teams and over 280 games in a day. Last year the same work took over a month. When we added another team, we regenerated the whole schedule in less than a minute. Before, that would have been days of redoing it by hand. We posted our fall schedule 22 days before the first game. Last year, families found out the week of. And with a few clicks it exported into Sports Connect, which is what feeds GameChanger, so nobody had to retype a single game.

FieldSlate isn't trying to run your whole league. It doesn't do registration, it doesn't take payments, and it isn't a website. What it does is the season. Fields, divisions, interleague, umpires, rainouts, brackets. The part that eats your nights.

When we're all volunteers building these things around kids and work, we don't have the time to spend remaking the wheel. I built this because I wanted an easier way, a more efficient way, something that would make parents' lives easier. I still coach, I'm still on the board, and my league is still running on it, so it will only get better from here.

I hope you'll give it a chance to show you how easy scheduling can be.

FieldSlate is season scheduling software for youth leagues. Field conflict detection, interleague coordination, umpire assignments, and playoff brackets. Free to try at thefieldslate.com.