Notes from running a club.

What actually breaks a season, and what it takes to fix it — written from inside the operational reality of a travel sports club.

October 25, 2026

What We Shipped This Quarter and Why

Three things went live this quarter: recurring billing, a financial health view for directors, and self-service cancellation requests for season withdrawals.

October 18, 2026

Inside a Stripe Connect Payment Model Built for Clubs, Not Platforms

Does the platform touch our money? No. The platform sees transaction status and metadata — but the money itself moves directly between family and club.

October 11, 2026

How We Built Tryouts, E-Sign, and Payment-Gating as One Flow

A player isn't added to the roster until signature and payment are both true. That's not a UI nicety — it closes the exact gap that causes the most director-facing confusion.

October 4, 2026

The Hidden Admin Tax on Club Directors Nobody Talks About

It never shows up as one big problem — it's a five-minute reconciliation here, a follow-up email there, until it's a second job layered invisibly on top of the one a director thought they took.

September 27, 2026

What "Club-Level" Actually Means (And Why It's Harder Than Team-Level)

Club-level isn't team-level multiplied by the number of teams. Ten instances of a team app don't add up to a club platform any more than ten spreadsheets add up to a database.

September 20, 2026

Team App vs. Club Ops Platform — They're Not the Same Thing

A team app answers "what's my team doing this week." A club platform answers "which of my 200 athletes are unpaid, unplaced, or mid-cancellation, across every team, right now."

September 13, 2026

Registration Chaos: What It Actually Costs a 200-Athlete Club

Four systems, three manual handoffs, per athlete, before a single practice happens. At 200 athletes, that's not a rounding error — it's a standing administrative burden.

September 6, 2026

The Real Cost of Venmo-and-Spreadsheet Payment Tracking

Payment status shouldn't be a research project. When it lives apart from registration, placement, and agreements, "are we square with this family" stops being a lookup and becomes an investigation.

August 30, 2026

Why Tryout Week Breaks Every Club's Spreadsheet

Registration through a form, payment through a link, evaluations in a spreadsheet, offers as PDFs. None of this is a staffing problem — it's a systems problem.