Full disclosure: I build Tennis League Toolkit, a competing product. This is my opinion and personal experience.
Tennis League Toolkit started off as a side project that I set aside due to competing priorities, notably tennis and what I have to do to pay for tennis. That changed when, one day, I received an e-mail from MatchTime.
Ayman,
A captain in your USTA league just set up their team on MatchTime. Their players are already submitting availability for the first match. Their schedule is imported. Their roster is loaded.
Meanwhile, you're about to start another season of group texts, email chains, and chasing people down for availability.
Your first season on MatchTime is free.
No credit card. No commitment.
...
Initially and irrationally, this pissed me off. Thinking about it, it still pisses me off - but now I can be rational about it. Let's break down why.
Condescending messaging
A lot of the messaging here, to me, amounts to being told I'm living in the stone age and a fool for not being on their technology. I'll pull some snippets from their three-email series and provide my thoughts on them.
Meanwhile, you're about to start another season of group texts, email chains, and chasing people down for availability.
Yes, email chains are annoying - I wouldn't recommend them over group texts. Group texts aren't that bad, though. If your team has any personality, they're often fun! Use them to hype the team up, celebrate the wins, trash talk your opponents.
While you're chasing availability by text, they're looking at a dashboard. Green means in. Red means out. Gray means hasn't responded — and MatchTime is already nudging those people automatically.
Your teammate is not responsive to your personal messages on conventional platforms (text, email). These are platforms people use every day to live their life. You expect them to pay attention to a dashboard or automated emails? They've already internalized a filter for noise and unfortunately tennis is getting caught by it, an app is not going to fix nor bypass that.
While you're emailing the team from your personal account, they're using built-in team email. No managing distribution lists. No “reply all” disasters. Captains send over 500,000 team emails per month through MatchTime.
If you have personally been involved in a tennis league captaining "reply all" disaster, please reach out to us. I am skeptical such a thing exists but would love to learn if you had such an experience.
We're experimenting with built-in team emails at Tennis League Toolkit, but it does feel like an odd overhead for league captains and players. Tennis teams should be personal, to some degree. The more e-mails you send (say, 500,000?), the more likely the team feels transactional. On top of it, the more likely emails are to be ignored.
While you're building a lineup from memory, they're seeing NTRP ratings. Every player's rating, right there in the lineup builder.
Condolences to those suffering from not being able to remember their player's NTRP ratings. If you truly have trouble retaining that information, MatchTime probably will benefit you. Or, just a better spreadsheet.
YOUR OPPONENT'S CAPTAIN IS READY. ARE YOU?
Really, we're going for FOMO? We care about winning matches, not paying extra money to overoptimize for not being personally involved as a captain. As long as our team is winning on the court, I couldn't care less (well - I am writing this blog post, so unfortunately I do appear to care).
While you're manually entering scores after the match, they're importing them from USTA. Two clicks. Done. Standings update automatically.
Someone has to enter the scores - there's no importing from USTA without someone having submitted those scores. They don't magically appear in USTA. Technically speaking - you can enter scores in USTA with two clicks - or less (just use your entire keyboard, including tab and enter keys.) This feels like some elaborate wordsmithing - because yes, if I am entering scores, then someone else can import them. But if both of us are on MatchTime - who's entering the scores in the first place?
Do captains or USTA know about this?
Captains are using this software to make their captaining lives easier. Most captains I've met are empathetic to fellow captains and what they have to deal with on top of leading busy lives. I find it hard to believe that any captain would opt-in to MatchTime marketing itself to opposing captains in their league. But maybe that's the case, and if you're willing to admit that you opted into this, please reach out to us. We will edit this blog post with your response. Also let us know if you were never asked to opt into this.
MatchTime is an "Official USTA Connect Partner," per the marketing e-mail they sent me. Me and another captain received marketing about a captain in the same USTA league - which raises a question for me about how an official partner is permitted to use league information this way.
Tennis League Toolkit's approach
Ultimately, this led to me moving forward with Tennis League Toolkit to be everything Match Time is not. I have to acknowledge I did make a few points that work against adopting Tennis League Toolkit, but we can live with the fact that our software isn't worth it for everyone. MatchTime, on the other hand, appears to be messaging that those who aren't on MatchTime aren't ready for league tennis.
Before I wrap up this post, I want to highlight how Tennis League Toolkit approaches captaining differently from how it appears MatchTime does.
Don't force people onto yet another platform
Your players are already using e-mail, text messages, WhatsApp, and the like. Let's meet them where they are. We all have busy lives outside of tennis (well, some of us), don't add another platform your players have to onboard onto. Are spreadsheets really that bad? Especially when many people already have Google accounts and have use Google Sheets before?
We're here to play tennis. We're here to decompress. We're here to be active and clear our minds from the bloat of our everyday lives. And we ask our players to add a new app, with its own messaging system, dashboards, and whatnot onto that?
I see the irony here. Tennis League Toolkit has a player portal. Okay, yeah, our defense is that players only need to go in there to get set up for the league. Make sure they're registered for your club and your team, and set their availability. Ideally that's the last time they go through our player portal and everything to follow meets them where they already are.
We may eat our words one day and build an app. We'll think long and hard and make sure there's a good reason behind it before we do.
Don't use cheap marketing
We won't be as bold as to straight up market ourselves to your opposing captains. We may send transactional emails to other captains (e.g. "Let us know what courts the match will take place") with Tennis League Toolkit branding, but even that feels sketchy.
Ideally, the product will speak for itself. Captains will recommend us to other captains, and non-captain players will like the product enough to use it for their own teams. This is all idealistic, obviously.
Don't pretend we know better
If what you use works, that's awesome. League tennis is already expensive. Keep doing what you're doing. Your players appreciate you for organizing, and your opposing captains appreciate you for not defaulting lines (and even when you have to default a line, we all understand that it happens.)
Tennis League Toolkit offers some ideas on how to streamline captaining, but the net benefit is marginal. It's here if you want it, but we're not going to pretend you need it.