First of all, I'd like to apologize for the clickbait title. I'd like to consider it a rare act of earnesty to admit when people should adopt your product, and if this title drew you in - then that means I'm not that far off. If this was an annoying way to draw you in to the blog post, please let us know at [email protected].
As much as we'd like to think we've built an awesome product that makes everyone on your team's life easier, sometimes it can make managing your team worse. Here are some reasons why you should reconsider adopting Tennis League Toolkit.
You're in the middle of a season
Sure, we offer easily-accessible player portals for your players to change their availabilities and see their upcoming matches. But if you started the season off with a Google Sheet and then decide to move your team onto our software midway, there is no way that ends without a hitch. Our players have lives and just want to play tennis every once in a while. All they need to know is when they're playing - you teach them to do it once, and many of them are checked out until their next match. If you introduce a new portal for players to check their availability, many of your players won't realize until it's too late. Take it from the developers, who tried this very thing and had a player miss a match because they were looking at an outdated Google Sheet before we moved over to Tennis League Toolkit.
You're playing against one of Ayman's teams in your leagues
I promise you, our purpose in building this app wasn't to get insider knowledge on your team's lineups and roster. We would never maliciously peek into your data to get a competitive advantage, however we cannot guarantee that we will never see it. When we develop features or fix bugs, we need the ability to look into existing data and user behaviors. We're fellow captains too - so it may be a conflict of interest for you to be using the software your opposing captain is operating. I will offer this as a consolation if you decide to proceed anyways - if you play any of my teams, I'll let you decide the order of my lines any time we play.
You have a low tolerance of bugs
Right now, it's just one person maintaining this software. There may be bugs and things may function as clean as we hope they would. You're captaining a tennis league, voluntarily, why should you have to put up with bad software as well? I believe we will get to a point where we can put captaining on autopilot - but we are early and we don't want to oversell yourselfs just yet. It's understandable if you don't want to be a part of the growing pains. We'd rather you try us out when we're mature than lose you as a potential user forever because you tried us too early.
You have your own system, and it works
This product was built by an individual's perception of what made captaining hard, and how to make it easier. You may have been captaining for 3+ years, with your own system (spreadsheets, notebooks, or even just muscle memory). That's awesome - this product isn't for you. As much as we'd like to think our software is seamless to adopt, moving onto someone else's mental model of how to captain is sometimes simply not worth the effort. We have to accept that, and also commend you on running your team(s) so well. We'd love to hear how you do it, and how we can make it easier for newer captains. If you don't mind sharing some of your secret sauce, please drop us a line at [email protected].