Note to readers: This article should not be treated as medical or expert advice to participate in, or host any activity. Always consult the most up-to-date recommendations of federal, state and local public health officials. Please continue to modify your programming as your local and state regulations change.

Oct 28, 2020

As sports organizers continue to brainstorm safe ways to return to league play, we at OpenSports have seen three interesting models at play, described below. If you’re looking for a quick guide on how to set up Adult pods or Youth pods on OpenSports, read here.

1 —Friend/Teammate Pods with repeating games

First are pods of teammates or friends, affectionately referred to in volleyball as “Volleypods,” meaning an existing group of friends, teammates or classmates gets to play together in a private setting for a set number of weeks on a fixed schedule. …

Many organizers love being able to view, at a glance, who is a brand new attendee at their events! This can be helpful to know, because they may need more instruction or guidance… or perhaps just some extra kindness!It’s easy to do this through the Manage Users or the Check-in tools.

While checking players in, you (or whomever is hosting the event) can view a list of all attendees and see if they are tagged with the new attendee tag. This indicates it’s their very first time registered for an event within your group.

If you want to allow your captains/co-hosts/co-admins/field managers to play for free, there is a very easy way to automatically set that up!

How to assign discounts to co-hosts

On the App

Go to the discount creator tool and set up the discount > toggle on “Specify eligible users” > tap the “Add User” button > type in the name of the group member who you’d like the discount to apply to and tap on Select when their name comes up > Exit the screen, and if you’d like to add more members to this discount, tap on “Add user” again!

You can set up filters for your group, which will allow players to easily filter all of your events by the event type and easily to find exactly what they are looking for!

Sample use cases

• By event type: Let’s say you’d like for players to be able to filter your events in the upcoming event list/calendar views by “Pickup”; “Tournaments”; and “Virtual Games”, you can easily add any of those as tags to your upcoming events.
• By sport: Perhaps you are a sport and social club with multiple sports; you can add filters like “Soccer”; “Volleyball”; and “Flag Football”
• By program: Hockey facilities tend to have a huge variation of programming, such a stick n’puck; public skate; figure skating; programming for just adults and just for kids.. etc. The screen shots below show how an ice complex uses filters for their group! …

Event creators can specify which tickets/how many tickets must be part of an order when they create an event on OpenSports. Let’s say it’s a parent-child event, and you want each parent to be required to purchase a parent ticket AND a child ticket.

When creating an event and entering in ticket details, we’ve added this new checkbox (“Required for Order”):

The event manager will then see the required checkbox reflected like this:

Note to readers: The following advice should not be treated as medical or expert advice on how to legally mitigate liability related to COVID-19 and reopening. Always consult the most up-to-date recommendations of federal, state and local courts and public health officials.

Organizations need to be very careful with return-to-play policies and protocols and organizations could limit their legal exposure/liability by having attestations/symptom checks before every single event. One additional way technology can assist you on the player registration side is by allowing you to send these digital questionnaires to attendees a few hours before the event starts. …

Event Chat

Every event has its own event chat, which, by default, includes all participants who have registered for the event, unless the event creator selects for the event chat to be open to players on the waitlist as well.

Let’s say the first 4 people to join an event start messaging each other in the event chat. What happens when 6 more players join? They CAN see messages that were exchanged prior to them joining!

We are so excited to announce that you can now add a tag for every event and have the discounts apply to only events with that tag!!!

This allows you to limit a discount to specific activities, or specific sets of activities, very easily. It works on the web and app.

Sample use cases

If you are a group that mixes what types of events you offer —let’s say pickup games, tournaments, and virtual games — you can have a unique discount for those different categories of events. Here’s a few examples we can imagine:

• For a volleyball tournament, you might give it a tag like “tournament”, that way the discount only applies to tournaments and not to all events in your…