January To-Do List

I asked my wife, 'if you had to tell folks what they need to do in January to prepare for the fall season, what would you tell them?'  Her answer?  Relax.  There's a lot of wisdom in that!  The fall season is a ton of work, so yeah, this is a good time of year to chill.  But, alas, there are things to do.

The board chair needs to do some basic thinking and planning.  Every year, a decision about the coach is needed.  The temptation is to think that the coach who did last year will do it this year or even be a good fit for this year.  On small home school or private school teams, this can change from year to year.  So the board chair needs to think: what happens if the coach can't come back, what are our options?

The board chair also needs to do a quick review of who will be on the board this year - is there anyone who won't be able to be athletic director, treasurer, secretary or parent representatives.  If one of them looks risky for coming back, what are the options?

Now is a good time to confirm fields to be used.  In our club, we have two fields we use.  This year I had the idea of giving our field contacts a picture of our team with the league trophy.  Those contacts need to know they are part of effort that impacts the lives of kids - make them feel part of the team.  This is a good time to give them that picture.  We have a spring training program that we need a field for, and the spring isn't that far away, so it's a good time to arrange for that field.

Our team is doing an assessment of uniforms - are they in good shape?  Do we need new ones?  What are the options if we do need new ones?  Our uniforms seem to last about 3-4 years, depending on the vendor.  This year our shirts seem to get a lot of snags - time to replace them since they're so badly snagged.

So, yeah, relax!  But there are a couple things you need to start thinking about!

Online - Don't Use Squidoo

Online tools will be important for managing information such as team calendar, documents, registration, information about game locations, etc.  For game location information I wanted an online tool that would allow me to capture information about where a game would be played, where people could eat afterwards, was there restrooms at the field, driving directions, map, address, etc.  The perfect tool seemed to be to use a service called Squidoo, http://www.squidoo.com/.  Very clever tool - you don't need to know how to create a web page, you add modules to a page, then publish.  The idea is that you collect links to other resources and provide some descriptions for the links - this collection of links and content is called a lens.  If you get enough traffic to the lens, then they actually give you money!  I wasn't really interested in the money, just a web tool that was easy to capture this information quickly.

The bad news

I worked hard to setup a lens for game information for my son's basketball team.  Three weeks later, Squidoo locked it and shut it down.  The reason?  I didn't have quality content.  Really?!?!?  I had information about places the team played, did the location provide concessions, how to enter the building, travel time and distance, places to eat, address, etc.  Not quality???  So I lost all that work.

Recommendations and lessons learned:

Don't use Squidoo.  It's not worth the risk of putting effort into this, then loose that work.

Setup a domain name for you team through a service like www.hostway.com.  These services will allow you to point your domain name to any other web site.  So you can give out a domain name for the team to people and switch if the tool you're using changes.

A service similar to Squidoo that I'm trying is www.hubpages.com.  Will let you know how it works.

What ever service you pick, see if the service will allow you to download the content you have authored.  Squidoo allows this.  It's still a very manual effort to cut and paste but is better than nothing.

Did I say don't use Squidoo?