Inside ClubApp Teams: the complete guide to running a team from your phone

Teams are the heart of ClubApp. A team pulls together players, coaches, managers and parents, then runs the whole week — availability, chat, selection, attendance and reminders — from the same app your members already have. Here's a full walkthrough of what it does, and exactly what each person can do.

One team, four kinds of people

The first thing to understand about ClubApp Teams is that what you see depends on your role. The same team page shows different tools to different people:

• Players and members see their teams, set their own availability, use team chat and check in to sessions.
• Parents and guardians manage a child's account — setting availability and getting reminders on the child's behalf.
• Coaches, managers and captains get extra tools to run the team from the app: create events, request availability, approve join requests and pick sides.
• Club admins oversee every team from the dashboard — appointing staff, generating join codes and running reports.

Coaches don't need a laptop or the admin dashboard to run their team. They open the team's page, switch to the Managing view, and their coach tools appear right there in the member app.

Getting players into a team

A team is only useful once the right people are in it. ClubApp gives you three ways to get there, so it works whether a coach is adding twelve juniors or a member is joining themselves:

• Invite link — a coach or manager shares a link; tapping it opens the join screen and adds the person to the team.
• Team code — members open Teams, tap "Have a code?" and enter the code the club gave them.
• Request to join — a member finds the team in Discover and requests to join; a coach approves or declines, and can add a reason the requester sees.

Joining now starts with a clear fork in the road. The join screen shows two big choice cards — Myself or My child — so nobody has to guess which path is theirs. Tap My child and you get a picker of the children already on your account, or the option to add a new one on the spot; you can also add your child to a team straight from the team screen. It takes a parent signing up a junior from a confusing form to two taps.

Adding the same person twice used to be the quiet mess behind every squad list. ClubApp now watches for it: when a new player matches an existing same-name profile, the app offers to link to that person instead of creating a copy. And if duplicates do slip through, team admins get a merge tool to combine the profiles back into one — so the roster stays clean rather than growing a second "J. Smith" every season.

Coaches see pending requests under "Add members" with a badge count, and get notified when someone joins. Club admins can generate both staff invite codes and player join codes from the dashboard, so onboarding a whole squad is a single code away.

Availability that actually gets answered

Every team app can ask "who's in?" The difference is what happens when people don't reply — and where the answers go next.

Events come in three types — Match, Training and Meeting — each with its own calendar colour, and a coach can change an event's type if it's set wrong. Anything that runs on a rhythm can repeat weekly, fortnightly or monthly, and coaches can bulk-edit or bulk-delete a run of events in one go. A "meet" time — say, meet 15 minutes before kick-off — shows on the event, the reminder and the calendar, so players turn up ready, not just on time. There's more on all of this in our guide to managing a team schedule everyone checks.

When a coach creates a training or match, players open the event and tap a response. By default that's Available, Maybe or Unavailable, each with its own colour. The response saves immediately, and the coach sees the breakdown update in real time — who's in, who's out, and who hasn't replied.

For the stragglers, coaches have two nudges built in. They can request availability, which notifies everyone who hasn't answered, then send a follow-up nudge to those still pending. The event even records who requested availability and when it was last nudged, so nobody has to remember.

Changed your mind? Tapping your current response again clears it back to no reply. And once an event has finished, availability locks — you can't retro-actively mark yourself in for last Saturday.

Team chat that does more than talk

Every team has a group chat that all members can see, and it's built for running a team, not just chatting. You can:

• Send photos — pick several at once and they appear as a swipeable gallery.
• Start a DM — tap a name to message that person one-to-one, without a side group chat.
• @mention teammates and #link events — type @, pick a name, and that person gets notified; type # to drop in an event as a tappable card.
• React, reply and quote — press and hold a message to add an emoji, reply, or copy the text; tap a reaction to see exactly who reacted.
• See who's read it — the latest message shows a "Seen by" count you can tap to see who has and hasn't caught up.
• Attach what the team needs to act on — events, polls, volunteer shifts, shop items, raffles and auctions all drop in as cards, and players RSVP or respond from inline buttons without leaving the chat. You can even link club documents as cards.

Coaches get more. Polls update live as people vote, a volunteer shift shows a live "spots filled" bar, and you can pin messages so the important ones don't scroll away. Busy teams can add extra channels — a Social channel, say — to keep the chatter apart from the organising. Coaches, managers and captains also get a separate Team admins channel for staff-only chat, and can remove messages that don't belong. Members never see that admin channel.

Picking sides: the selection board

This is where availability pays off. Because players RSVP in the app, their responses flow straight into the Team Selection board — so selectors are always working from up-to-date availability, not a group chat scroll.

To build a side, a coach picks the team, chooses the match day, and ticks which events seed the pool and which grades are playing. The board then lays out:

• A pool on the left, grouped by availability — In, Maybe, Out and No reply, each card carrying its coloured RSVP dot.
• Grade columns on the right (A Grade, B Grade and so on), each with a running count like 10/11.

Coaches drag players from the pool into a grade, or use a "Move to…" menu. Tap the number badge on a card to assign a jumper number, and resize the player cards to fit more of the squad on screen at once. If you accidentally select someone who marked themselves unavailable, the board flags it in red. Need a one-off ring-in? Add a fill-in guest who isn't on the roster. And if new RSVPs land while you're selecting, "Refresh pool" pulls them in. Picking a near-identical side each week? Copy a previous round's team into a new selection and tweak from there, rather than starting from an empty board.

Match details — opponent, venue, start and meet times, and notes — auto-save as you type, then flow straight into the selection notification, the email, the PDF team sheet and each member's match card, so the details you enter once appear everywhere without re-typing. When the side's done, finalise to lock it (you can reopen if plans change), export a PDF team sheet, and email the selected players — ClubApp only emails the players whose selection actually changed, so nobody gets spammed. You can also "Message team" to start a group chat for a selected grade, and players see a "View selected team" button showing the side by grade, with jumper numbers. For the full walkthrough, see how to pick your team sheet online.

Attendance and check-in

Availability is a plan; attendance is what actually happened. ClubApp tracks it without a clipboard. Admins set up an attendance group — training, competition, meeting or social — as a one-off or a weekly recurring session, with a sign-in window (by default, 30 minutes either side of the session).

Members check in two ways:

• QR code — scan the code at the venue, tap "Check In Now", done.
• Geofence — if the club enables it, just being at the ground within the set radius lets you check in with a tap. No QR needed.

Can't make it? Send an apology with a category — Illness, Work, Personal/Family, Injury, Travel, Weather, Transport or Other — plus a note, and it can be lodged in advance. Every session records who was present, late, absent or apologised, and coaches can also mark people manually.

All of it rolls up into reports the committee will actually use: per-person summaries, session-by-session detail, apology analysis by category, and an at-risk view that flags members below a threshold or on a run of absences — exportable to PDF, Excel or CSV.

Built for families, not just adults with phones

Most community sport is junior sport, and ClubApp is built for the reality that the player might be nine and the phone belongs to Mum or Dad. Under Teams → My children, a parent adds a child by name, date of birth and photo, and records consent.

From there, a parent can RSVP on the child's behalf — and responses show "by Mum" or "by Dad" so the coach knows who replied — and receive all the reminders for that child. Two-parent households are covered: a guardian can invite a second guardian with a shareable code, so both are connected to the same child.

When the child is old enough, the parent taps "Let my child sign in" and the child gets their own login while the parent stays connected. At that point the child controls, per guardian, who sits in the team group chat — turning a guardian off removes them from the chat only; they still see events and can message coaches. It's the difference between an app juniors tolerate and one designed for them.

Notifications everyone controls

A team app is only welcome if it isn't a firehose. In Profile → Team notifications there's a master switch, then a toggle for every kind of alert: event available, availability requested, RSVP reminder, new message, a reaction to your message, event updated, member joined, team news and selection made.

You can also mute an individual team — it still lands in your Alerts inbox, just without the push — and members of many teams can limit alerts to "only my teams". Everyone gets to decide how loud their club is.

Coaches vs club admins: who can do what

Two levels of control keep things both flexible and safe. Coaches, managers and captains run day-to-day team life from the member app — events, availability, chat, selection and attendance. Club admins work from the dashboard and sit above every team: they appoint staff by role, generate join codes, reorder how teams appear to members, customise RSVP options, and can see every team's chat even without being a member.

That reach comes with accountability. The member directory is minimised by default — name, type, groups and status — and opening someone's full record (for an emergency contact, say) is logged in an audit trail with the admin's name and a timestamp. Powerful for the people who need it, private for everyone else.