GameChanger Reviews

by Coach099

The old GC app is hands down better and easier to use! All I’ve had is trouble with and confusion with this new TM app. When I send questions to GameChanger help I receive no response. This change will cost GC a LOT of customers! I coach high school and summer baseball and my teams will sadly not be using GameChanger anymore (after 8 years) because of how downhill it’s gone and can’t get any help from them. Coaches don’t want players/parents to have access to be able to change their names on the roster. If you have more than one team on your list then good luck finding a specific teams schedule because they’re all lumped in together. It’s been weeks and all my teams still haven’t been moved over to new app. Using new app is slower and take way too long. You can no longer go in and edit game stats like you could in old app. These are just a few things I noticed after one weekend of using the new app! Unfortunately that old GC personal touch, high quality and care is gone now for some reason and I hate to leave but they leave no choice now.

by W.Sansing

Used this app for years and loved it. Switched to team manager since they’re getting rid of this app at some unknown time, and have hated it. There’s things I could do with this app that aren’t capable on team manager. GameChanger constantly is unable to upload the team chat, so players are constantly texting me saying they can’t get the messages to come up. It’s also limited on features. Once you create an event, you can’t edit the type of event but can edit everything else. I had a practice turn into a scrimmage, and had to cancel the practice and create a scrimmage so I could score it. I then had to make everyone rsvp again since it was now a new event. You’re restricted to a yes or no on events. Why not a maybe section and why aren’t you able to add a note to your RSVP. Other apps allow you to add a note so people can add they will be late or have to leave early. So many things can improve and I’m currently looking for a new app after all these years. Very disappointed

by VA Carolyn

When creating an event, I typically have to search for the opponent. In the “old” this app, adding terms would refine your search criteria, with additional terms narrowing your results. In this new this app, the search criteria works counter-intuitively as an ‘or’ (rather than and ‘and’), so if I enter “Virginia Copperheads” I get every team that has either Virginia or Copperheads in their name, and if I add 15U, it adds every team with 15U in their name to my results! And the “Location” filter only helps if you know the town and state that a team is from; this would be much more helpful if you could only enter a state, as many travel teams are from a county or an area, not one town and it’s impossible to guess what town they said they are from. Please fix this functionality. The scoring aspects generally work fine, but this makes the ap very difficult to use!

by Helpmelordalmighty

Fix the search function. It really is terrible. I’m the beginning, the search function seemed to be better than the original game changer but something has changed as time has gone on. Searches seem to populate and list by single word match only. Meaning if I am searching for a team with three words in its name, the results list with all the matches on the first word, then all the matches on the second word, etc. I would expect the search results to render the beat matches on all words searches. Also, if a team has dashes in their name, it throws of the search match and doesn’t always render the result. A really frustrating thing. Other than this, we are loving GameChanger. Really appreciate all that it offers. But, wow. The search function is really not great.

by Nighttimema

Overall has been great for scoring games but two features are just not working with the same ease. 1) can no longer search up other teams and follow their games. Can only do so if your part of the team..that’s a downfall for keeping up with how friends are doin 2) the live stream always turn off around 15 minutes..I’ve done everything to keep it from turning (phone on do not disturb, alerts turned off, connected to WiFi, screen saver off) and yet it still consistently ends around every 15 minutes. Its frustrating as the score keeper to keep going and having to restart it. Our families love the live feature especially now with COVID and limited spectators but the stopping and starting is a real downfall. Ready to try something different to avoid this

by MaliKam26

Downloaded GameChanger due to an email I received as the scorekeeper for my daughter’s team. I told the whole team to convert and it’s been nothing but a headache for them. On the score keeping end, it works the same- so that’s great! But I’ve been told by a few parents that they can’t see the live play by play without a paid subscription. So that’s frustrating. I understand the extras, such as voiceover requiring a subscription- but not just to watch the players at bat and their base running, fielding etc.

One thing I do love about GameChanger is getting notifications for every play my daughter is apart of- that’s a great feature. And although I’m the only scorekeeper and am at the games every time, it’s good to know if by chance I can’t make it- I’d get updates on her plays.

by Disappointedmoneypincher

Overall- it’s very basic. It’s nice to have the ability to quickly alert all of your parents rather than a text thread. Things that need improvement: please add a way to attach items to the notes section of games/practices such as field map pictures!! This is my biggest complaint, because when you try and send a picture via the team message option, the whole picture doesn’t show up and it gets lost within the thread. Sure would be nice to have the field map with the game info section on the calendar!!

I also frequently have trouble with being able to open my message section, so I’ve had to had another parent send messages for me. I’m sure there are other things that need improvement, like some reviewers have mentioned poor update ability between blue sombrero platform on the team page and GameChanger , but I recognize this as a problem and just know not to rely on it. It has potential, but needs some updates, additions, and fine tuning!! I also don’t have experience with other team apps, so I have nothing to compare it to.

by Amy823

Upgraded to this last week and scored our first tournament this weekend. GameChanger crashed multiple times during each game, which I see is a consistent problem. As quick as softball moves I was down two batters counts & balls in play before I could score it… probably looked like a hot mess to any viewers (and was likely inaccurate). I don’t like that you can’t name the chats… or that the “team” chat includes allllll family members linked to a player. Grandma in Kansas doesn’t need to know where we’re going to lunch after a game. Our team logo/photo just disappears. I don’t like that I can’t see a teams roster after the game is scored or that the teams aren’t separate in the game schedule. I didn’t have any issues with the live streaming and received good feedback from our fans. However, paid members should have access to the video afterward, not just admins. I haven’t had issues with messaging. I’m still exploring the different layout and features, but the crashing of GameChanger mid-game is just unacceptable.

by Gmack24

Very easy to use however I think there is plenty room for improvement.
1) Allow members to choose when they get notified of upcoming events. Currently only the coach controls it. However, some like to be notified 1 day or 2 days ahead of time. Some would even like a secondary reminder 1 or 2 hours before event. So that’s limited.
2) Calendars are great to have but this one could be less cluttered. Don’t waste space for days that have no events. Only about 2 events are displayed on the screen. I’d like to see GameChanger just have one line per event so I can see potentially see the entire week ahead. TeamSnap does a good job of this.
3) As a coach it would be nice to see that your message was read or received or acknowledged.
4) back to the calendar for those last minute rainouts would be nice to have a button or buttons to one click canceled or moved to new location which would also send a notification. Now you’d have to send a message to cancel event due to rain but the event still shows on the calendar as active.

by CopperCopperCrimeStopper

From what little I’ve seen on the baseball side of things, GameChanger and the ability to live-stream, score the game and see things happening is OUTSTANDING!!!! That of course having just played with it a little. I also think it’s great that they added the ability to live feed other sports besides baseball and softball and have added several sports, but the only thing lacking is the ability to live score the games. I understand you can’t do a play by play like in baseball but the ability to at least post a score would be great for those grandparents watching the games from afar can see the score live and don’t have to keep asking via text(offline from this app) or on the livestream. Other than that, this app has been doing a great job with adding things and keeping the game alive, especially in these uncertain times of the pandemic and some not being able to attend games. Maybe add that small change and I’d bump up to 4 stars, maybe even 5(rare for me to give 5 stars).

by Lockedout1

GameChanger is Very simple which is good for parents to use. At the same time looks somewhat lower quality compared to other apps just based off of the aesthetics. That said ability to message Through GameChanger but also email or phone call is nice. Sign-up is easy. Calendar is useful but again functionally and aesthetically pretty average. I do not know why it needs to show me every day both as a calendar and as a list. Would be nice to get rid of the extra days on the list except for ones with events. also would be great if you could share pictures and videos in a separate section because I think that’s a very useful addition especially for younger kids where a picture taking seems to be just as important as the game itself. Overall I chose it over the other apps because it simple, easy to sign up, and good for communicating. Despite all that it could be made a whole lot better with some simple changes to make with the calander.

by Tigermd

First season with using this as Team Parent for our soccer team.

Pros:
1. I like the calendar function. Very nice to be able to add the location for games/practices and directly open a navigation app if needed. The weather forecast is a nice touch too.
2. RSVP function is very handy.
3. I like that the kids can also be added. My daughter likes to know who’s coming to the games
4. Automatic reminder notification. Saves some time from using the Remind app before every practice or game.

Cons:
1. Not being able to add additional parents once one has accepted the invite. This makes it awkward when parents are divorced. You have to ask one of them to add the other parent or delete the player and send invites to both.
2. An administrator can’t edit the players photos. I take pictures at the games and have photos of all the players. Yet I can’t add them to their roster profile.
3. It would be nice as admin to be able to set up notifications for when someone RSVPs. I see this more useful for the “no” responses, so you get a notification if someone isn’t coming.
4. Please allow more online editing. Right now I have to do most of it on my phone. I asked for a roster link and couldn’t edit players I’d already added.

Overall, I think GameChanger will be useful but there’s some obvious areas that need to be improved.

by Jess78810609

I spiked this version better today. The graphics and font are cleaner.

We tried to do live from GameChanger today and it kept crashing. I had to keep restarting the live feed, but missed parts of the game since we are sitting right there watching GameChanger to see if it crashed. I saw it was in Beta, which normally means it’s being tested. Do you know when this will more finished?

Also, you cannot add family easily for players that already have family. I click on invite family and it takes me to the players information and will not allow me to add it just tells me I can’t change their Information. We have plenty of people that have a lot of family and we really need to figure out how to get them added. Please fix this as our families depend on watch the games this way when they cannot attend in person.

by Jmfalcon1

A: I’d like to be able to hide or even delete old teams, but I can’t.
B: I recorded a fielder’s choice the other night, the player disappeared from second base, then reappeared on the next base hit to score. We didn’t catch it and it caused a big snafu with the scoring.
C: This is the biggest problem... THE TEAM SEARCH AND OPPONENT SEARCH FUNCTION ARE BASICALLY BROKEN. The GC baseball/softball app had an amazing team search function that allowed me to include city, state, and year. GameChanger pulls up all sorts of wildly irrelevant teams from all across the country and various years. That wouldn’t be an issue if it still found the team I was looking for in the first couple results, but searching “Pirates 8U OK 2020” brought up teams in the first 8 results from TEXAS (#1), 2019 (#4), WISCONSIN (#5), and MASSACHUSETTS (#6). It’s infuriating. I’ve spent several minutes going through this terrible list and still can’t find our opponent🙄

by Good Looking Fella

My Youth Tackle Football, Flag Football, and Cheer programs all use GameChanger. I am the Webmaster for our non profit and GameChanger has been useful. However, there are never ending bugs, very glitchy is many ways. Parents grow frustrated by the lack of updating of calendar from blue sombrero site. I would update the webpage calendar, reimport it on GameChanger and it would take 3-7 days to show up, often never showing up. It is also very limited if you are a league organizer. Once parents accept an invite you can’t edit anything, even as an admin. You can only upload rosters one time from blue sombrero. Once you do, that’s it. You literally can’t make any edits. It’s a shame because the potential for GameChanger is great, but the bugs and glitches make you question wether or not the juice is worth the squeeze.

by Seth_In_the_OC

GameChanger has gotten better over the last year, but it still lags behind others that have been around and new ones that are coming out. A simple request to have a “Maybe” option for RSVPing would be so beneficial. I have been messaging the Customer Service Team over the last year a few times to ask about this and they can’t provide any answer except “That’s a good idea and we will pass it along.”
Also being able to update a “Season” and “Age Level” instead of having to start an entirely new Season would also be highly beneficial.
At least the notifications are now pushing through consistently. About 9 months ago there was a terrible lag. When tapping on notifications from home screen of iPhone, the message wouldn’t show in GameChanger so you had to shut down to be able to see messages. Hopefully Team Manager can develop some updates that bring them up to speed with other similar apps. It would be a shame to have to switch to another app that is actually free which is more advanced and has better features.

by TyJB

They have announced that the original GC will no longer be supported, but they have also left out too many features from the original. For example, you cannot do any research into other teams. It was really nice in GC to be able to search out other teams and view their schedule and results to get a feel for what the team is like. Another example related to the last is the inability to view a replay of a game for a team that I am not a part of. My son and I like to watch his friends’ games sometimes, but we don’t want to be official followers of the team. Yet another example is that there is no web interface anymore. It is so nice on GC to be able to go on your computer and view all the stats, and even download the stats for some of your own analysis. You can still export, but it requires an additional step of emailing the stats to yourself.

Anyway, I would give it 5 stars if they could have kept all the same functionality of the original GC, while simply adding to it with the new functionality of GC Team Manager.

by Marshallucf

GameChanger has been very helpful coaching my kid’s sports teams. Having the calendar, team chat, and rsvp all in one place has been amazing. Looking forward to the “organization” capability recently added as it would be really nice to see other scores in our league, schedule, and potentially standings. Would also hope that staff of one team can watch live streams from their organization without being a “fan” of the other teams as I may want to want some of the other games in my league.

The live steaming has been great for family members that live out of town or just can’t make that game. I wish their was an app for the Apple TV to watch games on the TV without screen mirroring, would give 5 stars for that.

As a coach having stats and spray charts has been great. As well as the ability to watch archived videos. Wish it was easier to deal with leagues that use kid and coach pitch without a complication work around that is difficult to keep up with multiples times each inning.

by Ryan RVA

Love GameChanger — by far the easiest to score a game once you get the hang of it. But there are two issues with the built-in live streaming that need to be addressed:
1) The stream is unstable and stops sometimes on its own. This causes all viewers to lose connection and the stream to have to be restarted by the operator manually, resulting in missed plays from both the live stream and the video recording.
2) GameChanger needs to recognize the type of phone being used for streaming and allow the choice of camera lenses and/or zoom functions. It is using the 1x on my iPhone 12 Pro, but I would want to use the .5x wide angle to get both 1st and 3rd base paths. I believe this is just a function of programming GameChanger to allow a choice of built-in lenses. Please correct this ASAP!

by Martalaaand

Love having everything so organized, it's neat, and user friendly.
When you add your event to calendar, it lets you add location, time, field notes and it even shows you a map as well as the weather of during the event.
Love that I can add multiple teams and sports under the same profile but still separate and organize.
I came across an issue. When adding my kids to an additional team/ sport it created an entire new entry for the child. Making it seam that I had double the same kid. I contacted support and they fixed it right away. Like really right away. Love love GameChanger. I seriously recommend to everyone I talk to now.

by Turloxk Mom

I got a new phone so I have to reset the password I go through the protocol of clicking on forgot password it says it’s going to email me so I eat I get the email I click the link and again it says forgot password you’re going to get it emailed I look in the email I click on the link it tells me forgot password put your email you’ll get a link to get in I checked my email I can click on the link it takes me to forget password I get in and told I’m gonna get an email I get the email and I click on the link I’ve been doing this five times already and is just going in circles! . Where can I all to reset my password!?

by AriF19

Very glitchy. I constantly have to restart GameChanger when it’s acting weird. It was a major pain to get everyone signed up. The group message tab would often sit there and spin and never pull up when I needed to get out a message to the team quickly. The shared pictures is nothing special. It could be cool if it consolidated them into a collage or something. I never could figure out the score keeper thing.

I do like the calendar and RSVP feature. But I wish it would send an automatic RSVP request before each game. Also it would be better if it had some way to show the entire schedule in a condensed table. It would also be cool if it had some way to show a treats assignment and automatically remind the family in charge of treats each week.

by BigDaddyLopez

When trying to initiate a message and/or reply to a thread, GameChanger hangs up. Quite often the four little dot pop up and just spin until you close GameChanger or it crashes on its own. I’ve had parents tell me that they never received my message. I find myself having to switch to regular text messaging. The main purpose of GameChanger is to communicate with the team, so if it can’t do that 100% of the time, what good is it?

GameChanger needs a place to share pictures. I miss this feature from the Shutterfly app; previous partner with AYSO. It would also be nice to have the option of logging into a website from a PC. Especially when you have quite a bit of updating to do, a phone isn’t always the best device to use.

by Emrysx

As a coach and parent, this has been a handy app to use as a scheduling and messaging platform for our team.

Two main issues I’ve run into, one of which is new with the latest version:

1) I’m coach on one day of my kid’s teams. That team imported without issue. I’m a parent on two other child’s teams, and neither of those have been imported from the Blue Sombrero site.

So much for having all of my kid’s schedule in one app! I’m not going to manually enter those and will just use a gmail Calendar.

2) I think someone else mentioned it in another review, but if a parent of a child on a team imports that team, it generates emails to the entire team saying I invited them to join TM.

This is very confusing to other coaches and parents who may not use TM. The only people who should be able to generate such emails are staff for a team. Otherwise a parent unknowingly causes confusion and emails fly around about it.

The sync issue for me has ruined the utility of GameChanger . Not sure if it’s a Blue Sombrero issue or an app issue, but it needs to be fixed ASAP for me to continue using this in the future.

by Jreinke65

Hi. Our team and parents were looking for an app for communication because group texts are limiting. The trouble we are having is that some people joined after a few messages were sent and there does not seem to be a way to delete the previous conversations. Also, it seems strange that once a player accepts the invitation, the team manager cannot make changes to something like a Jersey number. We haven’t even tried to do anything beyond messaging yet, but see room for improvement in GameChanger.

by I Have No Clue X400

could still use some fine tuning.
Parents seem to use the available details with ease this season. But we do have some key areas we’d be interested in seeing before using GameChanger again next season.

1. ROSTER: Many kids use nicknames or have fans that would like to follow the calendar as well - and not as a parent - if GameChanger were to add both options to the initial roster setup portion or even as a function that can be edited later by the players, it would make it much simpler across the board.
2. TEAM PAYMENTS: We have all noticed the lack of payment tracking for our team parents. It would be great to have that added - even as an admin only function - so we’re not using spreadsheets and programs outside of the team app.
3. MESSAGING: Being able to see who’s read messages vs. who hasn’t is also a huge piece that could be added into the message section for coaches sake.
4. CALENDAR: It would help to remove the dates in the calendar that have no events for better use of space as well as for easier search/ general reading purposes. Or use a brighter color for the event dates so they can stand out more.

by FamilyGuy70

I use this to manage two teams simultaneously. I really like how multiple team calendars integrate in one calendar view. I also like how it has simple administrative capabilities and that you can build the roster on a computer. Not sure why the tool tracks RSVPs for parents...I’d like to have control to disable that for parents.

Three issues I’ve found as a team manager:

1. Adding another parent after the player is created. You need to recreate a player profile if an additional parent asked to be added. Really annoying and unnecessarily complicated.

2. There is no feature for game volunteers to sign up for snacks. Need to run a separate SignUpGenius for that. Nuisance to have to keep two tools.

3. There is no aggregation of standing (eg, total number of wins/losses/ties). The scorekeeper feature is very good, but I’d love to see a tally of results.

by Elllasp5

GameChanger has made communication with my team so easy! The only thing I would like to change would be individual conversations. When parents ask me questions it goes to everyone. While this is great because it is usually a question more than one person has, i would like to see a chat room where it is only two people, or staff and the person asking the questions. Other than that I would recommend GameChanger any day!!!

by Gwilli42

There is a lot to love in GameChanger . There are still a lot of little flaws. Too many empty notifications about people entering or leaving a conversation. You have to type in the enter location for each game rather than GameChanger remembering previous locations. Hopefully GameChanger will connect with Game Changer to cut down on redundancies for player info and schedules.
All in all it is still an incredible app.

by Cygirl7576

I love GameChanger. It’s much better than some of the others we’ve used, but there are two things that would make it even better
- Color coding for events (games, practices, tournaments, meetings)
- The ability to delete chats. I have some that I started then didn’t use and our coach started duplicate chats.

These two things would make coordinating the team that much easier!