SportsEngine - Team management Reviews

For several years there has been an ebb and flow of bugs and glitches in SportsEngine . Feedback has been consistent from several parents of teams I have coached over the years along with my own experience. Team logos switching, disappearing and reappearing. Calendar events simply disappear from iOS calendar despite still being subscribed. Then they reappear randomly. Chat notifications (banner, Lock Screen, bubbles, etc) work intermittently at best. Right now I cannot get 2 of my teams to show up under the chat section. But when I go to the team directly and then to chat from within the team page, I can see the chats. Lately more and more users complain that they get logged out several times a day and have to log in again. Yet if a notification happens to work it still has them logged in. It seems to be getting worse over time as I get more and more negative feedback and even request to use other apps. It’s a shame as the design and integration are actually really nice when it works. It has gotten so bad this year that our manager is trying to contact support to see what we can do. Our travel team often has last minute updates to schedules and locations and they are often missed. This creates stress for families and players and takes away from the overall experience they are meant to have in these sports programs. SportsEngine is supposed to support that positive experience and not take away from it.

SportsEngine was so helpful in so many past seasons but this year it has been nothing but glitches and inconsistencies. Here are the two major issues not just myself, but everyone else I know using SportsEngine, is currently experiencing:

- Not receiving notifications!! This one is pretty major. Two kids on two different teams and one of my teams isn’t using SportsEngine because none of the parents are being notified of Chats this year. The other team is still using it unfortunately and it’s already causing miscommunication and missed message issues. We have all made sure nothing is muted, our phone push notifications are on. It’s ridiculous.

- Phone numbers are not adding / saving properly. My primary phone listed is my own cell- my secondary number is my spouses phone and yet my spouses number is the only one that shows up when someone needs to reach me. I’ve tried changing this multiple times and other moms on the team are having similar issues. We have even tried fixing it on computers and as a last resort I had to take my spouses number off “secondary” so that mine would show as primary. But anytime a secondary is re-added, it re changes what shows as primary on my profile. Very frustrating.

I have only had sports engine since November. I noticed this week that there was an update available and needed as the version I had ws not supported. So, after doing the update I have missed messages and schedule updates. Not sure how they didn’t show up timely, but something happened. My mom said my phone had a notification about a parent meeting. When she brought me the phone I could find no info or notice anywhere about a parent meeting. A couple days later I noticed that there was a parent meeting on the schedule that night, but it wasn’t there when I had looked prior. The update completely wiped out all prior chat messages as well. Now the chat menu at the bottom of the screen doesn’t connect with the team. I can only access the chat when I go into the team and from that menu, select chat. No more shortcut for me. I didn’t have an issue with the previous version, but this one has some glitches for sure! With about 5 or 6 weeks left of the season, wish I could undo the update.

I’m only using SportsEngine because our soccer club bought it for the entire club this year. It’s aweful after using team snap who has this dialed in - it’s like going back to the Stone Age. So basic it’s doesn’t have any attention to detail. For instance if I list arrive time an hour earlier it doesn’t show that anywhere on your linked calendar or in SportsEngine unless you drill down into the notes. The game scoring is awful- that’s all you can do is keep basic score. You can’t keep time, you can’t put which half it is or half time. You can’t say who scored each goal or chat to try and describe the goal - nothing just game in progress. As a mom of three kids who play sports, these live game updates are valuable to me when I can’t be in three places at once. Team snap did all of that and now that I’m stuck with SportsEngine I’m missing out. Hey developers why don’t you download team snap and see ALL the things you need to do to try and catch up to a great sports app that keeps parents connected to our kids games. Team snap even let’s you take pics and live video to share during the game as it’s played. You can do better. Thanks

Waaaaay too slow to switch between functions now. Chats take forever to pull up. Keeps freezing. So much unnecessary background processing it makes my phone hot. Wasn’t an issue just a few months ago. Now also shows a crap-ton of ads which it never did before. These things are probably linked - sharing my data with advertisers now without my consent? Same developer as the lousy Tourney Machine app so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they are selling youth sports out to the highest bidder as well. Screw the users, make money from user fees and advertising cos that’s the cable tv model - get em both ways, leave no pocket unpicked. Make money off the kids and parents, as well as the volunteer run non-profit associations because Comcast doesn’t have enough yet.

Hey, NBC/Comcast/corporate overlord of the day - We already pay for this as a youth athletic association! Stop bombarding our parents with your BS ads! If we wanted to give our parents a lousy app experience we would have signed up with TeamSnap. In fact... maybe we will.

One of the best features is RSVP. Once you get all parents on board, it makes preparing practice plans tons easier when you know how many athletes you’ll have in practice.

One suggestion I’d have is to add a “down” or “next” arrow to the RSVP screen, so I can easily and with one click move from one RSVP screen to the next rather than having to go back, then go to next practice and then click on RSVP (so one click rather than current three clicks). That would make browsing thru RSVP’s for the entire week much quicker and easier. Thanks for your consideration.

Our soccer club started using SportsEngine this year. It’s absolutely terrible. It’s clear that the people developing it have no idea how teams use it. It’s location feature is a mess. I end up putting game locations in other spots so our parents can find the location address and not default to the location website and have to find it there. When i want to make a simple change to game info (uniform, add field number, etc.), even though I click to not notify the team, it does so immediately. This causes way too many unimportant messages to be sent. There are unnecessary privacy features that make it difficult to get contact info for teammates. SportsEngine/program is just a mess. We have a tournament this weekend and i have no faith in my ability to get SportsEngine to do what I need it to do. I am going to personally pay for my team to use TeamSnap again because I dislike SportsEngine so much. I will encourage our club to move back to TS next year. If not, I’ll continue to pay to use TS, since the developers of it clearly understand how their app is used and what their customers want and need.

Only one parent can have an account with access to the kids. It’s the parent that registers the kids. Other parent can’t have their own account and access to kids, other than as a guardian. But the guardian only gets emails and notifications related to kids but won’t get emails and notifications from the league admin. Very frustrating!!!!!! We had initially set up one parent as secondary email address on the account of the parent that registered but secondary email address was not getting any of league admin emails. I was missing all the league admin notifications about key league dates. Half the parents in the league weren’t getting emails either. This is a disaster for the league and a very poorly designed app and website. Very disappointing. I was on with customer service via chat for an hour and could not get this all to work. I defaulted back to adding me as secondary email address with my ex-wife, so we now have to share a login and password to access our kids information.

I work in app development so this may be a little biased but I’ve used TeamSnap until a year ago and it is hands down 1 million times better. I have written into sports engine’s support team more times that I can count. The only thing they tell me is that I should restart SportsEngine and sign in and back out. It’s horrible. And it happens to my entire team so you can’t use that excuse here. Nothing updates when it should, the fact that you can’t bulk upload photos is absolutely absurd. What century do we live in? And the fact that you have to toggle in and out of event rsvp’s 19 times before you can finally get a list that doesn’t say “zero” is beyond my comprehension. How are so many people finding this helpful? It has completely screwed up several of our games because of updates being delayed. I’m done sending my detailed responses with helpful screenshots because it gets me nowhere. Not to mention it’s incredibly slow and I have to force it closed at least 10 times a day.

Me and my sons father have, for four months, been trying to both be able to have SportsEngine in its fully functional form. After I set it up he could not connect his email. Once his email was connected I stoped receiving emails and notifications and my app showed nothing but the schedule of games. I did not have messaging capability, a roster or the ability to rsvp for games. Now, after a coach had to talk with someone from sports engine, I have a filling functioning ap and my sons father has lost all function on his. He now has only a schedule he can’t even rsvp on and no longer gets messages or emails. My son can’t be the only child with two parents who use this ap that it’s this difficult for four people to try to get it set up correctly for both of us. I prefer what we used last year. I only give it two stars bc for the hour I have had a full ap it seems quite useful. Once my sons father is added back though who knows what I will have.

I’m disappointed. SportsEngine used to be better. I know improvements have been made which some of them have been great but whatever you guys did between March and now has made SportsEngine soooooo slow and it often crashes.

There should also be a way for the players especially if they are teens to be able to participate in a monitored chat feature or maybe be able to participate in chat period instead of the parent letting them use their phones or logging in as their parent. I mean it is their team after all, they shouldn’t be considered “fans” of the team.

Notifications don’t exist, I have them all turned on but unless I am constantly opening SportsEngine and looking I miss things. And only time something shows on screen is when my phone is locked, no sound, no vibration, nothing.

SportsEngine works great to organize teams for our 4 active boys. We’ve had 14 active teams at the same time. The last update ruined SportsEngine though. Now it takes literally five minutes to open and switch to the schedule. With our hectic nights, the schedule is the most important, we’re double checking times and locations every few hours. And the Feed seems to be causing major lag. SportsEngine opens and then sits there doing nothing and then flashes and adds the feed icon. Then we can see we have unread chat, click on it, and wait for it to load. Then wait longer and never get the channel to open with the actual chat. The only way we’re seeing chats is in the banner on my phone. Please fix this!

Errors with the message notifications have been present for years now. Updates always say they have fixed the problem but it always returns. It’s either 1) notifications don’t show up when they should and you don’t know there are messages until you open SportsEngine or 2) the notification badge never goes away. Even after you e read all messages. I’ve logged out, deleted/reinstalled SportsEngine , turned phone on and off. Nothing works. Add to it the fact that now I have to sign in nearly every time I open SportsEngine .
The 5 star reviews here are bogus. We have a soccer club with nearly 1,000 players and I ha ent met a single coach or parent who would Recommend SportsEngine. It’s constantly mocked but “it’s cheap”. There is absolutely no way SportsEngine has a legitimate 4.8 star rating. It’s garbage.

When opening SportsEngine it does not update as you would expect a well functioning app to do. If there have been changes to a schedule you have to tap schedule when already looking at the schedule to get it to update. Even if you close SportsEngine and restart it you’re likely looking at an old schedule until tapping the schedule icon again. We learned this the hard way after showing up to a practice that had been rescheduled. We closed SportsEngine rebooted the phone and still saw the old version of a schedule. After hitting the schedule button while already looking at the schedule the schedule updated and the practice disappeared. Very frustrating to plan on a practice and find out we wasted our afternoon because the sports engine app isn’t capable of updating on its own or even having a refresh button.

SportsEngine is very useful but... When selecting whether or not your child will be attending an event you can not revert back to no response. The event attendance is initially set to "no response" with the options of yes, no, or maybe. When navigating SportsEngine sometimes i have accidentally selected no to the event attendance. i want to unselect my response but i can't. Once an initial selection is made i can only change my response. i can not revert back to "no response". This is very frustrating. This has happened multiple times too both me and my wife. This NEEDS to be fixed. This is not a big it is designed into SportsEngine . I am not sure why.

I’ve been using SportsEngine because my hockey program requires it and, simply put, it is awful. I can’t understand why anyone would give this more than one star.

Regularly, SportsEngine will pull up rosters from previous teams thus increasing the likelihood of my accidentally sending updates to the wrong families (and the right families not getting the updates). It constantly takes forever to load. This morning it won’t load and keeps literally crashing. I’ll probably have to delete it and reinstall it and hope that fixes the problem.

Functionality is poor. Options for inviting players to events is not intuitive. (Why not make a button instead of an innocuous text link). If I try to send a message to the team, I either have to keep my message very short or copy and paste a longer message after I input the addressees.

One of my programs gave up on trying to use it because it’s admin interface was too flawed. We went to TeamSnap instead.

My daughters team recently switched from Teamsnap to this app and I am already understanding what sports engine is missing. It would be great if they could work on a few things. 1. Color-code events. It would nice to have the option to make practices and games and events different colors. 2. The ability to add attachments like field maps to an event would also be helpful. We need to send them through the chat instead of having it already linked. 3. The all white color is blinding. Jazz it up a bit. Throw in some grey 😉 While I am still cursing having to change from a system I knew and loved I am sure with a few updates they can be up to speed with their competitors.

I’m a coach for youth sports as well as a weekend softball player. SportsEngine has revolutionized the way I prepare for both sides.

Even as a parent who may have questions about practice or about the sport - SportsEngine makes all that accessible within your team chat.

++ I was originally having trouble with one of my teams that another coach set up for us. I reached out for tech support and easily they were able to locate the issue and solve for us. Great customer service.

I would be definitely using TeamSnap if our class b did require us to use this. I’m a team manager and a parent of a kid on the team. I was given admin access to our team, but it only works from the browser, not SportsEngine (and yes, all the permissions have been set-up correctly). Others in the club have the opposite problem and can only add/edit this from SportsEngine , but not from the website. On top of this, I cannot RSVP for my own child even though I’m a guardian on her account, while other parents on the team can. I reached out to the this app customer support and was told to talk to my club, even though ghey set-up everything correctly. This is going to be a frustrating season!

The ability to add and update games through the mobile is awesome! Quick and easy - my 13 yr old daughter finalized our game on the way out of the parking lot last night AND she added today's tournament game. In updated the game score on the bench and the parents not able to attend the game commented how nice it was to receive the notifications in their phones. Keep up the good work!

I can’t believe how much trouble I’ve had (twice now) trying to get logged into SportsEngine. So ridiculously broken. Just save everyone a ton of trouble and remove the option to login via Facebook. That whole flow is just horrible. Finally got logged in and then when I upgraded my phone I had to burn another hour going through this nonsense again.

That being said, SportsEngine itself is moderately helpful. One request though... Why can’t I add a scheduled even to my calendar? I can’t even copy and paste so I have to manually copy and paste game times and locations into my calendar.

Overall, pretty frustrating.

SportsEngine is a great help until you travel and then come back for the wrong game time! Unless I just can’t figure it out, there is no way to control the time zones (turn off/on in settings) when you travel. We had gone to east coast and thought daughter’s game was at 3:30 (when we looked from east coast). We get back home in central time zone and almost then almost missed the game! Please add something in Settings that allows you to control this yourself. We had several other parents on the team say that this happened to them too! Otherwise a great app!

SportsEngine used for payments by club is terrible . You can only pay based on the set up in the system. The club said they cannot change. Unable to pay more monies based on set up or change date funds are taken. Per the club they are unable to make any changes even administratively . SportsEngine should allow you to place the money you want and then deduct what is still owed . You should be able to make a payment plan as long as all fees are paid by the due date. The processing charges also are crazy. In the world of sending monies for free with so many different apps they should not be charging or if charging nothing more than $1.00.

Good app. It would be a great app if you could have multiple adults (let’s call them parents) tied to one account. As a coach and my wife as the president of the program and team mom, she has my son under her. I’ve tried working with support several times, but have not been able to get this issue resolved.

The other main issue is the coaches ability to communicate with the team. I don’t have the ability to group text the team parents. Email, yes, but not text.

For now, three stars. It has room to get better.

Provide the ability to view who liked the comments or pictures just like any social media source nowadays.

Add a “poll feature” I used to use that all the time with the last team app I had (groupme) we used it to decide uniform color or where to go for a championship celebration. Voting results were anonymous.

Add automatic reminder intervals. So if the game is Sunday at noon...there would be a reminder sent 2hours before or 1 day before or even multiple reminders that can be set up at the time as the original event is inputted.

I down loaded SportsEngine thinking this would help with organizing team events. First SportsEngine wouldn’t let me register it said my email was on file, so I called customer service the person I spoke to said I needed to speak to another person in a different department after being transfer the second person said the first person should have helped me and transferred me back to the first person who again either didn’t know or just didn’t want to help me.
Finally after playing the transfer game because customers don’t matter to them I hung up and down loaded the competitors app. Hire someone who know what’s going on.