Vincent Collins’ Weblog

I recently joined the board of our small town youth sports association and I have set the site up using WordPress, which allows multiple users to contribute with control over permission level. Everyone is happy.

However, when it comes to actually managing the sports, teams, coaches, players and registration as well as sending emails to all or a sub-set of players, I have not found any tool that seems to do it well. I have to be honest however, I usually search for ten minutes and grow frustrated if nothing stands out quickly and just decide to build it myself. I did find a few sites offering this service for a monthly fee and some with a per user fee but we are on a shoe-string budget and I want a tool I can install on my server and manage/modify from there. Preferably it should be written in ColdFusion

Thus, I quickly put together the following CF + SQL Server application in a couple of days:

Users Table (board members and delegates)
User Role (read only, read/write, admin)
Player Table (all players of all sports, their address, DOB, Parents/Guardians, phone number(s), email(s) etc.)
Log Table (logs all actions such as updates, emails sent etc)

Currently the tool allows you to manage users, players, as well as send email announcements to all players and users that have not opted out. I’m also thinking of adding things like associated seasons, sports, coaches, and fee management. Also maybe a Board Task List. I’m wondering if there is a need for such a tool by others out there. My thoughts are to set it up on RIAForge as an open source tool. What do you think?

Also, if you know of a CF tool already out there that does this, I’d love to hear from you.