Our goal at 20Skaters is to make lives simpler for our pickup hockey organizers, saving them time and money each week, while making the experience for their players better.

We started with taking over their weekly game admin work, setting up a game page each week, handling all of their emailing and reminders, collecting sub payments etc. We’ve been working our way towards some of the more interesting and fun features, including the following which are rolling out this week….

Team Selection

At most pickup hockey games, team selection is effectively random and requires ongoing balancing as folks are coming onto the ice. That means that every skater stepping on the ice has to count up the dark and white jerseys to decide which they should be. It’s not complicated but it’s annoying.

Starting this week, organizers can have us pick teams for them. As each skater joins a game, they are assigned to dark or white team. The organizer can adjust and balance the teams behind the scenes if they’d like. When we email our gameday reminder to each skater, we’ll remind them what colour they are wearing today.

For our games that do select teams which span multiple games, we will soon be adding the ability for you to assign a default team to each skater in your lineup.

Hopefully this results in less counting, less balancing, and we can get games started sooner, which means more icetime!

My Scheduled Games

One of our organizers, Tom from Ottawa, recently sent us a wicked list of his dream features. In that list, he mentioned that he bookmarked his upcoming games page and often started from this page. We’ve now added a “My Scheduled Games” link to our main navigation to make this simpler.

Note that for some of our organizers, we’re still generating your game each week so this list could be short.

Attendance Change Notifications

Another one we’ve heard from Tom and others is that they’d like to know when previously accepted skaters decline. Currently we email organizers when a new player chooses to attend your game. We’re expanding that definition so that we will now notify you when the number of attending skaters for your game changes, either up or down.

By the way, if you don’t want these ‘attendance change’ emails at all, we can turn them off for your game.