Anyone coaching, playing or working with a sports league knows there is a lot of information to juggle. Schedules for games, practices, rosters, game changes and whole host of other things have to be kept in order and made available to a variety of people.
Everyone has their own system for clearing through the clutter, and a local Kirkland company is hoping to make it a breeze for any team.
Team Cowboy is a sports management site which aims to make managing teams, league and individual players information easier.
Founded in 2007 by Travis Solin, who found he wasn’t getting the service or type of site he wanted for his soccer team. Chris Heffernan joined the team in 2009 after having used the site to help organize teams he belonged to. Four years later hundreds of teams in many countries use the site to help organize their team through the completely free site.
“He (Travis) started the site (because) he wasn’t really getting what he wanted from sites to manage his soccer team so he thought he could do it better and there was a lot of community support,” said Heffernan. “He decided to do it better and offer more features. I got involved in 2009 and been making it bigger and better. The idea of the site is really whatever problem you’re having managing a large group of people to organize that. Right now we have thousands of teams across the globe. There’s a concentration in some of the core sports like soccer and softball, we have just countries all over the globe using it.”
Heffernan, who used to be a member of the Parks Board for the City of Kirkland, said he knew he wanted to get re-involved with a sports related business and found Team Cowboy to be a perfect fit.
Team Cowboy recently announced a partnership with the local store chain Soccer West to co-market their projects.
“Soccer West has five stores in the region that we love having our cards in, we give them ad space so it’s kind of a co-marketing agreement. Also we’re trying to work with them on a deeper level, what kind of promotions we can do, the guys over are terrific. We want to help them grow and they’ll help us grow,” said Heffernan.
With thousands of groups using Team Cowboy, Heffernan said largely people hear of the site by word of mouth, and through online searches.
“When people type in team management or some combination of that, they can find us that way,” he said. “We tend to do partnerships with leagues, we work with GSSL here in Seattle and work with a lot of different leagues across the U.S. Essentially one team will start using it, then another team will start, and it just kind of snowballs from there.”
Despite a lot of users spanning the globe, the duo pride themselves on making sure they add a personal touch to the site.
“Our biggest thing is paying attention to everything the customer wants. Customer service is key for us; privacy and security are all key components,” said Heffernan. “I mean you’re not going to find better customer support. If you send something to the site, we’re really looking to get back to them as soon as possible. Not something that goes into days or whatever, we’re looking at hours.”
One of the biggest things, aside from the customer service that sets Team Cowboy apart from the herd are several of it’s features. An RSVP feature allows users to get online or on the mobile site and reply about an event quickly. There’s also an integrated calendar feature to make busy families lives easier.
“As a matter fact, one of the biggest concerns people have is how to make sure if my kids are on a team, how can I manage that, so we have a merge tool so you can manage your kids across multiple teams,” he said. Heffernan added that he and Solin are working on several other things, scheduled to debut in the next six months, things users have been asking for.
“Certain things we working on that we can’t talk about, but we can say that certain features we’re launching will be fantastic for users who’ve been asking for deeper integration in certain areas,” he said.
In the last year, Heffernan said the site’s growth was around 70 percent.
“We’re very focused and with such a low budget we’re very happy,” said Heffernan. In fact, the site is totally self-funded and done as a labor of love between Solin and Heffernan. While someday they will likely charge for their services, the goal for now is to focus on making it the best product it can be.
To learn more visit the Team Cowboy site.
