The player tracking system is a WordPress plugin for sports clubs which allows users to administer a database of sports club members. Frequently Trainers and Coaches in sports clubs are parents of players who volunteer for a year at a time and therefore have no easy oversight of a player’s history with the club. This history can be relevant for example for player positions, medical things to keep in mind, disciplinary actions taken in the past or simply notes about players by former trainers. The tracking system is composed of one fully functional free plugin as well as a few paid plugins which add extra functionality. This gives club members the opportunity to contribute to the free plugin as well as earning a little bit of compensation for making commercial plugins. The commercial plugins require the free plugin to run.
Free Plugin
The free plugin creates some forms for people to sign up to WordPress. This uses the standard WordPress user functionality. It also creates an administrative backend which allows the site administrator to add certain ‘roles’ to WordPress users. Standard roles are:
- Player
- Trainer
- Coach
- Scout
- Technical Staff
- Coordinator
- SVS Admin
Furthermore, the plugin backend lets people with the role SVS Admin create ‘Teams’ and identifying information for the club itself, as well as the language settings for the plugin which will make all the roles specific to your language region.
Every WordPress user that’s marked as a Tracker user also gets some unique new fields in their user information. These are mostly for specific identification purposes as well as the ‘Team’ somebody belongs to. Tracker users may belong to 0, 1 or more ‘Teams’.
Planning Plugin
When we already have a full tracking database for the club with all the players, coaches and trainers assigned to teams, it may become convenient for the club to do match planning using the Tracking plugin as well. Therefore, this commercial plugin provides the Technical Staff with the:
- ‘Game’ object
- ‘Club’ object
- ‘Field’ object.
Additionally, a role of ‘Referee’ will become available with this plugin.
Using these, the Technical Staff can add basic information about other clubs to the database and add placeholder Teams for this club. Using this information as well as the club’s own Team information an SVS Admin can then create Games of the local Team vs. the other club’s Team while assigning a Referee to the game.
When creating a Game, the SVS Admin can then send notifications to the Team and the Referee. If a Game is cancelled or modified after this there will also be an opportunity to send out notifications through email to the Team and the Referee.
On sending out notifications through email, a hyperlink will be included in the email for the Team members and the Referee to acknowledge they will either be there or not be there. This way, the Trainer and Coach always have up to date information. The Planning plugin can also be configured to send an automated notification to the Team a fixed amount of days before the Game.
Requires: Free Plugin
Joint Club Plugin
In the Planning plugin we can add other Clubs and ‘placeholders’ for the other Club’s teams. With the Joint Club Plugin we can make Clubs’ Planning modules talk to one another. This of course requires the other Club to have the Joint Club Plugin as well! Both Clubs also require the Planning Plugin as the Joint Club Plugin requires it.
When the Joint Club Plugin is installed on both Club’s sites, the other Clubs added by the Planning Plugin get extra fields which define the URL, username and password for the other Clubs. Using this URL/username/password, ‘our’ site can connect to ‘their’ site and ask questions such as:
- What is your identification information? (so we know address, contact persons etc)
- What are your Team names? (so we can replace our placeholders with the actual information of ‘their’ Club)
Additionally, Joint Club Plugin can send simple messages to ‘their’ site saying such things as:
- Game XYZ is planned/modified/cancelled, Info (…..)
‘Their’ Joint Club Plugin can then decide to notify for example the Technical Staff of a change or even let ‘their’ entire Team know right away.
Requires: Free Plugin, Planning Plugin
Financial Administration Plugin
The Financial Administration Plugin adds a few private fields to every Tracker user. These fields are:
- Contribution paid?
- Bank
- Account Number
Keeping track of financial administration and the visibility thereof is a complex matter which frequently involves a lot of communication so the specs for the Financial Administration Plugin will evolve strongly as we go. Essentially the functionality will involve sending out reminders to players and eventually sending out notices to Trainers and Coaches when somebody becomes delinquent of payment.
Also fines or compensations can be added.
