Okay, so you know I’ve been coaching my daughter’s U12 soccer team, right? And this year, they’re playing in the Cornerstone league. Figuring out the game schedule was a bit of a mess, so I thought I’d share how I tackled it. Trust me, it’s not as straightforward as you might think.
First thing I did was hit up the Cornerstone website. Man, their site’s navigation is something else. I swear, I spent a good hour just trying to find where they posted the official schedules. Eventually, I found it buried under some obscure “Documents” section. Seriously, who designs these things?
Once I downloaded the schedule, it was this massive PDF file, you know, the kind that’s clearly been scanned from a printout. Each team’s schedule was spread across multiple pages. Not exactly user-friendly.
So, step one: copy all that data and throw it into a Google Sheet. I created columns for date, time, opponent, location, and field number. Tedious? Absolutely. But it’s gotta get done.
Then came the fun part: cleaning the data. The PDF had all sorts of weird formatting issues. Dates were in different formats, locations were abbreviated differently, and the opponent names… let’s just say there were a few typos. I spent another hour or so just standardizing everything.
Next, I added a column for “Home/Away.” I had to manually go through each game and figure out if we were hosting or traveling. This was important because I needed to let the parents know where the games were.
After that, I created a separate sheet just for our team’s schedule. I used the `FILTER` function in Google Sheets to pull out only the rows that matched our team name. This made it way easier to share just our games with the parents.
Sharing is caring, right? I formatted the sheet to be a bit more readable and then shared it with the team parents. I made sure they only had “view” access, because you know how some parents can be when they think they know better than the coach!
But wait, there’s more! Some of the parents wanted a calendar integration. No problem! I used the “Publish to the web” feature in Google Sheets to generate an iCal URL. Then, they could subscribe to the calendar in their Google Calendar, Outlook, or whatever else they used. BOOM! Automatic updates whenever the schedule changed.
- Tip #1: Double-check everything! Seriously, I found a few errors even after I thought I was done.
- Tip #2: Communicate clearly with the parents. Let them know how to access the schedule and how to get updates.
A few unexpected things to consider
You might think you’re done after all of that, but you aren’t. Fields change, refs don’t show up, and parents complain about game times. Roll with the punches!
All in all, it was a bit of a pain, but having a clear and organized schedule made a huge difference. Plus, the parents were happy, which is always a win. Hope this helps if you ever find yourself in a similar situation!
