A bit of blurb about my site
Who runs Matchdetails.com?
My name is Niz and I am currently Divisional Secretary for the East Berks Youth Football League. Prior to this I was youth football manger for 4 years finishing at U10. I also do a wee bit of web site development using PHP. Mid 2008 I started getting a little overloaded with work and the football management started to take a bit of a back seat. I’d forget to email fixture details out, couldn’t remember who I was playing next, missed parents off of emails. The list was endless. So I decided to use my PHP development expertise and knowledge of SMS gateways to good use and came up with a unique web based service that helps make managing teams and fixtures easier, www.Matchdetails.com.So what is Matchdetails.com all about?
(As I have already said, I used to be a youth footy manager so the rest of this 'blurb' relates to then...) I use my site Matchdetails.com, all the time. Currently, it allows me to manage fixtures, player resting dates and player notifications from one place, well two: the web and my mobile phone via SMS. All of my future fixtures are there, as are my known player resting dates and their contacts (parents at this age).Every Monday the site works out which is my next fixture, who is resting and then sends me an SMS and email reminding me. From that point I can either send the words ‘Match details’ as a text to 86688 to inform all of my players. Or, I can go online and update the next fixture with new information and then send an email or text message from there.
If the game gets cancelled (as I type it is early Feb ’09 so this has happened a lot recently) then I simply text the words ‘Match cancel’ to 86688 and my player’s contacts all get an SMS and email informing them about the cancellation. The same goes for a training cancellation, if this is cancelled I simply text the words ‘Training cancel’ to 86688 and my team gets the notification.
A bit of blurb about the information that we hold about you and your team.
You and your mobile number are at the centre of Matchdetails.com. As the manager of a team you can log in and use many of the site functions, such as adding players, fixtures, contacts and making amendments to each. We only ask for your first and last name and email address as a minimum. The reason we ask for these are simply for addressing you. ‘Hello Chris’ sounds better than ‘Hello user ID 1’. Your email address is used as your log in ID on the basis that it is an id that you will remember. It also allows us to verify who you are and make sure that we can get hold of you if needed.If you want to start using the Matchdetails.com SMS system then you must register your mobile phone number. This number isn’t used for any other purpose than identifying your SMS’ as they come in. Think about it, if we didn’t have it registered how would we know who sent what? It would be chaos!
Moving on from you, your team is next in line. Without your team there are no fixtures. So, it follows that after you have entered information about yourself, you will need to add details about your team. The club name, team name, and age group are some of information that we need. Adding your team’s colours, league registration number and the division or section that you play in, are bits of extra information that can help make your experience of Matchdetails.com better. For example, if like mine, your team is in the East Berks Youth Football league we can use its age group and division to automatically provide a list of opponents for you.
Information we hold about your player.
You only need to enter your player’s name to get things going. There is an option to enter this player’s primary and secondary position, and I am working on the code that will display and use this info. The other optional piece of information is your player’s league registration ID. I say optional, because I plan to use this in the future to generate league score cards for each played fixture, more on that later!Player contacts information
You can have as many contacts for each player as needed, but I may opt to limit this in the future. To use a contact you need to enter their name and at least an email address or mobile phone number. It goes without saying that if you have only added a mobile number, then they will only get text message; email address and they only get emails.Privacy
It isn’t in our interest to pass on contact information about you or your players to third parties. It’s not what we are about. This information is only used to send fixture notices. What we do is add little bits of advertising to the bottom of every text message and email. Income generated from this advertising is used to keep the site going by paying for the operating costs such as server renting and text messages.Advertising
If you are interested in advertising with us or sponsoring text messages send an email to advert@Matchdetails.comThanks for listening
Niz