SportsEngine vs SportsPlus: Which is a better fit?

Glenn: Hi, my name is Glenn, and I am a social media and sports management expert, and I give SportsEngine a three out of five stars rating. Prior to using SportsEngine, we used probably their biggest competitor, TeamSnap, for all our organization's sports management requirements. We switched over temporarily to SportsEngine, because we wanted to implement some of the additional features such as website access, online services, potential tournament set up as well on the platform. There was a whole host of additional requirements and features that we wanted that SportsEngine could offer us that we weren't satisfied with the previous application, which was TeamSnap. The overall interface of the app for smart devices seemed to be a little bit easier than TeamSnap. The ability to switch to the web platform that directly interfaces with the app was a huge plus for us, because it meant that whatever we did on one was immediately available on the other. It was potentially going to give us a much simpler and smoother transition from one to the other to better manage our athletes, as well as our overall website for our sports organization. The onboarding part of it was pretty easy. We started setting up all the player profiles for our organization's teams, the players and/or their parents were claiming the profiles and setting them up. That part was pretty easy to do. Where it became a bit of a challenge was if there was a problem with somebody's access, whether they needed a different email address or something wasn't quite right. As soon as they claimed the profile as an administrator for our organization's teams, I didn't have the backend capability to make any changes to the important parts that they needed. A lot of parents had tried going to through tech support to get the help that they needed, and it wasn't as easy as it probably could have or should have been. I know that when I spoke to the tech support side of SportsEngine, they said that they intentionally took away some of those privileges from the admins, so that the players and their parents would take more ownership of the profiles, which I guess is not a bad idea in theory, but at the end of the day, it became more of a headache for everybody else. As far as the website part of this whole equation that we did, they did a great job building our website based on our requirements and our guidance. Their onboarding, for me, as the administrator of the website, was pretty easy. Matter of fact, it was a lot easier than I expected it to be. Shortly after being onboarded, I was able to go in and make the changes to webpages, to add webpages, to add photos here and there, and to just generally make the website our own. So it was a pretty good experience in general. Okay. This should be interesting, because my recommendation is, do not use SportsEngine, and I'll explain why. While the software of SportsEngine is pretty good, it's at least as good as its other competitors, such as TeamSnap. The website part of it, very good as well. Their customer service is absolutely horrible. Absolutely horrible. As an analogy for this, a lot of people in the world subscribe to cable television services, where you pick and choose what it is you want to pay for. If the provider has 300 channels and you only want to subscribe to 100 of them, you pay for 100 of them. Pretty simple. With SportsEngine, we paid for them to create the website and to administer the website on the backend for us for a year. I don't remember what the cost for the website build was, and I'm not sure exactly how much we were paying per year for the service, but they kept hitting us with additional fees on top of it, despite saying, no, that's all you're going to pay for the year. They kept shutting our website down, saying that we owed them money for this fee and for that fee. And they were very difficult to get in touch with, to get a human being to answer my questions. The first time I spoke to our supposed customer service rep, they said, "Oh, well, you're not using our online player registration tool." And I said, "Okay, but we don't need that." And they said, "No, you have to use it." I said, "Why do I have to use it, if I'm subscribing to your service? I'm not asking for anything that I'm not paying for. I'm just saying we don't want to use that function." And they said, "Well, if you're not going to use it, it's going to be another $300 per year." So I said, "All right, well, I'll see what we can do about getting our players to start registering online." So that went away. And then six months later, our website was disabled again. They didn't answer any of our emails or phone calls right away. And when we finally did get ahold of somebody, they said, "Oh, well, you're not using our online services to use online payment. None of your players are paying for their fees and their registrations online through our services." And I said, "We don't want to do that. We have it already set up the way that we want it to be. Our players pay our organization, either by check or by Venmo or any other payment method they choose. They don't want to go through the SportsEngine website to do this." And I was told, well, then it's going to be another few hundred dollars of fees for not using our technology. I asked, "What are you talking about?" They said, "Well, we spend a lot of time and energy creating these options for people through our technology. And if people aren't using what we create, then it costs us time and money on the back end of it." And I asked them, "Well, that's kind of silly, because I should be paying for what I'm using, not for what I'm not using. And if I don't want to use those elements of your service, I should not be getting charged extra for them for not using them." So long story short, we ended up canceling our subscription with SportsEngine and we went back to TeamSnap. And I highly don't recommend SportsEngine at all.