Field Guide: Sports Coaches

Coaching a sports team requires your personal time both on and off the field — let Basecamp help you with the latter. 🙌🏼

In this guide, we'll offer some examples and tips on how you can use Basecamp to manage the administrative and communication chaos brought on every season.

Jump to:

• Projects
• Templates
• Message Board
• Chat
• Email Forwards
• To-dos
• Docs & Files
• External Doors
• Schedule
• Inviting people to your account
• Notifications

Projects

Projects are the ❤️ of Basecamp. As a coach, you'll likely have three types of projects — one where you'll share with players and their families, another that you'd share with your internal staff/volunteers, and one for just your eyes only.

Here's an example of how our coach's Home page would look:

Projects can be created from scratch or created from a project template. For coaches, you'll likely use the same kind of projects every season. So, you'll want to create some project templates right off the bat. Ready to learn more? Keep reading!

Templates

Templates are perfect for any projects you'd use over and over again — like the projects coach Rob here shares with their players and their families and staff/volunteers. Created a project by mistake? No worries! You can create a template from your project. PHEW!

Here are two project templates the coach created:

Let's open the Teams template to see its setup:

And here's the Staff and Volunteers template setup:

Now that we've taken a peek inside, let's go over the project tools used in the examples above.

Message Board

The Message Board is where you’ll want to post announcements or any important information you’d like folks in the project to know.

In a project template, adding a 'Welcome' post is always a great start — this is where you can introduce yourself, share important information, and even give tips on how they should use your Basecamp.

Here's what the welcome message in the Teams template looks like:

As you can see above, there are few areas that will need to get edited once a project is created from this template, but minutes of your time have already been saved by using this pre-populated Message Board post 🥅

Chat

The Chat is a great tool for folks to chat openly and freely. You can technically add chat lines in the template, but it'll make the most sense to start chatting in the project (created from a template).

Here's how the Chat looks in a project created from the Teams template from the coach's view:

What are those client banners you're seeing in the screenshot above? We'll get into that when discussing the invite process below 😊

In the meantime, let's hope Zoe can rally some parents — teamwork makes the dream work (i.e. take turns sitting in the cold 🥶).

Email Forwards

Email Forwards is another tool that you probably won't populate in the template. Instead, you'll use this in a project when you receive an email that's relevant to, well, the project! You'll just forward the email to your personalized forwarding address and, BOOM! That email is now in the Basecamp project.

Here's an example of an email sent to the coach that was forwarded into the Staff and Volunteers project:

One of the best features of the this Forwards tool is that you can discuss emails with your team — just like coach Rob did above. Then, My there, can reply to Zoe right from Basecamp with an update like this:

That reply from My will be sent to Zoe via email. Is it really that easy? Yep!

To-dos

The To-do tool will likely get more of a workout in the Staff and Volunteers project since that's used to make sure the league runs smoothly/as planned — a task is created, assigned, and marked as complete.

To-dos for staff and volunteers won't likely change every season, so you'll definitely want to add those to your project template. Here's an example from the Staff and Volunteers template:

Most likely, you won't be assigning to-dos for players families in a Teams project to complete. But! It's a great tool to use when coordinating those post game snacks!

Docs & Files

The Docs & Files tool is pretty self-explanatory — this is where you can upload files, embed videos, or create documents that will be useful for the folks in your projects.

Here's how that tool looks in the Teams template:

And how it looks in the Staff and Volunteer templates:

External Doors

When you need access another online service related to your work, you can add a Door to your project.

Both template examples have Doors that open to different services. In the Teams project, two doors were added — one for players and their families to purchase gear from the team store and another for the coach and the staff to use to keep track of signed/submitted forms and waivers:

Don't worry, the players and families will only see the 'Team Store' door when they access their project. This is because they were invited as Clients and the "Family forms/waiver list" will be marked as 'private' so only the coach and other staff members in the project will see that Door. We'll get into that more below.

Schedule

The Schedule tool in Basecamp will automatically pull all dated to-dos in the project, and you’ll have the option to also add any events relevant to the project as well.

You can also set the template up so that you have two Schedules in a project like coach Rob did in the Staff and Volunteers project — one for dated to-dos and the other for the practice and game days (events only):

Inviting people to your account

When inviting new users to your account, you'll want to think about what kinds of permissions they should have in your account — will you need to keep some project items private from them, should they be able to create new projects without your knowledge, will they ever need to be an Administrator or co-owner on the account? These are just a few things to consider.

There are three different user types in Basecamp: an Employee, an Outside Collaborator, and Client:

You can read more about the different user permissions here: https://3.basecamp-help.com/article/75-permissions

In the examples used in this field guide, the coach invited players and their families as Clients, the assistant coach as an Employee, and our volunteers as Outside Collaborators. Here's how those users are organized in the "Add/remove people or change their access" page in Adminland:

The Forest Park Soccer Teams, Players and Families, and Volunteers sections you're seeing there are the names of the companies the users were added to.

The first company you see on that page will always be the name of your account's primary company. Users added as Employees (aka 'Someone who works at' option) will be automatically added to this primary company.

The Players and Families section is the name of the company the coach created for the players and their families. The coach decided to invite all of these people to the account as Clients. Why? It's because this user type has the most restricted access and the coach can control exactly what they see when they log into the account.

For example, Zoe is a parent and does not need to see who still needs to sign off on the required waivers, so the coach made sure to keep that specific Door private to the Employees and Outside Collaborators. Here's what Zoe (and all other Clients added to the project) will see when they access the project:

And what the Employee and Outside Collaborators will see (they see everything!):

More on working with Client users here: https://3.basecamp-help.com/category/115-working-with-clients

Lastly, the Volunteers section is another company the coach created for the people who offered to volunteer for the season. Coach Rob added them as Outside Collaborators because he wanted these folks to see everything in the projects they've been added to (as shown in the screenshot directly above), but not to have the option to create new projects without his knowledge. Sorry Min and Teddy, if you want to create your own projects, you can sign up for your own account here 😁: https://basecamp.com/signup

Notifications

In Basecamp, you'll always receive notifications in your Hey! menu (unless you've turned on Focus Mode). When something new has happened in the projects you're a part of, you'll see an orange badge at the top of the Hey! menu like this:

You can also set up push notifications for specific project updates — you can get them via email (this setting will be on by default), banners and/or alerts in your browser or desktop app (Windows and Mac), and on your phone or tablet.

And! You can decide what kinds of updates will send you push notifications — Everything (messages, comments, to-do assignments, events, etc.) or Only Pings and @mentions. You're in control here!

More on notifications here: https://3.basecamp-help.com/article/86-how-notifications-work

That's a wrap for now! We hope this guide helps you save time so you can focus on getting your teams to the playoffs 🤞. And if you need any assistance with Basecamp, you can check our our learning center, help pages, or send us a note at Support. Happy Basecamping!