All information on this website is taken directly as excerpts from the project report. As such, figure and table numbers may not correctly align, and some information may be omitted due to formatting constraints. A copy of the complete project report is available upon request using the button above.

About

Introduction

This website and accompanying report serve to outline the specification, design, implementation, testing and evaluation of a web application (web app) that allows grassroots sports clubs to manage their day-to-day operations. It highlights the justification for the project, competitors in the space and how My SportApp is positioned against them.

Problem Definition

Grassroots sports clubs typically do not effectively embrace technology to improve the efficiency of their operations despite their members’ desires. This is primarily due to the cost and complexity of the available systems. An easy-to-use, cost-effective web-based application (web app) has been produced to address the needs of club staff and members, helping to improve the efficiency of their operations and ensure their continued operation into the future.

Scope

The project has built, to a usable state, a web-based application (web app) that can be used by club staff to manage their sports organisations in key areas, such as member/team/staff information, calendar, communications and payments.

At this stage, member/parent accounts were outside of the scope of this project due to time constraints. All functions have been developed to allow their functionality without this component, but in a way that they could be expanded in future if this component was developed (like adding a ‘push notification’ option to the communications module, or allowing members to update their own information.).

Rationale

In the UK alone, there are over 150,000 grassroots sports clubs (UK Parliament, Impey Clilverd Sport Limited, 2020), with over 8 million regular participants (Social Policies and Consumer Protection Sub-Committee, 2011). All of these sports clubs have dedicated volunteers who work to manage the club, organise its events and administrate its operations in their spare time.

It is a well-discussed topic that grassroots sports organisations positively contribute to society and the creation of social capital (Adams, 2012). There are 150,000+ grassroots organisations in the UK, each with an average of 24 volunteers who, in 2013, said they spent 6+ hours each volunteering at the club – this equates to 348 hours per volunteer, per year (Active Together, 2013). Based on the minimum wage in 2013, this equated to £7.9 Billion worth of volunteer hours. Given this and the suggestion that people feel they have less spare time than ever (Imtiaz, 2021), there is a risk that the number of volunteers will decline and these valuable organisations will begin to close. My SportApp has been developed to solve this and provides a way of reducing the amount of hours that are spent managing a club and its various statutory (The Football Association, 2020) and logistical requirements, which then, in turn, can hopefully help to retain volunteers within these organisation and allow them to continue to serve their communities.

My SportApp has been developed as a webapp to allow it to be platform-agnostic. Platform-agnostic software runs on any combination of operating systems and underlying processor architecture (Wright, 2022) which means that My SportApp can be used on a mixture of desktops, laptops, mobile devices and tablets (or, theoretically, any web-enabled device like a Smart TV or Smart Fridge) making it highly convenient for club staff, members and parent/carer to utilise the system at any time that is convenient for them.

The additional benefit of the platform being web-based is that there are no local storage requirements that could prevent installation on devices with limited available storage, nor does it place any responsibility on the end-user to backup or process/secure personal data securely by means of ‘appropriate technical and organisational measures’ (Information Commissioner’s Office, n.d.), freeing them of some GDPR requirements. All data relating to the system is stored, protected and backed up in the cloud by My SportApp.

In recent years, mainly as a result of the lockdowns that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and other academic institutions have embraced mobile apps/websites (Singer, 2021) as a way of managing their operations and engaging with parents/carers in addition to their existing systems for student management.

Given that sports clubs store similar data, have similar safeguarding and child protection requirements and also require parental engagement (in the case of under 18 clubs), it was reasonable to expect that My SportApp would be a success and a worthwhile development, both for the clubs in terms of their operations, but also for parents/carers engaging with the club.

My SportApp is intended to make managing all aspects of a sports organisation more efficient, more accessible and less burdensome for these volunteers.

While other similar systems provide a wealth of features and functionality that cannot be overlooked, they have some issues. Firstly, existing systems, such as SportMember, appear to be overly complex, making them suffer from ‘feature-overload’ (Zhang, et al., 2011), making them difficult to navigate for less tech-savvy users who want a needs-met solution. To address this, My SportApp has been designed with a customisable and user-friendly interface that, in its initial implementation, only covers the necessary features to manage the user’s specific organisation and its payments and ensure compliance, therefore making it accessible to all members of any organisation, regardless of technical ability. As the product matures, it could bring additional modules to enhance the functionality. Still, organisation administrators would always have the option to turn these off if they will not be used, helping to maintain a simple and easy-to-use webapp.

Secondly, existing systems have a relatively high price, between £0.15 (SportMember, n.d.) and £0.25 (SportEasy, n.d.) per member per month plus administrative and percentile transaction fees on payments made via the system. This makes such systems inaccessible on top of their other operational costs (such as FA affiliation, league entry (Cox, 2018)) for most small organisations, especially during a cost-of-living crisis (The Guardian, 2023) where both club staff and members are looking for ways to save money.

In addition, evidence shows that grassroots sports teams, primarily in the youth leagues, plan mostly either via verbal discussion, handwritten notes, or WhatsApp groups. The first two methods are inefficient and can often lead to confusion around dates, times etc. Using WhatsApp as a communication method also has a number of disadvantages, such as:

  • Limited control over who joins the group and proving identity (safeguarding risk).
  • Primarily a chat-focused app with no sport-specific features such as an event calendar.

My SportApp’s communication module addresses these points by providing a unified communications solution that utilises existing data within the My SportApp system.

Project Aim and Objectives

Aim

To develop a webapp, leveraging various technologies and APIs, that can be used by sports organisations to manage their clubs and better engage with members and their families.

Objectives

To ensure that the My SportApp project is successful and that all requirements are satisfied, a list of primary objectives has been constructed that can be referred back to at each milestone in the project to ensure that appropriate progress is being made. These objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART): 

  1. Research and evaluate existing Sports Management Systems, and similar systems in sectors, in combination with the gathered user requirements for My SportApp. 
  2. Research and evaluate available web technologies and methodologies that can be used in My SportApp. 
  3. Develop a functional, device-agnostic web app that satisfies or exceeds the user requirements. 
  4. Thoroughly test the developed solution to ensure functionality, reliability and suitability against the user requirements and other specifications within the project timeframe. 
  5. Evaluate the final product and the project as a whole to identify successes, weaknesses and areas for improvement in the development and project.