A club, live in one week.
Five steps, four roles, and about two hours of work spread across the people who already do these jobs. Nothing here replaces a system you already run — the schedule stays where it is, the registration stays where it is. This adds the layer none of them have.
- About two hours total
- No software for families to install
- Works mid-season
01
Name the person who owns it
Club leadership · 15 minutes
One adult owns college placement at the club. Usually the Director of Coaching, sometimes a dedicated college coordinator. Every club that stalls on this stalls here — the software gets bought and nobody is accountable for it, so nothing is entered and the invoice looks like waste in March.
- 01.1Decide who the director is. Not a committee.
- 01.2They sign up at playerlink.me, then we promote that account to director — the password stays theirs and we never see it.
- 01.3They add a second director as a backup, from the Team tab, so a holiday does not stop the club.
- 01.4They fill in the club contact on the Branding tab: name, role and the address a college coach should write to. That address appears on the public club page.
Done when: One named person can sign in at /staff and reach the club console, and a second person can do the same.
02
Put the squads in
Director · 20 minutes
Every squad the club fields, with its real name. The age group and gender are read out of the name, so “U16 Girls” is the whole entry. Do this before anything else, because managers, fixtures and families all attach to a squad.
- 02.1Teams tab, one squad per line. Paste the whole list at once.
- 02.2Upload the crest and set the club colour on the Branding tab.
- 02.3Add the club website, which then links from the club page and every squad page.
Done when: The public club page lists every squad, in club colours, with the crest.
03
Give each squad its manager and its coach
Director · 20 minutes
Two different people, doing two different jobs, and clubs that conflate them regret it. The manager is usually a parent volunteer who handles kick-off times and travel — they get a login. The coach is club staff, and a college coach standing at a showcase needs their name and address on the squad page. That is a field the director fills in, not an account.
- 03.1Managers tab: invite one manager per squad by email. They set their own password and can only ever see their own squad.
- 03.2Teams tab: enter each squad’s coach — name, role and work address. This is published on the squad page.
- 03.3Never enter a volunteer parent’s personal address as the squad coach. If the coach does not want to be published, leave it blank and the club contact carries it.
Done when: Every squad has a manager who can sign in, and a named adult a college coach can email from the squad page.
04
Send the families their link
Director and managers · 10 minutes to send
One link per squad. A family clicks it, creates the account, and the profile arrives already on the right squad, already covered by the club plan, with nothing to type and no code to remember. There is a club-wide link too, where the family picks their squad — use that one on the registration form.
- 04.1Share tab: copy each squad’s link and give it to that squad’s manager.
- 04.2Managers send it to their squad’s group chat. It works better from the manager than from the club.
- 04.3Put the club-wide link on the registration form and in the welcome email, so every new family lands on it from now on without anybody remembering to send it.
- 04.4If a link ends up somewhere it should not be, rotate it. The old one stops working immediately and nothing already created is affected.
Done when: Families are creating profiles that appear on the right squad without any staff action.
05
Fill one squad properly, then leave the rest alone
Director · 30 minutes, once
Pick the age group with the most families already asking about college and get that one squad genuinely complete — film on every profile, the next showcase entered, the roster link sent to two college coaches. One finished squad sells the rest of the club far better than a club-wide email ever will.
- 05.1Enter that squad’s next showcase on the Schedule tab, tagged to the squad, with kick-off times as soon as they are published.
- 05.2Check the Insights tab: it shows which profiles are live and which have film. Chase the empty ones through the manager, not directly.
- 05.3Send the squad’s showcase link to two college coaches who already know the club, and print the handout for the tent.
Done when: One squad has a shareable page carrying the schedule, the roster and the film — and the club has seen a college coach open it.
Then, every week
This is the whole ongoing commitment. If it is bigger than this in practice, something has been set up wrong and we will fix it.
Manager
Five minutes
Kick-off times when the tournament publishes them, and a tap to mark anyone not travelling. The link they already sent updates itself.
Player or parent
Ten minutes
New film after a good weekend, and the recruiting tab: who to chase this week, and the email to send them.
Director
Once a month
Insights: who is live, who has film, who has gone quiet. One message to the managers of the squads that are behind.
What changes for the club
Stated as mechanisms rather than promises. Nobody can guarantee a player gets recruited — what a club can guarantee is that the reasons a player goes unseen stop being administrative.
- 01
A college coach at your tent never leaves without something to open.
The squad link carries the schedule, the field numbers and every player underneath it. The printed handout carries a face and a QR code per player. Neither requires the coach to make an account, and both work on a phone with one bar in the middle of a complex.
- 02
The club stops being the bottleneck for film.
Families upload their own, on their own time, to a page they control. The club is not asked to host video, edit reels, or answer a parent asking where the footage went.
- 03
Nobody goes unseen for an administrative reason.
The Insights tab names the profiles with no film and the ones never published. Those are the players who quietly get missed, and until now no club had a list of them.
- 04
A player who moves on still helps you.
Every profile carries the club name and crest for as long as the family keeps it. A commitment badge on a page a coach opens two years later says where that player came from.
- 05
The families stop asking the director to do it for them.
The recruiting tab gives a family the school list, the chase reminders and the email to send — the work a placement consultant charges thousands for. That is the pressure that lands on a DOC every autumn, and it moves to the people whose job it actually is.
- 06
What a family writes stays theirs.
The club sees whether a page is live and whether it has film. It cannot read which schools a player is chasing, which went quiet, or what any coach wrote about them. That is enforced in the database, and it is why families trust the club enough to use it.
Start with one squad
Not the whole club. Pick the age group with the most families already asking about college, run the five steps on that one squad, and let the other managers see it working before they are asked to do anything.
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