Link to online registration.
You have probably noticed the green icons on the meet calendar. We have had quite a few meets sign up to use our new online registration system, which had its public debut in the fall and is currently being used at indoor track & field meets around the country. This week we've had several other interested parties, so those meets should be going online this week as well hopefully.
So I wanted to just write a quick little article telling a little bit about it and encouraging any of you on the fence to make your life easier and go with our online registration system!
10 REASONS TO USE OUR SYSTEM!
1) Make your life easy. If you've never used an online registration system for your meet, you don't know what you're missing. Probably the worst thing about putting on a meet is all of the paperwork, communication with coaches, manually entering all the entries in either by typing or hand writing, dealing with checks and keeping track of who paid. It's just a nightmare. Do yourself a favor and even if you don't use our system use one! You won't go back! We even have tri-meets using our system this year!
2) Built by a meet director. Putting on a cross country meet that has as many as 5000 athletes and over 300 teams to worry about is a bear! So when I built this online registration system, I built it for me! I put all of the features in that I wished I had elsewhere. Even though I did online registration in the past, I was still doing paper entry forms, typing coach contact information into a spreadsheet to keep it for reference, keeping another spreadsheet of all the teams and when they paid or how much, doing invoices and receipts for teams who requested them, etc. It was a pain! So starting in the fall with this system I had NONE of that. No system is built like ours from a meet director's perspective.
3) Entry Fee Payment. Our system will calculate how much the team owes and tell them. It will tell them where to send payment or that they can bring it to the meet or you can use PayPal to let them pay you online. And then when you get the check in the mail or through PayPal, all you do is go into our system and just say you got a check for whatever from so-and-so high school. It keeps track of the date you received it and if they were paid in full. It automatically sends the coach an email with a receipt telling them its been received and that they can give to their bookkeeper. It gives you an easy to see list so that you can see in a glance who still owes money.
4) Invoices. Some schools are getting picky and are asking for you to make them invoices to get paid, which can be a huge hassle to have to do. So with our system, when the coach is entering their athletes into the events it tells them how much they owe and allows them to print an invoice right then and there if they need it. No need to bug you.
5) Private Meet? We allow you to set a password on your meet so that only coaches you invite (give them the password) can enter your meet.
6) Cheapest Solution There Is. We are the cheapest online registration system there is. For a meet with 200 athletes our system would cost you $20. For Direct Athletics you'd pay $50 and for CoachO you'd pay $125. You do the math. Our system is 10 cents per athlete with a $20 minimum. So up to 200 athletes is $20, 400 athletes is $40, etc.
7) Roster Database. All of the rosters that teams use to enter meets is tied in with the flrunners.com database. So a first time coach logging in to enter a meet for the first time is likely to find their ENTIRE roster already in the system! Or at least most of it! And when they update their roster to fill in any athletes missing or fix any misspellings, they are helping flrunners.com get a full and complete database at the same time. We've integrated it all.
8) Performance Database. No more fake seed times! If accurate seed times are important to your meet and you are sick of coaches entering bogus times, you are able to lock your meet down if you want to ONLY accept times that are verified by flrunners. Here's how it works, as soon as the coach checks an athlete to enter them in an event it will automatically fill in their seed time and list what meet it happened at. (Saving the coach time of having to type it in also) If you allow it, the coach can then change that seed time to something different--but it will note that the time was overridden by the coach. OR if you don't want to let the coach change the time then it can be locked down where they can't. It's your meet and it's up to you.
9) Helps this site. Sure we make *a little* money from it, but we charge so little that that's not the main purpose... we didn't really do this system to make money. It basically is enough to pay for supporting it. But it helps us by getting coaches signed up to use the system, getting rosters correct, and getting accurate lists of who is going to be in the meet. This let's our features like virtual meet results work well... and down the line we could use it to show live performance lists based on the latest entries to the meet. And I'm sure other things we have yet to think of! But mainly it just gets people in our system and rosters and other data accurate and complete.
10) Easy to Use. I've actually been very pleasantly surprised. I expected to be doing A LOT of support for this system from coaches confused about how to use a new system. Actually, it's been basically non-existant! Statistically only about 3% based on our support calls/emails of the coaches have any problems figuring it out. For a brand new system that none of them had used before until this season! That tells me our system is pretty darn easy and straight forward!!!
There are lots of other reasons to use our system, cool features and benefits. So I hope you will consider using it! If you are interested, please email me at jason@flrunners.com