Announcements
Manage → Announcements emails every team's contact: schedule changes, reminders, or any update the tournament needs to push rather than publish.
Who receives it
The recipients are the contact addresses on the teams in the tournament, plus each club's Club contact email for that club's teams — so a head coach hears about all of the club's teams in one email, and a team with no contact of its own is still reached through its club. You can see the recipient list before sending, which is the moment to notice that eleven teams have no contact email.
Collect contact emails at registration or in your import sheet. Chasing them on the Friday evening is the worst time to discover they are missing.
Short urgent messages
There is no SMS button in the admin app. A short message to every team contact — up to 320 characters — is sent through the AI assistant: ask it to text every team, check the message it proposes, and approve it. Only an Organizer can send one.
For now these messages go out by email, not by text message. They reach the same team contact addresses as an announcement, with a line telling the recipient why it arrived by email, but unlike an announcement they are not pushed to the mobile app. While that is the case, an announcement reaches more people than a short message does — the same inboxes plus the app — so it is usually the better choice. For a same-day schedule change, a weather cancellation or a venue move, do not count on a phone buzzing in someone's pocket: send the announcement, then tell the coaches at the pitch as well.
What to send
The messages that work have the change at the top and the reason after it:
Pitch 3 is closed for the rest of Saturday. Matches 118, 124 and 131 have moved to pitch 5, keeping their original kick-off times. Everything else is unchanged.
The ones that do not work say "the schedule has been updated, please check the website". People do not check the website; they read the message and act on it, or they do not act at all.
Work from the schedule changes list rather than memory — it tells you exactly which matches moved, and a wrong match number in an announcement is worse than no announcement.
Announcements and the public site
An announcement does not change the schedule; it tells people about a change you already made. The order matters:
- Make and publish the change.
- Check the public site shows it.
- Announce it.
Announcing first produces a wave of people looking at a site that still shows the old times.
The mobile app
Followers of a team in the FairGame mobile app get push notifications when that team's matches move or a result comes in — and an announcement you send is pushed to them too. That covers the people who opted in; the email covers everyone else, including the club secretary who forwards it to a WhatsApp group of forty parents.
The compose form shows email-contact coverage beside Send and warns when teams have no email contact. When none of them has one, it says so before you send: the announcement will only appear in the app. Announcements also appear in the app; eligible followers with notifications enabled can receive a push notification. No email contacts are required to publish an app announcement. The recipient count and delivery totals cover email only, not app followers. Open a sent announcement’s subject to read its message, sender and delivery details. Failed email deliveries remain visible in the list.
Published announcements appear on the public results site under Announcements, and the latest two appear on Overview. Parents and spectators can read them without the app or an account.