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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. 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.

SMS​

Tournaments can also send SMS to team contacts. Use it for the small number of messages that genuinely cannot wait for someone to check email — a same-day schedule change, a weather cancellation, a venue move.

Reserve it. An SMS that could have been an email trains people to ignore the next one, and the next one might be the important one.

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:

  1. Make and publish the change.
  2. Check the public site shows it.
  3. 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. That covers the people who opted in; the announcement covers everyone else, including the club secretary who forwards it to a WhatsApp group of forty parents.