Hit a home run with Clubspaces

Bay County (Michigan) PONY baseball is a fast-growing league that consists of 12 teams packed with some of Michigan’s most upstanding young athletes. For three years, Bay County PONY has been a champion of Clubspaces, and President Richie Clayton believes that this partnership has made the lives of organizers, players, parents and volunteers easier. With such exciting features as online player registration, instant payment processing, custom team websites and an easy-to-use email communication client, Clubspaces is the baseball management software that does it all.

Winning Formulas from Richie Clayton, President

What drew you to Clubspaces?

Our league was one of the first ones to use Clubspaces when they offered it free to PONY baseball. We just finished our third season with the software. We chose Clubspaces because it was the official PONY choice.

Before Clubspaces, we set aside two Saturdays in March from 10 to 2 and players would have to come in with a birth certificate and would register. Payments weren’t collected then, we waited until they made a team and then the managers were then required to get whatever the player fee was at that time. It put a lot of pressure on the managers.

How did the transition go from your old system to Clubspaces?

Before we had Clubspaces I would sit down and create a small database and we had everybody register that way. During our first year with the software, I entered everybody, all the players, into Clubspaces. In 2010, we made online registration mandatory and I would say we were up to about 91% of people having no problems whatsoever. Credit cards ran smooth. Clubspaces baseball management software worked out really well for us.

What aspects of Clubspaces are you using?

I use Clubspaces to export rosters when they are finished. We use it to manage volunteers and to catalog names and phone numbers of all of our volunteers to create contact lists. This year, we’ve used Clubspaces extensively for mass emailing to players and parents. If we ran into an issue where we lost games, I’d post it on our website, but I’d also send out mass emails from both the player listing and the coach and manager listing so that people knew there was a rain out. You’ll notice on our site that we have our league boundary areas that I linked into Google Maps. I went in and defined where each district is. When new registrants would come to the site, they could see what areas they were in geographically. It has answered an unbelievable amount of questions. This has done a lot for us. We’ve been extremely happy.

How do you feel Clubspaces has benefited your league the most?

Clubspaces online registration did something for us that we hoped for. We used to ask our managers, “How many players are you going to have from your area” and we might get just enough to fill one team. When we went to online registration, we got to a point where we had 55 more players than we thought we had. For us, it’s worked out extremely well.

Late registrants have dropped down to maybe two players this year from last year where we had maybe 30 late players. We found that Clubspaces made it easier because it put revenue into our league that we need. For us, it worked out extremely well.

How much time would you say Clubspaces has saved you?

On registration alone, I know Clubspaces baseball management software has saved us those eight hours we used to use for registration, but it also saved us all the time of getting correct information, putting it together on rosters, into a database or spreadsheet the league can use. That has saved us, easily, another 10 hours. It has reduced the number of league meetings we need to have. It has probably cut registration time in half.

“I’m also region-director for PONY baseball here in the state of Michigan. I’ve been using our site as a stepping stone to show other leagues that they can do this, too.”

– Bay County PONY league President Richie Clayton.

Clubspaces is the Official Online League Management System of PONY Baseball & Softball

Schedule a demo with an Active Network representative to see if Clubspaces can help streamline how you manage your PONY league.