Team RosterBot has challenged Team CFOX to a charity game at Ice Sports North Shore, this coming Thursday January 10th.  Puck drops at 7:00PM.  Whether you want to come to support CFOX, to check out our new uniforms, or are scouting us prior to the Apex tourney, please bring an item for donation to the Food Bank and/or make a donation to Vancouver Children’s Hospital.

Our roster for the game is as follows:

The best way to play this game, regardless of conditions, is outdoors in Canada’s great alpine wilderness.  We’ll be doing exactly that this coming January 24-27 at the annual Apex Mountain Hockey Tournament.  It’s on an outdoor rink at the base of one of Western Canada’s most awesome ski resorts.

Our current roster is as follows:

Here are some photos from past tourneys @ Apex Mountain:

One of the great features of RosterBot from the very beginning has been the ability to subscribe to your team’s calendar automagically.  This means that, when you do it properly, you can have new Events from each team automatically appear in your favourite calendaring app. This is especially exciting now that more people are using calendar sync tools like iCloud… because it means when you subscribe to a Calendar service on your computer, the events actually show up on your iPhone, iPad, etc.  (Yes we are Mac bigots!).

Here’s how to do it properly on OSX (on your Mac):

First you’ll notice that on your Team Dashboard or Events page there’s a big button in the top right-hand side that looks like this.  If you click on this, it’ll download an .ICS file that you can load into your calendar app, such as Outlook or iCal.  It will instantly copy all your upcoming events into your calendar, but it only does this once. That’s cool.. but that’s not as cool as what happens when you CTRL-CLICK on the icon.  On a Windows machine, this is known as a Right-Click; on a Mac, holding down CTRL while clicking brings up the following menu:

Instead of downloading the .ICS file, you are now copying the actual location (URL) of your calendar feed for that team.  This is important, because as new events are added or existing events are changed, this automatically becomes available at that feed. Your calendaring software checks that URL periodically and updates your calendar as the schedule changes completely automatically.  That’s veryuseful. So, having copied your URL you need to pop over to your Calendaring software (in my case that’s iCal on the Mac) and locate the function that enables you to subscribe to calendars over the internet.  Here’s how it looks on my Mac:

… and once there you just need to paste the URL you just copied, like so:

… and your Calendaring software will ask you some more stuff about your subscription.  In this case I just gave it a name and made sure that it was saved to my iCloud account and not just my local Mac:

… otherwise the defaults were good for me (OK, I made the colour orange!).  Once that’s done and you hit “OK” then you should see the team name appear on your list of calendars on the left-hand side of the window, like so:

You will also see your upcoming events from RosterBot, and those will update automatically from here on in.  Nice trick, eh?

Note that your calendar feed, even though it’s for a team, is unique to every player.

So don’t go sharing that URL with other folks otherwise things might get complicated for you down the road when we make further enhancements to this feature…

If you manage a hockey team (we promise not to use hockey as an example always) you can make this feature as discrete as you wish.  For example, you can create two classes of player: “Skater” and “Goalie”; you can define “Forward”, “Defense”, and “Goalie”; or you can create discrete each individual position as “Left Defence”, “Right Defence”, “Center”, “Left Wing”, “Right Wing”, and of course “Goalie”.

Because this is a blog post, we’ll keep it simple, and just use “Skater” and “Goalie”.  Head on over to the POSITIONS tab on your team’s page, and add two positions:

You’ve got to hit the ON switch before this will work.

Remember to set real minimums and maximums for each position.  When you’re done, skip back to the ROSTER tab and assign players to different positions.

From here, you can assign positions to individual members.  Once they are assigned by Team Managers, only managers can manipulate the position of a player on a given team.

When players RSVP, they will begin to fill the positions you create and assign to them, until the maximum number of players for that position is met.  If they attempt to RSVP for a position that is filled for the event, they will not be allowed to select “IN” for that event.

You can use this to simply differentiate your GOALIE from regular SKATERs on your hockey team, or if you are OCD you can create positions all the way down to LEFT DEFENSE, RIGHT DEFENSE, CENTER, LEFT WING, RIGHT WING, and of course WATER BOY.  :)

This feature is still fairly BETA… be careful as it could omit players from your events if it’s not properly configured.  We’d definitely like your feedback as we evolve it toward perfection.

Here we show each stage of the mask’s production.. which is made to the exact measurements of Ian’s face from a special mix of kevlar and fibreglas, with a carbon-fiber outer layer, before being primered and painted by Mark.  This mask weighs more than most custom masks but less than a store-bought mass-produced mask, and is ultra-strong.  Johnny’s craftsmanship is second-to-none, as is Mark’s attention to detail.

One unique aspect of this design is the internal routing of the mask’s webbing, which rests against Ian’s head on the inside of the back cover.  This leaves more space for art on that back plate, of course, and leads to a more snug fit while saving on weight and padding on the inside of the back plate.

What do you think?

We saw more than 250 different types of activities created within just a few months, and teams and groups all over the world leveraged our unique tools to manage everything from school sports days, to bridge clubs, to military training exercises, to more mundane activities like hockey, soccer, football, and baseball.

When you first sign up for RosterBot we invite you to create a team, and we make it easy to copy and paste the email addresses from your email software into the Player Roster.  From there, savvy team managers like you can add events (which can be one-time events, or recurring events) and set the time, place, and other details.

Since RosterBot knows who your players are, and when your events are, it now sets about contacting those players at pre-set intervals to notify them about an event.. here’s what our simple email looks like:

Players then respond IN or OUT, and RosterBot accepts those RSVPs until the Roster is full.   RosterBot also has more powerful functions that allow you to manage Spare Players, and players who occupy specific roles using our Position Genius.

Everything about this process is designed to save you time.  Our goal is to get you and your team up-and-running in less than 10 minutes from when you first join RosterBot.  It turns out that people who organize weekly events like a soccer game actually spend many more hours organizing the game than they do playing the game.  That’s crazy!

From your team’s ROSTER tab, scroll up or down to the player whose status you’d like to change… there are only two options.

Next you head over to your SETTINGS tab for the team.  Here’s where you actually turn the feature we call “SPARE LIST” on or off, and tweak a couple of very influential settings..

Our hockey team, for example, has 16 Full-Time players and about 10 Spares, including an extra goalie.  What we do is send out invites to games to the Full-Time team members, give them a few days to Check-IN for each game, and then two days before the event we “release” the event to the Spares, by inviting them to RSVP.

If the team’s maximum number of players per event is 16, and only 10 Full-Time players have RSVP’d as IN, then up to 6 more players from the Spare list or from the team can RSVP as IN right up until the system stops accepting RSVPs at the time set by the Manager.