Running The Team
Free on every plan — including the free one
The part between the games.
Practices, games, who is actually coming, and telling everyone when it moves. Most teams pay for this in one app and track stats in another. Here it is the same app, and this half costs nothing.
What you get
One calendar the whole team actually reads.
Games and practices together
One calendar across every team in the club, in agenda or month view, with repeating practices set up once. Subscribe to it and it appears in the calendar app you already use.
One-tap RSVP — no account needed
Families answer from a link in their email without signing up for anything. Coaches see who is coming, who is not, and who has not answered — silence is never counted as a no.
Reminders that go out on their own
A nudge to whoever has not answered two days out, a reminder to everyone going the day before, and an immediate notice — never held for a digest — when a time, date or location changes.
Cancelled, not deleted
Calling a game off tells everyone and leaves it on the calendar struck through. Deleting it would make it vanish from a parent’s view, which is how people end up at an empty field.
Announcements, kept
Post to a team or the whole club, pin what matters, let people reply, and export the record when you need to show what was said and when.
Contacts and an emergency call tree
Every athlete’s guardians in one place, reachable when it matters. Never public, under any setting, and every look at a child’s details is logged.
Safeguarding
There is no private channel. That is the design.
Why we have no direct messages
SafeSport’s Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies require electronic communication between an adult and a minor athlete to be open and transparent, with another adult included. Private one-to-one adult–minor contact is prohibited. Most clubs, schools and travel programmes are bound by that or adopt the same rule.
Nearly every team app treats this as a policy document a club emails to its coaches, and then ships a direct-message inbox anyway. We took the other route: Drabble™ has no private messaging at all. Every message is an announcement to a team or a club, visible to that audience, with replies in the open and the whole thing exportable.
It is a compliance position you cannot accidentally break, because the non-compliant message is not something the product can compose.
Being straight with you
What it doesn’t do.
This is a scheduling and notice system, not a chat product. Some of that is a limit and some of it is the point.
- No chat, no DMs, no group threads. Deliberate, for the reason above — not a feature we have yet to build.
- Notices go by email and in the app. Text messaging is wired up but switched off; turning it on would need your people to opt in separately, and we would rather ask than assume.
- Nobody is forced online. Families can answer an RSVP without an account, but a coach still needs one to run the calendar.
- It is free, and we intend to keep it that way — it is how a club ends up opening Drabble between games rather than only on game day. If that ever changes we will say so in advance, not in a renewal invoice.