Duty rosters for youth sports team parents

The idea

Every youth sports team runs a shadow logistics operation of snack duty, carpools, scoreboard shifts, and jersey washing, coordinated through a group text that fair-minded parents dread and freeloaders ignore. The team manager, a volunteer, spends hours chasing confirmations and absorbing complaints about fairness, and the same three families cover every gap.

TeamSnap and SportsEngine own schedules and payments, but their task features are an afterthought bolted onto an app half the parents never open. The wedge is auto-rotating assignment that is provably fair, plus swaps that resolve themselves over SMS without the manager touching anything. Parents need zero accounts; everything works from a text.

Who pays

The real buyer is the club, not individual parents: clubs pay $199/yr club-wide (or $10 per team per season for single teams) because duty chaos is a top recurring parent complaint and volunteer manager burnout is their staffing problem. Distribution: sell to club administrators through league associations and registrar networks; one club onboards 20 to 60 teams at once.

MVP scope

• Roster import by paste or CSV with mobile numbers
• Auto-rotating fair assignment of configurable duties per event
• SMS reminders 24 hours out with one-tap confirm links
• Self-resolving swap flow over SMS with automatic roster updates
• Read-only team page showing the full season duty schedule
• Skip for v1: game scheduling itself, payments and fundraising, chat, native apps, coach or referee management

Build SidelineDuty, a duty roster app for youth sports teams. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth for managers), Twilio for SMS. Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: the team manager imports a parent roster (paste names and mobile numbers, or CSV), enters the game and event schedule, and defines duties per event: snacks, carpool, scoreboard, jersey wash. The app auto-assigns duties on a rotating basis so every family carries an equal load across the season, visibly fair by design. Each parent gets an SMS 24 hours before their duty with the event details and two links: confirm, or request a swap. A swap request texts the next two families in the rotation; the first to accept takes the duty and the roster updates itself, with no manager involvement. Parents interact entirely over SMS and signed links, no accounts and no app install.

Pages: manager dashboard (season schedule with duty status per event), roster manager, duty setup per team, public read-only team page parents can bookmark, billing.

Implementation details: store the rotation as a persistent ordered queue per duty type so swaps rotate fairly instead of re-randomising; log every SMS so the manager can prove who was reminded.

Pricing: $10 per team per season, or $199/yr club-wide, via Stripe.