Pick Up Pains
Most weekday evenings, you can find me playing pick up soccer at Cal Anderson Field. There’s a great group of guys that play there on a regular basis. In general, its rare that there won’t be at least half a dozen other guys to scrimmage with.
The exception to this rule is when the weather gets shitty. Unfortunately, this winter, the weather in Seattle has been very shitty. Wind storms, torrential rains and even the occasional hail have all conspired to ruin my evening pick up matches. The tricky challenge that I find myself facing is, when is the weather bad enough that nobody (or not enough people) will show up?
My tolerance for inclement weather has increased significantly in the past few years, so I’m perfectly comfortable playing through anything less than thunder and lightning. However, there have been far too many times when I’ve shown up to the soccer field and waited out in the rain for half an hour before realizing nobody else was coming.
So, I’m proposing a feature idea for those sites that facilitate pick up soccer.
Socster does an adequate job. While I was down in Berkeley visiting a friend, I was able to find a game near his house easily enough. However, there’s one killer feature that is blatantly missing - mobile integration. By the time I start worrying about whether guys are going to show up, I’m standing on the field and definitely don’t have PC access.
Based on the demographic that tends to show up to these games - high school athletes on an allowance, college students up to their ears in debt and internationals on an immigrant’s budget - its unlikely the majority will have a data plan, so a WAP site is out of the question.. This leaves us with an SMS approach.
Each major playfield in a given region should be assigned a short code. You can then send a text message indicating which field you’re playing on. I would expect this feature to be used most often when players are actually at the field already, so there’s no need to specify a time. However, if you want to notify people in advance, there should be an option to input a time.
The other critical text message which should be supported is the query. I’d love to be able to send a text message with the field short code, followed by a question mark, and receive a message back outlining the number of guys who will be showing up to that field at what times during that day.
If you think this proposal has merit, feel free to make some noise about it.
17 Dec 2006 Dan
Man, I miss playing soccer. Perhaps I’ll join you next pick up game.
SMS me?
Hey Dan,
We hear ya. I work for Sportsvite.com and a text messaging service to better organzie events is on the list of stuff we really need to do.
When we finally get to building it out we’ll be sure to hit you up for more good ideas.
Thanks,
Brian
good ideas on the sms stuff.
Socster has kind of run out of steam at the moment, as it was more or less a one-man operation (moi).
I still can’t find enough games for when I want to play - and I know they’re going on b/c sometimes I’ll drive by them! So, there are _lots_ of improvements that could be made all around. But SMS is a good one.
I’ve been pretty excited about Google, in particular - you might have noticed the Google integration - maps, calendar, etc. Google Calendar recently added the ability to search for public events. In an ideal world, all of the games listed on socster.com would be publicy searchable via the Calendar (as well as upcoming.org, etc.). How great would that be? I don’t see Socster doing much in the near future, but you never know.
Right now, you can add a public event to your own calendar (the calendar itself might have to be public), and that public event (e.g. your daily pickup game) would become searchable via Google’s public calendar search button (and, I suspect, soon from their regular search button). I’d added my own games in the past, but haven’t had much luck have my games show up in the results of the public Google calendar search, yet. Probably something I’m doing wrong, but it’ll eventually work. Google Calendar already finds pickup games listed from their partner sites (like Meetup.com), and it already can send reminders over SMS, etc.
Point being, I’ve been thinking about how to leverage Google’s public GData API to build increasingly-sophisticated funtionality into Socster.com for very little development effort. Google Calendar also does weather already, for instance. For me, doing the weather stuff was fun, but it was time-consuming. I’d rather have spent that time working on a mobile interface, for instance. I’m starting to think of Socster.com as a mashup of web services (which it essentially already is) - kind of like some higher-level features facade built on top of the Google web services api’s.
p.s. the link at end to info-at–socster.com is broken.