Tips, guides, and stories to help your club run better. From registration to match day, we cover it all.
news
How Club Software Pricing Actually Works (and What It Should Cost)
Most club management platforms charge an annual software subscription - often priced per player or per team, quoted privately, and renegotiated at renewal. That model quietly costs a mid-size club $2,000-15,000 a year before a single fee is collected. Squadora takes the opposite approach: the software is free at any size, and the only cost is published all-in payment processing when you collect money - 2.5% flat on bank payments (ACH), and 3.5% on cards, dropping automatically to 3.25% past $250k and 3.0% past $1M in trailing 12-month volume. Stripe processing is included, nothing is added at checkout, and there is no software fee on top. If your club collects nothing through the platform, you pay nothing. When comparing platforms, ask one question first: what is the total cost to your club community - software fees plus processing plus checkout surcharges - not just the sticker price.
Squadora Team
Jul 7, 2026
news
The 2026-27 Age Group Change: What US Youth Soccer Clubs Need to Know
US Youth Soccer is moving to an August 1 - July 31 age cutoff for the 2026-27 season, replacing the calendar-year grouping clubs have used since 2016. That means every roster built on birth-year logic needs rechecking: players born late in the year may shift age groups, sibling pairs can land differently than parents expect, and tryout communications need to explain the change clearly before registration opens. Practical steps: publish your club's new age matrix early, re-run team assignments against the new cutoff before tryouts rather than after, and give parents a lookup (birth date in, age group out) instead of a table they have to interpret. Squadora computes age groups from the governing cutoff automatically, so rosters and registration forms stay consistent as the rule changes.
Squadora Team
Jun 30, 2026
community
SafeSport Compliance: The Checklist Every Youth Club Needs
SafeSport training is mandatory for coaches and staff in US youth sports, and it is not a one-time checkbox: the certification runs on a multi-part cycle - a full core course followed by annual refreshers - and lapsed certs are a real liability for clubs. The clubs that stay compliant treat it as data, not paperwork: track each staff member's certification date and expiry, surface who is due before the season starts, and keep proof accessible for league and association audits. Combine that with background-check tracking and a published code of conduct and you have the compliance baseline most state associations now expect. If you are still tracking this in a spreadsheet, assign one owner, add expiry dates, and review it monthly - or use a platform that flags expiring certifications for you.
Squadora Team
Jun 23, 2026
match report
Public Standings Pages: Let Parents Follow the Season Without an App
Every league weekend generates the same messages: what is the score, where are the standings, when do we play next. The answer should be a link, not a group chat. Squadora publishes league tables, fixtures, recent form, and knockout brackets to public pages that need no account and no app install - each division gets its own shareable deep link, every page has a QR code you can print on a flyer or flash on a scoreboard, and spectators can download a standings image sized for social media. Group stages and knockout formats are both supported, and scores flow to the public page as they are entered from the sideline. Grandparents three states away follow the season with one bookmark.
Squadora Team
Jun 16, 2026
match report
Live Match Scoring from the Sideline, Not the Kitchen Table
Match data entered Sunday night from memory is already wrong: goal times drift, cards get forgotten, and the parent who asked for an update at halftime never got one. Scoring live from a phone fixes the data and the communication in one motion - goals, cards, and match timers recorded as they happen, standings recalculated automatically, and the public match page updated for anyone following along. It also changes what your season data is worth: accurate minutes and events per player feed real analytics (leaderboards, performance trends, attendance patterns) instead of approximations. The bar for doing this well is low - if entering a goal takes more than two taps, coaches will stop doing it by week three. That two-tap rule is what we built Squadora's match center around.
Squadora Team
Jun 9, 2026
training
Running Tryouts Without Spreadsheets: A Working Checklist
Tryout season fails in the gaps between tools: sign-ups in one form, evaluations on paper, offers by email, and rosters in a spreadsheet nobody else can edit. A cleaner pipeline: collect registrations online with the waiver signed and contact data structured from the start; check players in against that list on tryout day; record evaluations against player profiles, not paper; and when decisions are made, send offers with a join link so acceptance lands the player on the actual roster - same record, no re-typing. Squadora's invite codes (a nine-digit code any parent can redeem) close the last gap: accepted players join the club themselves, and the roster builds itself as offers are accepted. The measure of a good tryout process is how little data you touch twice.
Squadora Team