Mike Walsh www.wp-swimteam.org 4/29/2010

I have three children who swim for the MacDolphins and my wife has been an active volunteer for many years. At the end of the 2007 summer season my wife was approached to chair the swim team for the 2008 season. She agreed, not knowing what she was getting into!Like many summer swim teams, the MacDolphins were run by an ad-hoc group of volunteers. The leadership positions turned over frequently and just about everything was done by hand. Registration, volunteers, rosters, heat sheets - just everything the swim team did was on paper or existed on someone's computer in Word or Excel. Each season the person in charge litterally had to start all over. My wife knew this going when she took on the position but didn't know how bad it was. When she took the job she asked me if I would help her computerize the MacDolphins. I said "sure, how hard can it be?". Little did I know ....

In late 2007 I began the process of computerizing the MacDolphins. I was presented with some basic requirements so I had a rough idea of what team wanted and needed. The early requirements consisted of these: Computerized Registration No more paper forms with hard to read handwriting. We had swimmers with wrong birthdays, misspelled names, all sorts of data entry errors simply because people didn't write legibly. Web Presence The MacDolphins wanted a web site. While the MacDolphins are part of MacGregor Downs Country Club, the club's web site didn't feature the swim team prominently and getting information posted on it was a tedious process. E-Mail Distribution List The swim team did not have a mechanism to communicate quickly or effectively to parents. Swim Times Because of the ad-hoc nature the team was being run, there were no records of swim times. Parents and swimmers wanted their times and the coaches were seeding the meets based on gut feel and not real data. Times had been kept in Excel in past years but somewhere they got lost and there was no ownership of the problem. With these basic requirements I set off in search of solutions. Before I got involved, the swim team had started looking at Hy-tek Team Manager since that is what was used for our local CIty Invitational Meet. I did some reading on Team Manager, concluded it would do what we needed from a time and seeding perspective, and began looking at the other requirements. Like many swim teams, we didn't have a large budget to work with so I was looking for free or low cost solutions. There are a host of free web offerings which all could help but I didn't find anything that really solved what we wanted solved. Doodle and MySignUp.com offered solutions for volunteer sign up. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups offered e-mail distribution. There are a host of free web site offerings and blog services. All of the sports team web site solutions I found were focused on stick and ball sports and not well suited to swim team. The only thing that I found which looked like a fit was Hy-tek's Active Network but the cost was more than we were willing to take on. We didn't want the MacDolphins scattered across half a dozen web sites each requring different registration and login requirements I started to think that building our own web site was the best solution. I had used Wordpress for several other small projects so I was familiar with it and knew that it could do a lot of what we wanted and the plugin system would probably be sufficient to build what I couldn't find. Very quickly I had a domain registered and a web site set up to show the leadership committee what could be done. The idea of everything being in one central location was very appealing so with the leardership committee's blessing, I started to build what has become the wp-SwimTeam Wordpress plugin. There wasn't a lot of time between when I started and swim team registration so I focused on getting the data model correct to support the registration process.