Danny McSweeney the 5ths captain has decided to take the organisational work out of managing the team and he has decided to let a computer system do the work.

The IT professor from the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown is using a new free Irish website www.teamer.net that greatly simplifies the tasks involved in organising a hockey team.

There are a couple of features on the site which really help:

He can use email and text messaging to notify our team of an upcoming practice, game, or other event. Players can respond to the emails and texts and their availability is updated in real time on the Team's page. So instead of wondering how many he is going to have at Monday nights training session for example, he will go up knowing who and how many players we will have.

- Teamer automatically notifies subs. So if he picks a squad of 16 for the weekend’s game and someone responds that they are unavailable, he can specify standby players that get automatically notified to replace the unavailable team member.(example Carr, Tobin)

- Probably the best part of all this is that it's completely free. So for teams currently spending money, sending texts from the phone and making calls to get the team out, Teamer will end up saving money as well as time.

There is a demo to view on the site (http://teamer.net/pages/demo, that goes into a little more detail. In summary Danny says that with about 15-20 minutes set up work, he can save herself a few hours each week and a season worth of calls and texts.

A little on the background of the developers, Steve Moulten is an ex-Railway Union 1st XI captain and brother Ken (the co-founder of Teamer) is still very much involved in the club. they set out last year to put together a site that took the grunt work out of running a team. Their own experiences (Ken has captained various teams in Railway over the last 20 years) were that too much of the week was being spent organising teams and thus detracting from the amount of time being spent focusing on the upcoming game.  

Danny sent this message to all the players today

Dear Player

'Glenanne 5ths' is now being organized using Teamer.net.

Teamer is a free online sports team management system that uses text messaging and email to solve the headaches of organizing a team.

He will get all future game/event notifications to your email and/or phone via text. Email is free, text at her standard rate. All response will be collated on our private team page at Teamer.net.

Please follow this link and sign up (it takes 30 seconds!).

Link details here (not published Danny does want twenty guys from Pembroke joining the 5ths in one day)

When you receive notification to a game, please follow the link and confirm your availability promptly.

There is more functionality on Teamer.net , so please explore at your leisure.