I’m an average dad who coaching two summer little league teams two of my sons play for. One I am head coach and the other I’m an assistant. Being an assistant coach is great because you get to have all the fun of coaching without the responsibility of the team administration, etc. Head coaching however, though fun, involves more responsibility. This is only the second year I have done it, but I did learn some things from the first year, and one of those is to have good management tools.
Last year I used a Windows based software program, Baseball Lineup Pro for managing my team’s positions per game, etc. Since I use Macs, that meant I needed to also run VMWare in order to access the program. This year, I was less than enthusiastic about using the same software, even though I paid for the license. After looking around a bit for Mac based software, I found a pretty neat Excel spreadsheet based baseball manager called Line Up Manager Version 4.1. I was a bit skeptical at first, I admit, but Line Up Manager really does a lot of things both simply and very well. The trial version lets you manager two games but it only costs $14 to purchase and so far it seems to be very well worth the price. Line Up Manager lets me plan a game and then gets out of the way rather than forcing me to adapt to the program like Baseball Lineup Pro did.
I also started using an iPad (and also works with iPhone) app for scoring games. The app is free and so is the website account which collects all of the stats and lets both coaches and parent see how the team is doing statistically as well as individual players. Everything is initiated from the iPad app and when you finalize the official scoring for a game, all of the box scores, stats, and team records are organized and available for viewing from the team’s site online. The app and website are both named Game Changer and are located in the Apple iPad/iPhone app store and online