Field Guide: Sports Coaches

Coaching a sports team requires your personal time both on and off the field — let Basecamp help you with the latter. 🙌🏼

In this guide, we’ll share examples and tips for using Basecamp to manage the administrative and communication chaos each season brings.

Jump to:

• Getting started with your projects
• Working with your players and staff
• Managing practices, games, and tasks
• Schedules and game days
• Files and team resources
• Staying on top of everything

Getting started with your projects

Everything in Basecamp is organized into projects.

As a coach, you'll likely have a few types of projects — one shared with players and their families, one for staff or volunteers, and a private one for your own planning.

Here's an example of how a coach's Home page may look:

Projects can be created from scratch or from a project template.

Templates are perfect for projects you’ll use over and over again — like the ones Coach Rob shares with players and their families, and with staff and volunteers.

Here are two project template examples created by the coach:

Let's open the Teams template to see its setup:

And here's the Staff and Volunteers template setup:

Working with your players and staff

Once your project is set up, you can invite players, parents, and staff to join.

Before sending invitations, take a moment to think about what level of permissions each person should have. You may want to keep some items private, limit who can create projects, or decide whether anyone needs admin-level access.

Basecamp has three user types: someone who works at your company, an outside collaborator, and a client. In this example, players and their families were added as clients, the assistant coach as someone who works at the company, and volunteers as outside collaborators. Here’s how that looks in the "Manage people" page:

Users are grouped by company. The first company is always your account’s main company, so you’ll see yourself and all the other folks who work at your company listed there. The coach also created separate companies for players and families, and for volunteers.

Players and families were added as clients because this user type has the most restricted access. This allows the coach to control exactly what they can see. For example, parents don’t need access to internal items like waiver tracking, so those remain private to the folks that work at the company and outside collaborators/volunteers.

Here's what a Client user will see when accessing their project:

And here’s what people who work at the company and outside collaborators will see — they have access to everything in the project:

Volunteers were added as outside collaborators so they can see everything in the projects they’re part of, but can’t create new projects. Sorry Min and Teddy, if you want to create your own projects, you can sign up for your own account here 😁: https://basecamp.com/signup

With everyone in place, you can start sharing updates to ensure everyone is on the same page.

The Message Board is where you’ll want to post announcements or any important information you’d like folks in the project to know and reference at any time.

Adding a 'Welcome' post is always a great start — introduce yourself, share important information, and explain how to use Basecamp.

Here's an example welcome message:

For quick, real-time conversations, use Chat. This tool is great for last-minute updates, quick check-ins, or casual team communication. Here's an example of a Chat between the coach and a parent of a player from the parent's view:

Managing practices, games, and tasks

Running a team involves a lot of moving parts — practice planning, game-day prep, and everything in between. Basecamp helps you keep track of it all in one place.

The To-do tool will likely get more of a workout in the Staff and Volunteers project, where tasks can be created, assigned, and completed to keep the league running smoothly.

To-dos for staff and volunteers likely won’t change every season, so you'll definitely want to add those to your project template or create a To-do list template.

Here are two To-do lists from the Staff and Volunteers template:

You likely won’t assign to-dos to families in a Teams project to complete, but because the tool is so flexible, you can use it to coordinate post-game snacks:

For work that moves through stages — like tryouts, tournament prep, or season planning — you can use the Card Table.

You can also get creative with Card Tables and use one to see your team rosters in one view:

Schedules and game days

As things start moving, you’ll want a clear view of what’s happening and when.

The Calendar brings together everything with a date, including practices, games, meetings, and deadlines in a project.

You can also add two Calendars to a project, like Coach Rob did in the Staff and Volunteers project — one for dated to-dos and another for practices and game days (showing events only):

Files and team resources

Keep documents, files, and links in one place, so they’re easy to find when you need them.

Use Docs & Files to store things like contact information, game rules, and other team materials.

Here are some documents created in the Teams project shared with players and their families:

And documents created in the Staff and Volunteers project that's only shared with staff:

If your team uses outside services like merch stores, registration forms, or shared drives, you can add them as External Links.

That way, your team can access everything from one place without digging through emails or bookmarks.

In the Teams project, two External Links were added — a team store for players and families, and a form and waiver tracker for the coach and staff:

Players and families will only see the ‘Team Store’ External Link when they access their project. This is because they were invited as clients and the "Family forms/waiver list" will be marked as 'private' so only the coach and other staff members in the project will see that External link.

You and your staff may want to keep important emails related to a project in Basecamp. To do that, turn on Email forwards and forward messages directly into your project.

Once added, everyone with access can read the email, reply, or leave comments for the rest of the team.

Here's an email that was forwarded into the Staff and Volunteers project, discussed internally, and followed up with the parent:

Staying on top of everything

Once everything is set up, you can stay on top of what’s happening without needing to check every project.

The My Bar gives you quick access to your tasks, upcoming events, bookmarks, and notes.

On the right, the notification sidebar shows recent activity across your projects, along with your Pings.

In addition to your notification settings, you’ll get a daily email with the latest activity and a weekly email with upcoming assignments. You can turn these off at any time.

Use Automatic Check-ins for recurring questions like “Are you available for the next game?” or “Any updates?”  to collect responses in one place.

That's a wrap for now! We hope this guide helps you save time so you can focus on getting your teams to the playoffs 🤞. And if you need any assistance with Basecamp, you can check out our learning center, help pages, or send us a note at Support. Happy Basecamping!