It feels as though we just released the new-look TeamPages (I guess it was only a month ago), but our development team has done it again!  They have been hard at work making TeamPages Pro a reality and since our beta release last night, we are overwhelmed with the feedback and support we’ve already received.

TeamPages Pro is a result of the many emails, messages and phone calls we receive daily from our community requesting features, reporting bugs and working with us to make TeamPages even better.  Many of you who read this blog regularly, contribute to our forums and contact us with suggestions, might notice your accounts have been upgraded automatically to the Pro version.  We hope you enjoy your free 1-year subscription and continue to update us with your success stories.  If you’re reading this and wondering where your free upgrade is, please contact me at derek.story@teampages.com as we’re giving away free upgrades during the first week.

Some of the new features now available with TeamPages Pro include:

• Custom header colors
• Custom pages and links
• Sponsor show case section
• Sub-domains (also available on TeamPages Basic)
• Unlimited photo and document uploads
• Printer friendly rosters, schedules and game sheets

If you haven’t already checked out the new TeamPages Pro, click here to see how it compares. Still not sure? We enjoy talking on the phone too, so feel free to contact us at our customer support number 1-800-500-7203.

Thanks and keep playing,

Derek at TeamPages

Here at TeamPages, we’re always looking for more ways to give back to our members which is why we’re so excited about our newest guest blogger, Coach Robert Wright from Complete Soccer Coach (who we featured in our Resources for Soccer Coaches post).  With the fall season approaching, Coach Wright will be posting a series of articles chalked full of tips and drills for youth soccer teams.

An experienced soccer administrator/coach, with a seventeen-year background in coaching soccer at the professional youth, college and recreational levels; Coach Wright’s credentials are only matched by his passion for the game.  For more information about Coach Wright’s background, I encourage you to check out his qualifications: http://completesoccercoach.com/coach.

Team Preparation and Goal Setting

by Robert Wright

For many of us, August signals the imminent arrival of the fall soccer season with lots of soccer practices and games in a short space of time.  Withe everything else that happens at this time of year, it is easy for coaches to feel overwhelmed and under prepared for working with their children.  Some easy tips to help alleviate this are:

Decide on your goals for the season

This may not be as simple as it sounds.  Your Long term goals for the team are important but there are other people who will also have opinions that are crucial, and that must be factored in.  These include your soccer organization, your players , and the parents of your players.  Only by taking all these stakeholders into consideration, will you develop a plan that everyone will support and buy into. (more…)

 We’d like to say thank you to all of our members and all the great feedback we’ve received.  Based on much of your feedback, our designers and developers have been hard at work creating a fresh new look for TeamPages that will help everyone navigate the site more easily.

All the features are still there (schedules, announcements, rosters, site admin, message boards, etc.) but some will have a more modern look and feel.  Let us know what you think about the new design by taking a short survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2283F6CTQKN

To learn more about the changes we’ve made to TeamPages, check out our updated Tour section for select screen shots and detailed functionality.

Even though we’ve just released TeamPages 2.0, we’re always interested to learn what you would like to see TeamPages do.  Find the Forum we’ve dedicated to TeamPages feature requests where each week we’ll be holding contests and giving away cool TeamPages shwag for people who post suggestions and feature requests.

We would like to pass on some good news to the TeamPages community.  Thanks to many of you creating profiles, telling your teammates, and using many of the tools TeamPages has to offer, we recently squeaked into the top 100 of TechVibes’ Canadian Start-up Index.

Greg Andrews has been producing such indexes for TechVibes over the last six months now, with this being the first nation-wide list.  The criteria for companies to appear on the list include:

• Located in Canada
• Less than five years old
• Not a public company
• Is a tech company; either hardware, software, web app/service, or mobile

Here are a few of the companies grouped together with TeamPages:

Kudos to a couple of local companies also on the list that started up in Victoria with us around the same time.  Indochino,  a designer of custom tailored, premium quality suits, can deliver an order anywhere in the world within days, while Oprius Software provides independent sales professionals the contact management software they need to conduct business.

Again, we would like to thank everyone for their great feedback, bug reporting and recommendations.  Keep up the good work!

With the changing of seasons, the TeamPages crew is uprooting from the quaint city we’ve called home for the last two years and taking the ferry over to Vancouver, British Columbia. 

As excited as we are to open a new chapter in the TeamPages saga, it’s sometimes difficult to leave behind so many memories that are intrinsically tied to Victoria; the excitement that was bringing TeamPages online, as well as the coziness of Mike’s one-bedroom apartment that doubled as a cramped office for the first year, are a just a couple of things that we won’t soon forget.

Another difficult thing to leave behind is the local sports community here in Victoria.  Without their amazing support and feedback, TeamPages would not be what it is today. It’s our goal to continue growing these relationships while also beginning new ones with many of the local Vancouver leagues and clubs.

All of that said, this summer promises to be an exciting one full of product releases and getting to know our new neighbors.  With a new user interface on the horizon, and a premium service scheduled to be released shortly there after, we’re going to be hard at work in the new office to ensure the transition is both smooth and seamless.  I also know that each of us are searching for new leagues, teams and groups to join.  So if you’re looking for an extra mid-fielder, a climbing partner or someone to trek through Squamish on a mountain bike with, drop us a line because we’re always game.

With our much anticipated launch of the new look TeamPages fast approaching, we want to hear from you, our members. So, to encourage more of the great feedback we’ve been receiving recently, each week for the rest of the summer we will be randomly selecting one feedback comment and sending the contributor a customized TeamPages t-shirt.

Don’t know what the write about? Not a problem! Visit our forums at www.teampages.com/forum and comment on one of the many topics we’ve already created. You can also send us an email to talk-to-us@teampages.com or call our toll-free support line at 1-800-500-7203. No matter how you contact us, we want to hear from you…and give away some free schwag at the same time.

As Mike Tan (right), CEO of TeamPages and Derek Story (left), Business Development Manager, prepared for their first soccer conference, they had no idea how much of an impact the T-shirts would make. For those of you who do not receive our newsletter I will attach the original story below, for those of you who do, I thought I would link to this post so you could see the T-shirts we were referring to.

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As I prepare for the launch of the new TeamPages Blog, many questions run through my head. What makes a good blog? How do I engage the readers? What should I write about? I read blog after blog searching for the eternal blog truth, the blog of all blogs, the answer to the question of blog life and yet I still feel as though this answer is nowhere in sight. Then I come across a book called The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil and I try and absorb as much helpful information as humanly possible. Some of the tips tell me to write a blog entry as if I was writing to my mother, some tell me to be informative and introduce topics that will spark a discussion, some tell me not to use puffery or PR and to just be myself.

Well world here I am, the community development manager for TeamPages, and gosh darn it I intend to develop the TeamPages community. As Babe Ruth once said “don’t let the fear of striking out get in your way.” So here is the epiphany I have made for this blog entry. The answer to the eternal blog truth is YOU!

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