SportsEngine HQ is a credible league management platform. It owns registration, rosters, communications, and a real safety/compliance stack — bigger surface area than Big Sports will ever try to cover. If you're buying SportsEngine for those reasons, keep buying it.
This page is for the directors who picked SportsEngine for the LMS, then quietly bought a second tool to do the actual scheduling.
The pattern we keep hearing
It goes like this. You sign up for SportsEngine because every other org in your association uses it. Registration is good. Rosters are good. Communications are good. Then you sit down in August to build the season schedule and the scheduling module turns out to be the part of the platform that gets the least love: fine for one division, increasingly painful as you add more.
So you buy Diamond Scheduler ($25–$50/mo on top of your $799/yr SportsEngine bill) to generate the schedule, then push the result back into SportsEngine for parents to view. Now you have two tools, two sources of truth, and a Tuesday-night ritual where a coach asks you to move a game and you have to remember which one to update first.
That's the gap Big Sports fills.
Where Big Sports is different
Big Sports is a single tool that does scheduling deeply. Three things that follow from that:
- The constraint engine is the product. Not a feature inside an LMS — the entire engineering team works on it. Coach conflicts, venue blackouts, minimum-rest windows, travel-distance limits, official availability, home/away balance. That's a different depth than a bundled scheduling tab.
- Live re-optimization. Drag a game to a different slot and the engine finds the fix and shows you a before-and-after list of what moved, before anything changes. Cancel a game in the rain and it ranks make-up dates that don't break your rules. A bundled scheduling tab doesn't reach for that, because the engine underneath isn't built for it.
- A schedule you can defend. Round-robins, double round-robins, single-elimination brackets, and the rules your league actually runs on — same inputs, same schedule, every time. Every change is saved as its own step, with a name and a time on it, so "why is my kid playing at 8am three weeks running?" has an answer that isn't a shrug.
What Big Sports does not do
We are not building an LMS. At launch, Big Sports does not handle:
- Registration and payments
- Background checks and abuse-prevention compliance
- Live scoring, live streaming
- A team-comms app
Keep the tools you already use for those things — including SportsEngine for registration. The design pattern is "Big Sports is the scheduler; your LMS is the LMS." The schedule leaves Big Sports as a public page, a calendar feed, or a CSV export, so it can live wherever your parents already look.
If you need an LMS and a scheduler in one product, SportsEngine is the better fit and we'll happily say so. If your LMS is fine and your scheduler is painful — Big Sports is the one to swap.
Pricing fit
Big Sports's Plus plan ($79/mo, $790/yr) is built for the club that currently runs SportsEngine ($799/yr ≈ $66/mo) plus Diamond Scheduler ($25–$50/mo) for the scheduling half. Plus costs about what the second tool does — and it replaces the part of the stack that keeps sending you back to a spreadsheet. If you stay on SportsEngine for the LMS layer and add Big Sports for scheduling, the math works.
Plus covers one division per season. Running several? Talk to us. There's also a Free tier — one division, up to ten teams, two venues, watermarked public pages.
Try it
Start free. Twenty-one days of Plus, no card up front. Enter your teams, venues and dates, and see what the engine does with them.