We're going to be honest: most of the leagues Big Sports is built to serve are not currently being scheduled in a competitor's product. They're being scheduled in a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is, by sheer market share, our biggest competitor — and the most credible one for a lot of customers who haven't yet hit the wall.
This page is for the directors who haven't hit it yet. We'll explain what the wall looks like, why it's worse than it appears from the outside, and what specifically Big Sports does that a spreadsheet can't.
Why spreadsheets win the first round
The spreadsheet has unbeatable advantages out of the gate:
- It's free.
- The team you inherited from already uses one.
- Every adult on planet Earth knows how to use a spreadsheet.
- You can structure it however you want. No vendor opinions to fight.
- You can email the file. You can publish it to the web. You can print it.
For a 6-team adult kickball league with one field and a fixed Wednesday-night slot, a spreadsheet is the right tool. Big Sports is overkill. We'll say so when you ask.
When the spreadsheet stops being free
The wall arrives somewhere between 12 and 25 teams, two-plus venues, and the first real-world disruption. Three things break at the same time:
- Constraint enforcement becomes manual. The spreadsheet does not know that one of your coaches has two teams. It does not know that the Tigers' shortstop is also on the school cross-country team and can't play before 11am Saturdays. It does not know that Field 3 isn't lit. You know all of these things — and you enforce them by re-reading the sheet, every time you make a change, and praying you didn't miss one.
- The record of who changed what evaporates. Even with Google Sheets revision history, "what did we agree on Tuesday?" turns into a 20-minute scroll through cell-level edits that don't say what they meant. There's no answer to "show me the schedule as of last Tuesday," because the schedule isn't a thing with a history — it's the current state of the cells.
- A rainout becomes a Sunday. When a Saturday morning game gets cancelled, you don't just move that game. You check whether the make-up slot creates a downstream conflict with another team. You check whether moving Game 14 cascades into Game 19 needing to move. You email coaches, you wait for replies, you update cells, you regenerate the PDF, you email the PDF. The version on parents' phones is now wrong.
That's the real cost, and it isn't the Saturday in August — it's every week after it. Count what a season of patching the sheet costs you in evenings before you decide the spreadsheet is free.
Where Big Sports is different
Big Sports is built specifically for the moment the spreadsheet stops being free.
- Setup that ends in a schedule. Enter your teams, venues, and dates — say, 14 teams on 3 fields, every Saturday from September 7 through November 16, nothing on October 12 for fall break — then generate. Round-robin, double round-robin, or a single-elimination bracket. The first hour of spreadsheet work disappears.
- A real constraint engine. Coach conflicts, family conflicts, venue blackouts, minimum-rest windows, home/away balance, travel-distance limits — the rules your league actually runs on. Move a game somewhere it doesn't fit and the engine flags the clash and names the rule it breaks. Then it's your call.
- 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 the engine ranks make-up dates that don't break your rules. You're not patching cells; you're approving a ranked list.
- A history that means something. Every change is saved as its own step, with your name on it, the time it happened, and what moved. Undo takes any of them back out. A board-ready change history answers "what did we agree on Tuesday?" in one click.
- A public schedule page parents can subscribe to. Auto-generated, mobile-first, with a calendar feed that works with Google and Apple Calendar, plus a CSV export. The parents' version updates automatically when you save a change. No more "v17 FINAL.pdf."
Pricing fit
Big Sports's paid plan — Plus, $79/mo or $790/yr (two months free on the annual) — covers unlimited teams, venues and surfaces, every rule type, and clean public pages. We charge for it because Big Sports is designed to eliminate the spreadsheet, not co-exist with it. Whether that's worth $79 is a question about your evenings, and only you can price those.
Plus runs one division per season. Running several? Talk to us.
If your league is genuinely small enough that the spreadsheet works — keep using the spreadsheet. We mean it. The Free tier is here when you outgrow it.
Try it
Start free. Twenty-one days of Plus, no card up front. Bring your spreadsheet and see what the engine does with it.