Worked example: Saturday game-day shifts

Constructed example: a youth soccer club, home game Saturdays, three jobs that must exist or the field does not open. Not a customer story. The same grid works for a school carnival or a church festival with different labels.

Objects you create once

• Team: “Northside Soccer”
• Location: “Northside fields, lot B”
• Sign-up: “Home game volunteers · spring”
• Public listing: off
• Default capacity: unused for the jobs; each slot carries its own
• Slot template: “Home game default”

The template

• Field setup 7:30–8:30 · capacity 3
• Gate 8:00–10:00 · 2
• Gate 10:00–12:00 · 2
• Concession 8:00–10:00 · 2
• Concession 10:00–12:00 · 2
• Field teardown 12:00–1:00 · 3

Fourteen adult slots. A club with forty families can fill this if you ask early. If you publish it Friday night, you will work gate yourself.

Each Saturday

Add an instance for that date, times 7:30–1:00, apply “Home game default.” Put the opponent in the instance title: “Apr 18 · vs. Hillcrest.” Parents scanning the team chat can match the instance to the league schedule. The official kickoff is still the league’s; this page is only jobs.

Do not generate every Saturday for the next two years on day one. Add four weeks. Weather will cancel one. Deleting a generated ghost date is easy; explaining why an old URL still shows a canceled opponent is harder if you never edited it.

How you fill it

Send the sign-up URL, not a screenshot of empty slots. Ask two specific people for first-shift concession (cash and food safety) before the blast. Everyone else picks from what remains. If teardown is empty on Thursday, assign it in the chat and enter the names. An empty teardown slot on the live page means you do not have teardown.

Someone who can only do 10:00 gate registers for that slot. They do not also need a sign-up for the game itself unless you created a separate attendance sign-up. Do not mix player RSVP and adult jobs on one slot list; kids are not a capacity-2 concession shift.

Saturday morning

Coordinator opens the instance. Two names on 8:00 gate, one on 8:00 concession. You need a second concession person: raise nothing yet; call a parent who lives nearby and have them register, or add them yourself. If a no-show texts at 7:50, remove them so the second window is not planned around a ghost.

Reminders: organizers can enable SMS 30 minutes before the instance. That fires relative to the instance start (7:30), which is useful for setup and useless for the 10:00 gate unless those people also look at a clock. Do not pretend the 30-minute alert replaces a human for late shifts.

Next Saturday

New instance, same template. If concession needed three people, edit the template before you apply it again. Already-played dates keep the old slots. That is what you want.

For the staffing philosophy behind this grid, read How to run a volunteer event. For snack-only seasons, the sports teams page is enough and this template is overkill.