A match rescheduled by the Nevobo: the alert that keeps your schedule right
A rescheduled match costs you no practice and no preparation, but it does cost you a match day. The federation moves it a week on, you never hear about it, and at the agreed time half a squad is standing in a hall where nobody is expecting them. This is one of the few things in a season you cannot prevent by planning better: all you can do is make sure you hear about it. That is what the daily check is for.
Why a rescheduled match stays invisible for so long
The programme of the Nevobo — the Dutch volleyball federation — and your calendar in Koach are two different things. When you link a pool you pull the programme in once and put it in your calendar; after that it sits there, frozen. If the federation moves a match a week later — a hall double-booked, an opponent asking for a postponement, a cup round being redrawn — then something changes at the federation and nothing changes with you.
That would be no problem if anyone noticed. But who still checks the federation's programme for their own team halfway through the season? The coach looks in his own calendar, because it is in there. The players look in the app, because it is in there. Everyone is looking at the same out-of-date line and nobody has any reason to doubt it.
So there is a check running that asks nothing of you. Early every morning, at a fixed time of six o'clock, Koach fetches the programme of every pool your team is linked to and lays it next to the matches in your calendar. You do not have to open the app, press a button or refresh anything. If nothing differs, you never notice it happened. If something does differ, you hear about it that same morning.
This is the most important property of the watch, and at the same time the one you only come to appreciate the day something goes wrong: Koach changes nothing of its own accord. It compares, it writes down what is different, and it sends one notification. Beyond that, nothing happens until you say so.
That is a deliberate choice. A federation programme can sit half-filled for a morning, a feed can hiccup, a pool can come back empty for a while during a reshuffle. If the app pushed on regardless in a case like that, one glitch at the federation would strip half a season out of everybody's calendar — and that is not damage you undo with a single tap. Koach would rather skip a round than guess: if no usable programme comes back, nothing is reported and nothing is proposed that day.
For the same reason the alert does not repeat itself. The check remembers what differs, not how often it has already seen it. If the situation stays exactly the same, it stays quiet. If a match is added, or the same match shifts again, you do get word. That way the alert never becomes noise you swipe away without reading.
In short: the daily check looks, reports and waits. It only changes anything after you have tapped the button.
What you see: was 12 September 19:30, now 19 September 20:00
The alert goes only to the team's coaches, because they are the only ones who can move a match. Open the app and at the top of the dashboard — above everything else going on today — there is a card headed The federation changed something.
Underneath it there is one line per match. The opponent on top, and below it the old date and time struck through, an arrow, and in bold what the federation has made of it. Literally: 12 Sep · 19:30 → 19 Sep · 20:00. You have nothing to compare and nothing to look up; the difference is already spelled out for you.
The comparison itself looks at three things at once: the date, the start time and the venue. Matches whose date or time has shifted end up on the card; if that new date also comes with a different hall, that goes into the proposal too. The line on the card names the date and the time, so with a rescheduled match, do check where it is being played now.
Applying: one button and one confirmation
Under the card sits a button with the number in it: Apply 3 changes. If it is just the one, it reads Apply change. Tap it and a question comes first: Move this match to the federation's date? — or, with several matches, the same question with the number in it. Only once you confirm does anything change.
What happens then is precisely this:
- The date and start time of the match are replaced by the federation's. If the federation passed on a different venue as well, that comes along with it.
- A short note is added to the match saying it was rescheduled, with the original date in it. That way you can see later that this Saturday was not always this Saturday.
- Your team is notified. Not one message per match, but one message for the whole batch — for a rescheduled round of matches that is a single announcement instead of a string of alerts one after another. How those messages reach your players is covered in push notifications and team announcements.
- The card disappears by itself. It checks itself: if a match is already on the new date and time, there is nothing left to ask and that line drops out. So if a fellow coach has already applied the change, you never see the card at all.
What does not happen: sign-ups are not wiped. Anyone who had signed up for that match is still down for it afterwards. That is usually what you want, but it is the moment to run through the team calendar once more, because a week later some players may have something else in the way.
Matches the federation no longer lists at all
The second kind of difference is not a shift but a disappearance. A match was in your calendar, no longer appears in the federation's programme, and so has no new date either. There is almost always something behind it that you notice elsewhere in the season too: a team that has withdrawn, a cup round that did not happen because you were knocked out, or a pool that has been redrawn.
Those matches get their own box, headed No longer at the federation on the import screen. On the dashboard it is put more briefly: a line under the changes — In addition, 2 matches are no longer listed by the federation. — with a separate button below it: Cancel 2 matches. Here too a confirmation comes first, and here too nothing happens without your tap.
Mind the word: cancelled, not deleted. The match stays in your calendar with a note that it is not going ahead, and everything attached to it is kept — the sign-ups and the carpool schedule for the away trip are still right there. Why that distinction matters and what you see back at the end of the season is explained in cancelling a match or practice instead of deleting it.
What the watch leaves alone
Sometimes you know better than the programme does. The federation has listed a hall nobody has played in for months, or you and the opponent have agreed a different start time between yourselves. Edit such a match yourself in Koach and it gets the label Nevobo · edited by you — a small text label on the match itself, in the spot where it would otherwise just say Nevobo.
From that moment on, the daily check leaves that match alone. It does not appear on the card, it is not proposed for rescheduling and it is not proposed for cancelling. That is not a side issue but the whole point of the label: someone who steps in themselves does not want the app undoing their correction the next morning. If you do want that match back on the federation's date, you put it there yourself — the watch will not do it for you.
Two more things stay out of range. Matches that have already been played are never moved: a result and statistics are attached to them, and those do not travel to a new date. And matches that have already been cancelled stay cancelled; they no longer count in the comparison.
Only for clubs playing in the Dutch league
This check talks to the Dutch volleyball federation and to nobody else. If your club plays in another country, the feature simply does not exist for you: no card appears, no alert arrives, and there is nothing you have to switch off. Every other part of Koach works exactly the same: you put your matches in the calendar yourself, and everything that follows — sign-ups, lineups, the statistics, the carpool schedule for away matches — behaves just as it does at a Dutch club.
The watch only starts running once your team is linked to a pool. That is one action at the start of the season, and a good deal simpler than it used to be: you no longer have to pick a region, because Koach works out for itself which region your pool code belongs to. Paste and done. How to find that code or link is explained in linking the league table to your volleyball app.
Does your team play in more than one pool — the regular league plus the cup, or a second half of the season in a new pool? Then you link both, and the watch checks both. There is no separate setting for it: every linked pool joins in automatically, under the team name you go by there.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
The import itself — the screen with the counts of new, updated, unchanged and skipped, and the way Koach recognises that a match was already in your calendar — is a story of its own. That one is in importing the match schedule from your pool. This article is about what happens afterwards, in the months when you no longer give it a thought.
The practical payoff is small and dull, and that is exactly the intention. Once or twice a season there comes a morning with a card on your dashboard you were not expecting. You read two lines, you tap apply, your team gets word, and the match day that would otherwise have fallen through simply goes ahead. For the rest of the season you notice nothing, because there is nothing to notice.
Frequently asked questions
I tapped apply by accident. Can that be undone?
There is no undo button. You put the match back on the old date and time yourself, just as you would with any other match. Watch what happens next, though: because you edited it by hand, it gets the 'edited by you' label and the daily check leaves it alone from then on. If you later want it on the federation's date after all, you will have to do that yourself.
I have push notifications switched off. Do I miss a change like this?
No. The notification is only one of the two routes. The card showing what differs is on the team dashboard the moment you open the app, and it stays there until somebody applies the change or cancels the match. Without notifications you hear about it later, but you do not miss it.
My alert said a new match had been added, but I can't see it on the card. How come?
The morning alert counts three kinds of differences: rescheduled matches, matches that have disappeared at the federation, and matches that are newly listed. The card on the dashboard only handles the first two, because those are about matches you already have. A new match is added through the import screen at the linked pool; it is waiting there under the new matches.
What happens if I only read the alert after the match date?
Matches whose date has already passed are no longer moved: applying skips them and leaves them exactly as they stand. The same goes for matches that already have a result attached. If you still want such a match on the federation's date, you edit it by hand.
