One player short: bringing in a player from another team
It is Tuesday evening, quarter past seven, and you are standing there with seven players. Someone messages that a player from another team in the club fancies joining in. Fine — but how do you put that in your app without her sitting among your own players for the rest of the season and skewing your attendance figures?
Guest player or training-only player: decide first
Before you tap anything, one question: is this person coming once, or is she coming regularly?
If she comes every week, you do not want a guest player but a training-only player. You put that person in your team once, from then on she is simply in your attendance list, you can assess her after a session and she stays until you take her out. How you set that up is in training-only players: joining in without being in the squad.
If it stays at that one evening, the guest player is what you are after. A guest player hangs on one session, one match or one tournament and on nothing else. Next week she is gone by herself and there is nothing to tidy up.
Choose wrongly and you only notice late. The regular fill-in you add as a guest player week after week appears in no list at all at the end of the season — even though she was there twenty times and she is exactly the player you wanted to be able to show what she had built up. The other way round, a genuinely one-off visitor created as a training-only player hangs around in your team for months because nobody ever looks at it again.
Searching within your own club
Open the session, the match or the tournament in question. There you will find a block called Guest players, with the button Add guest player. That opens a search field: Search the club by name.
Type two letters and the app searches club-wide — so not in your own squad, but across every team attached to your club. On one letter, most clubs would hand you back half the membership list, and that is no longer a search result but a membership export. If your search term produces more hits than fit in one short list, the app tells you how many more match and asks for a few extra letters. That way you know that a short list really is a short list, and not a truncated one.
For each hit you see three things: the name, the team the player is in, and her shirt number. Nothing else. No email address, no phone number, no date of birth, no parents. That is not an omission but the heart of the design, and exactly the reason this search is open to every coach in the club and not only to someone with a board role. You are planning your own session; a name and a team are enough to know who will be in the hall. Anyone who does need contact details should be looking in the club's member overview — a different door, with a different lock, and one that only opens for club admins.
Tap the line and the name is added. Add the same clubmate a second time by accident and the app refuses, telling you she is already on the list.
No button, or no results? Searching the club only works if your team has a club name. You fill that in on the team itself, if you like with your town after it or with your club's code — see linking a team to the right club. Without a club name there is simply nothing to choose from.
Attached to one session, match or tournament
The block works the same way in three places: on a session, on a match and on a tournament. What you add in one place does not show up in another. So a tournament has its own little list, and every individual match within that tournament has one too. That takes some getting used to, but it is precisely why a guest player is so lightweight. She is a note on one fixture, not a line in your member list, so there is never anything that accidentally starts counting later on.
You take her off with the cross behind the name. The app asks whether you really want to remove her, and after that it is as if she was never there. If the evening was called off or she did not turn up after all, that is two taps and nothing more: there is no attendance to reverse and no figure to correct.
Not in the club? Type the name in yourself
Below the search results is Not listed? Enter a name yourself. You type a name, then a shirt number, and that is it. Use that for anyone who does not belong to your club: a player from the opposition who joins you on a tournament day because her own squad is over-full, a former player doing one last session, someone from another club who trains with you because she lives round the corner.
After that, how she got in makes no difference at all to the app. A manually typed guest player behaves exactly like a clubmate you looked up: she sits in the block, you can take her off and she counts towards nothing. The only difference is that a clubmate also shows her own team, so that later on you still know where she came from.
Only you can see her there
The guest player block is there for the trainer and the coach. Players and parents do not see it — in their app nothing changes about the attendance list for that evening, and no extra name appears among their team-mates.
That is deliberate. The attendance list belongs to the team; who else is joining in is a decision for the coach and not something the group needs to form an opinion about. If you want everyone to know somebody is coming along, you say so in the hall or in a message to the team. It also saves privacy trouble: a name from another team does not land unasked on the phones of an entire squad.
She counts towards nothing — and that is the point
A guest player does not appear in the attendance list, not in the counter above that list, not in the attendance percentage and not in the statistics. She sits in her own little block and nowhere else.
That is not half a job but a choice, and you can see why the moment you turn it around. Suppose she did count. Your season has twenty-four sessions and she is there once: in your attendance overview she then stands at one out of twenty-four. That is exactly the number you normally use to spot someone who is drifting away from the team — except that here it is wrong, because she has not drifted away at all, she simply does not belong to the group. And every team average she is folded into gets dragged down by a line like that.
The same thing applies to matches. The availability list for a match tells you one thing: how many of your own players you will have on match day. The moment a fill-in from another team is allowed to raise that number, you no longer know it, and that is precisely when you make the wrong call about whether to postpone.
And finally the statistics. Someone who plays one set would turn up in your season list with four points, among players who were there for thirty matches. That does not compare anything, it only pollutes.
On court during live scoring
She may of course play. If you are scoring live, the match start screen has a block called Fill-ins / guests with a button to add someone: the same club search, the same option to type a name yourself. Put her there and you can place her in your lineup, substitute her on and off and tap in her points as if she belonged to the team. In the list of substitutes she carries her own label, so you can tell her apart from your own bench.
So the score is simply right: every point she scores counts for the set, and the flow of the match is complete. What does not happen is that she then turns up in your player statistics. She does not appear in the points-per-player overview afterwards, and her points are not quietly added to a team-mate's total either. They belong to that one match and nowhere else — exactly what you want, because otherwise one tournament day with two fill-ins would shift your whole picture of the season.
There is one thing the app does not settle: whether she is allowed to play in a match. A guest player in Koach is a note for you, not a registration with a competition. What applies there is in filling in for another team: can a player play in two teams?. At a training session it does not come up and you can happily let somebody join in; for a match you check first, and adding her in the app is the last step rather than the first.
Frequently asked questions
Does the coach of that other team notice when I add his player?
No. A guest player is a note on your own session, match or tournament; nothing changes in the other team and no message goes to the coach there. So the conversation with that coach is one you have yourself — a quick call or message. For a match that is sensible in any case, because whether someone may fill in is a question for the competition and not for the app.
Does a guest player use up a place in my subscription?
No. A guest player is not a player in your squad and not an account, but a name attached to one fixture. So she does not count towards the number of players or coaches in your plan, and no extra charge appears. Only when you genuinely add someone to your team does she start counting.
Does the guest player get an invitation or a notification?
No. The guest player block is only visible to the trainer and the coach; the person herself gets no message and sees nothing change in her own app. She does not need an account either. So if you want her to know what time she is expected, tell her yourself.
What if somebody I added as a guest player keeps coming back?
Then make her a training-only player in your team after all. The separate notes from the earlier evenings stay as they are and do not retroactively start counting towards attendance or statistics. If you would rather not see those earlier occasions any more, remove them with the cross; you do not have to.
