Running an award

Setting one up

New award asks what your club plays. Picking a sport fills in the award name, the scoring, the tie-break rule and roughly how long a season is — every one of which you can change, because the preset is a starting point and not a rule.

Then:

Club name. The club, not the team. Every award you create with the same club name belongs to the same club and shares its public page and its honour board.

Award name. The team and the division, so several awards at one club stay tellable apart. "Senior Men — Division 2 Best & Fairest" beats "Best & Fairest".

Season. "2026", or "2025/26" for a winter season. Worth filling in: it is how a pasted fixture list with no years on it gets its years, and how the public page sorts your seasons.

Votes per round. Points from best downward. "3, 2, 1" is the classic: three picks, three points for the best. A single "1" is one pick each — the format for a club that votes once at the end of the season rather than every round.

This is locked once the first ballot exists. Changing the scoring mid-season would restate votes already cast, so the app refuses. Get it right now, or start again before anybody votes.

Rounds in the season. Created empty, ready for the fixture list. A guess is fine — rounds can be added, edited or left unused at any point.

If the season ends in a tie. Joint winners share it, or a countback decides it (more best-on-ground votes, then more second-place votes). Say which now; deciding after you can see the numbers is how clubs fall out.

Club clock. The time zone your deadlines mean. "Votes in by 9pm Sunday" has to mean the same thing to a committee member on holiday as to the coach, so every deadline is stored as an exact moment and shown in this zone.

The squad

Roster takes a pasted team list. One player per line; squad numbers are picked up whether they come first or last, from a spreadsheet, a team sheet or a WhatsApp message. You see exactly what the app understood before anything is saved — if a name has been misread, fix the text and watch the list follow.

Pasting the same list twice is harmless: anyone already on the roster is skipped.

Names matter more than they look. Winners appear on the public page under the names on your roster. A club that wants "Juan K." rather than a full name types that here, which keeps the decision with the people who know the players.

A player who leaves gets made inactive rather than removed. They stay off new ballots and their votes stay counted, which is right — the season they polled in already happened.

Somebody who must be removed entirely — a safeguarding matter, or a request under data protection — is a different, deliberate act on the roster page. It blanks the name and the squad number for good. The votes cast for them survive as numbers, because a count that dropped them would restate a season that has already been announced.

Running a league rather than a club? Give each player a club on the roster and every screen names them "J. Kelly (Peel)", which is what makes the two J. Kellys in the division tellable apart. Paste one club's list at a time.

The fixtures

Fixtures is where a round gets an opponent, a ground, a date and a voting window.

Paste the league's list in. Tabs, commas, columns of spaces or plain sentences all work, and round numbers, dates, opponents and grounds are picked out wherever they sit on the line. Dates are read day-first. A date with no year on it takes its year from the award's season, so a 2025/26 season puts September in one year and January in the next.

Where the fixtures land:

• Empty rounds are filled first, in order.
• Anything left over is added to the end.
• A round you have already set up is never overwritten — a fixture, a ground, a date or a window all count as work somebody has done.
• A fixture already on the list against the same opponent on the same day is skipped, so pasting the same list twice is harmless.

Voting windows. Tick the box on the import and the app works them out from the match dates: voting opens at a time you choose on the day of the match and closes a stated number of days later. Every window is shown against its fixture before anything is written.

This is the part that stops the award being a chore. A round with a window opens and closes itself — nobody has to remember on a Sunday night. There is no scheduler behind this and nothing to go wrong: a round is upcoming before its opening time, open between the two, and closed after the closing one.

A round with no window sits as upcoming until you open it by hand. That is a perfectly good way to run it, and it is what the Open voting now and Close voting now buttons are for — they do not use a different mechanism, they just move the window to now.

The voting panel

Voting panel invites the people who vote: the coach, the observers, whoever the club's rules say.

You invite by email address. They follow the link, sign in, and they are on the panel. There is no password to invent, which removes the single most common reason a volunteer never gets round to it.

They sign in whichever way the site offers: with an account they already have — Google, and possibly Microsoft or others — or by having a short code emailed to them and typing it back. The second one matters more than it sounds for a committee, because the people you most want on a panel are often the ones with a work or council address and no interest in a Google account.

An invitation is only claimable by somebody who has confirmed that email address, so an invitation sent to the wrong address cannot be picked up by whoever happens to receive it.

Each member has three separate switches:

• Voter — submits a ballot each round.
• Admin — can run the award: roster, fixtures, panel, publishing.
• Can view tally — can see the running count.

These are deliberately separate. Being an admin does not let you see the count. A club can and often should have somebody running the award who cannot look at it, and somebody who can look at it — the club president, say — who does not run anything. Every look at the tally is recorded and the log is readable by the award's admins.

Weighted ballots. If your club's rules say the coach counts double, or a guest observer half, set a weight. Halves and no finer. Anywhere a weighted result is shown, the page says so — a weighted total presented as a plain count of votes would be the app misdescribing your own rule.

While the season runs

Who has voted shows the participation grid: a tick per voter per round. Status only — never the votes. This is what you chase from.

Chasing. Two ways, and neither needs anybody's phone number:

• Send a reminder emails the voters who have not voted in an open round.
• The group chat message is a ready-made block of text to paste into wherever your club actually talks. Copy it, paste it, done. It names the round and the deadline and nothing about how anybody voted.

If the deployment has the automatic reminder configured, voters also get one "voting closes tomorrow" nudge per round without anybody doing anything.

The weekly votes post, if your club turns it on, is a ready-to-paste block with one round's votes in it. It never carries the standings — that is the whole point. A club can tell its members who polled on Saturday without telling anybody who is winning.

Votes from outside the panel

Two separate decisions, and a club can take either without the other.

Players' Player — the squad votes on each other. Each active player gets their own single-use code per round. Nobody appears on their own ballot.

Votes from outside the panel — umpires, parents, whoever is at the fence. You issue as many codes as you need and hand them out.

Both live on Voting codes, which prints. Each code appears with a QR square beside it that opens the ballot with the code already filled in, and the code itself printed next to the square — for the phone that will not scan, and for the person who would rather type.

A code is good for exactly one ballot and stops working when its round closes. Treat unused ones like the slips of paper they are; if a sheet goes astray, revoke the unused codes and issue fresh ones.

Worth saying out loud to your committee: this changes what the award is. A panel votes on what it watched for; a crowd votes on who it enjoyed. Both are real awards. They are not the same one.

Voting on paper

Not everybody has a phone, and not every ground has signal. Voting on paper prints numbered slips with the round, the fixture, the roster and a line per pick. People fill them in and hand them back; you type them up afterwards, working from the bag rather than from a screen — a squad number, a surname, or a full name all resolve.

An ambiguous entry is refused rather than guessed. A club with a Callister and a Corlett who both get typed as "C" is told to be specific, because somebody's award depends on it.

Slips carry no QR code, on purpose. A slip's number is not redeemable online — it is a paper ballot, and its number is only how the club knows the slip has come back. A square that opened a page which then refused the code would be worse than no square.

Only outstanding slips reprint. Reprinting one already typed up would put a dead number back in the bag.

When something goes wrong

A ballot that should not count — a slip filled in twice, a code used by the wrong person — can be set aside, with a reason. It stops counting. It is never deleted, and the reason stays with it.

A voter who missed the deadline can be granted a late vote for a round that has closed.

A round closed too early can be reopened.

All three are recorded in the audit log, which the club's admins can read. That is the deal: the app will let you fix things, and it will not let you fix them quietly.

Finishing the season

Finish the season after count night. It opens the season's record to everyone on the panel and lets you put the award on the club's public page.

It cannot be undone. A finished award can be reopened by nobody — that is precisely what allows its record to be shown to people who were never given tally access. You type the word to confirm.

Voting is unaffected either way: rounds open and close on their own times regardless.

The club's public page

Give the club a short address and its page lives at /c/that-address. Anyone can read it, with no account.

Publishing is per award and off by default. Only a finished award can be published — the app will not put a running count in public, and cannot be made to.

Beside each award is a How the count works link: a plain page explaining that award's scoring, who voted, who could win it, how the tally was kept and what happens when a ballot is set aside. It carries no vote and no total. It is the page to send somebody who thinks the award was a stitch-up.

The page does not have to wait for a finished season. Type in the honour board — every winner the club has had, going back as far as anybody knows — and the page is worth linking to today rather than in eight months. Those entries sit in their own section, marked as the club's own record rather than a count this app made, and nothing can promote one into a counted award.

Posters prints QR posters for the noticeboard: the club's page, the live count while one is running, and a link that starts an award for the next team along.

A word about small panels. Publishing a result reveals how the votes fell — that is what a result is. On a two-person panel, unanimity is visible from the aggregate. That is a property of announcing a winner at all rather than a leak, but know it before you publish an award with a very small panel.

Next season

Start next season makes a new award carrying the squad, the panel and their roles and weights, the scoring, the club clock and your minimum-games rule. Fixtures come across as opponents and grounds only — without last season's match dates or voting windows, because those were last season's.

Last season is untouched: its ballots, its record and its place on the public page all stay exactly as they were. Rolling the same season over twice is refused rather than quietly duplicated.

The season name is guessed where the format is recognisable — 2026 becomes 2027, 2024/25 becomes 2025/26 — and left blank where it is not.

Several trophies on one night? Add a sibling award instead, and the squad and the panel come with it.

Handing it on, and giving up

Hand over makes somebody else the admin. Step down removes you, provided somebody else can still run it — an award is never allowed to end up with nobody able to administer it.

Deleting a season removes it and everything in it, for good. You type the award's name back to confirm, and the check is in the database rather than only in the form. If it was the club's last award, the club goes with it.