Dragon Boat Coach Guide

For crew managers, steerspeople, coaches, and club admins · updated 14 October 2026

Setting up a crew, running a season, and getting the right twenty people in the boat. Read it here, or take the PDF to a committee meeting.

Download the PDF

20 pages, A4, 179 KB. No sign-up needed.

Paddlers want the athlete guide instead. Send them that one at the start of the season.

Changes since this was written are on the release notes page.

What DragonSignUp does for you
First-time setup
Building your roster
Roles and permissions
Invite links
Scheduling practices and races
Recurring series
Capacity: choosing the right seat count
Waitlists
Guests and recruits
Availability: who is actually coming
Your boat house
Building a lineup
The seating bot
Race day: regattas, manifests, and sub-ins
Team events and sign-up slots
Reminders and communication
The contact directory
Running a multi-crew club
Plans, limits, and billing
Season playbook
Race-day operations
Troubleshooting
FAQ

1. What DragonSignUp does for you

The job DragonSignUp is built to remove: chasing a group chat to find out whether you have eighteen or twenty-two paddlers on Thursday, then rebuilding a seating chart by hand when two drop out.

What it handles:

One roster, current, with roles and paddling details
Practices, race days, and team events with enforced seat counts
Waitlists that promote and notify without you touching them
A boat house: your hulls, their seat counts, their weight ratings
Drag-and-drop lineups on any event, with a balance-aware suggestion and a printable manifest
Regattas and races, so a race-day lineup knows which event it belongs to
Team events with sign-up slots for meetings, volunteers, pot-lucks
Email reminders before every session, and a day-before “still good?” ping to the people holding seats

What it doesn’t handle: training programmes, video analysis, GPS, payments from paddlers, or regatta entry with your governing body. It manages who’s in the boat and when.

2. First-time setup

Setup takes about five minutes. The welcome email you get at signup lists the same steps, and your crew’s Overview page ticks them off as you go. The Overview also reminds you to add your boats. That one can wait until you seat your first lineup (section 12). The order that works:

1. Create your account at the sign-up page. Use a password or Continue with Google — either way you’re the first admin.

2. Create your crew. Name it what your paddlers call it, so “Allegheny Dragons A Boat” rather than “Team 1.” If you’ll run several crews, read section 19 before naming anything. Team name, sport and time zone can be changed later from team settings, so a typo at sign-up is not permanent; changing the time zone does not move any events. Weight unit is in the same place and switches the whole crew between kilos and pounds. The maths underneath is always kilos.

3. Add two or three people by hand — your co-manager, your steersperson, yourself. You get to check the roster fields and the paddling profile before twenty people arrive at once.

4. Post your first two weeks of practices. An empty schedule is a bad first impression. Paddlers who open the app and find nothing to sign up for don’t come back.

5. Promote your co-manager to admin. Free covers two.

6. Share the invite link. Only now, with a real schedule waiting for them.

That ordering matters more than it looks. The most common failed rollout is sending the invite link on day one, having everyone create an account, seeing nothing, and never returning. Give them something to do on arrival.

3. Building your roster

Three ways to get people on:

Invite link (use this for the bulk of your crew) — one link, they self-register, they land on your roster having filled in their own profile. No transcription errors, no chasing people for their weight.

Add member — you enter one person: email, name, role. Useful for the handful who won’t engage with a link.

Bulk add — paste a list, one member per line, in the form Email, Name, Role. Email is the only required part. This is the fastest way to import last season’s roster out of a spreadsheet.

Anyone you add gets an email asking them to set a password and finish their profile. Until they do, they sit on your roster but can’t claim a seat.

What you need from each paddler

Field	Where it lives	Why it matters
Name	Profile	Roster and lineup display; use the name you shout on the dock
Email	Profile	Reminders, waitlist promotions, the availability ping
Phone	Profile	Optional and private unless they tick the sharing box. Also where waitlist texts go, if they opt in
Preferred side	Paddling profile	Drives lineup balance and the warnings you see
Weight	Paddling profile	Drives balance side to side and front to back, and the boat’s total-weight readout
Paddler / drummer / steers	Paddling profile	Which seats they can fill
Stroke-eligible	Paddling profile	Flags who can hold the front bench

You can edit any member’s paddling profile yourself from the roster page, which covers the paddler who joins by link and never fills theirs in.

On collecting weight. It’s the field paddlers hesitate over, and how you frame it decides whether you get accurate numbers. Say what it’s for — balancing the boat side to side and front to back, and the boat’s total weight — and mention the privacy control: each paddler chooses whether coaches see their number, or whether only the app sees it while it does the balance maths. Point out that anyone who’d rather not enter one can tell you and be seated by hand. A guessed-low number hurts your lineup more than a blank field does.

Keeping it current

Roster hygiene is the boring thing that makes everything else work:

Remove paddlers who’ve left. They count against your member limit and clutter your lineups.
Chase incomplete paddling profiles in the first fortnight, not in June.
Re-confirm preferred sides at the start of each season. People change.
Ask for weight updates once mid-season, framed as housekeeping for the whole crew rather than aimed at individuals.
Export the directory to CSV or vCard when you need contacts somewhere else, such as a phone or a mail merge.

4. Roles and permissions

Your team roster has two roles, and a third sits above it at club level.

Athlete — the default. Claims seats, joins waitlists, brings guests, signs up for team events, sees the roster and the contact directory.

Admin — creates and edits events, manages the roster, builds lineups, sets up regattas and races. Free covers 2, Pro covers 5. Admins see the club’s boats and seat lineups in them, but adding or changing a boat is a club-level job (see section 12).

Club admin — the club-level role (the app also calls it org admin). Anyone holding it is treated as an admin of every team in the club, which is how a club owner reaches the B boat’s schedule without being added to its roster. Only a club admin adds, edits or retires boats. Whoever created the club is a club admin for good; to add another, open Admin → Club, find the person, and choose Make club admin. The same page takes it away again. A club admin counts as one admin toward your plan’s limit, whether or not they also run a team. The roster marks club admins so you know who to ask. Billing is club-level as well: only a club admin sees the Billing tab, and a team admin who opens it is shown the club admins’ names instead.

Steersperson is not a role. Whether someone can steer or drum lives in their paddling profile as seat eligibility, so the lineup editor knows which seats they can fill. Flag everyone who can steer, not just your usual sweep. You’ll want that list the week they’re away.

Delegating well

Single-admin crews are fragile. If you’re the only person who can post a practice, the schedule stops the week you’re on holiday. Free gives you two admins, so there’s no reason to run on one.

A workable split for a busy crew:

Head coach — lineups and race entries
Team manager — schedule, roster, team events
Steersperson — reviews and adjusts lineups on the water side

Be deliberate about who can edit events. Two people posting overlapping practices creates duplicate sign-ups and a split crew.

5. Invite links

One link per crew. Share it wherever your crew already talks: group chat, email, the club newsletter, a QR code on a poster at the boathouse.

Good practice:

Send it with context. “Here’s the link — sign up for Tuesday and Thursday this week” gets far better uptake than a bare URL.
One crew, one link. If you run several crews, keep the links straight. A paddler on the wrong roster is a five-minute fix and a confusing first experience.
Regenerate when it leaks. If a link ends up somewhere public, generate a fresh one. That kills the old link, so re-share it with anyone still joining.
Don’t rely on it alone. Expect to add the two or three people who never click links.

6. Scheduling practices and races

The three event types

Type	What it is	How people sign up
Practice	On-water or land training	One seat each, against a roster cap. Carries lineups.
Race day	Competition, linked to a regatta	One seat each. Carries lineups and race tags.
Team Events	Meeting, pot-luck, volunteer shift, social	Named slots instead of a seat count

Each event needs a title, date and time, location, and (for practice and race day) a seat count. Add detail in the description: meet time versus on-water time, what to bring, where to park at an unfamiliar venue. Paste a full web address (one starting with https://) and paddlers can tap it on the event page, which suits a parking map or a race schedule.

Meet time versus water time. Set the event time to when you want people there, and say so in the description. “6:00pm — on the water at 6:15, be at the dock by 5:45” prevents the slow drift where half the crew arrives as you’re pushing off.

Races and regattas

Create these as far ahead as you can. Race sign-up tells you whether you have a crew before entry deadlines, which is the whole point.

Put the venue, race times, arrival time, uniform, and what the club is providing in the description. Regatta days usually want a matching team event for volunteer shifts (see section 16), and a regatta record if you want per-race lineups (see section 15).

Past events stay on the calendar

An event stays visible for 72 hours after it starts. A 7pm practice is still on the schedule at 7pm, and still there the next morning when you’re fixing the roster or checking who came. Past events show dimmed. Nothing has been deleted.

Cancellations

Cancel or update the event in the app when weather kills a practice. Everyone signed up gets an email, and paddlers who can see it on the schedule stop asking in the group chat.

7. Recurring series

Set up your Tuesday/Thursday pattern once and it generates dates through the season. Paddlers sign up for each date separately, which is deliberate: you get a real headcount per session rather than a season-long assumption. Tell your crew this in week one. It’s the single most common misunderstanding.

Your events page lists Recurring series above the dated events. That’s where you change when a series stops, or clear the end date so it keeps running. Open a series to edit the rule itself.

Dates are generated about 60 days ahead. A series ending in September will not show September dates in June, and that’s working correctly. The series card shows both the last generated date and the end date so you can tell the two apart.

An empty calendar doesn’t mean the series has finished. Check the end date on the series card before you rebuild anything.

Deleting or moving a generated date sticks. A date you delete stays deleted; the nightly generator won’t put it back.

8. Capacity: choosing the right seat count

Seat count is enforced, which makes it a real lever rather than a suggestion. Guests count against it too.

Standard boat: 20 paddlers + drummer + steersperson. Small boat: 10 paddlers + drummer + steersperson.

Setting it above boat capacity. Plenty of coaches set practice capacity at 24 for a 20-seat boat, rotating paddlers through and resting a few each piece. Good for training, bad for races.

Setting it exactly. For races, set the real number. You want the waitlist doing its job rather than three extra paddlers on the dock and an awkward conversation.

Setting it low. If one boat is going out and you have a large crew, a hard cap plus a waitlist is fairer and clearer than first-come chaos.

Adjusting mid-week. Raising capacity promotes people off the waitlist straight away. Lowering it below current sign-ups is blocked until you free the seats. Decide who comes, tell them yourself, then use Remove beside their name on the admin event page.

9. Waitlists

When an event fills, the next paddler joins an ordered waitlist. When someone cancels, the top of the list moves into the seat and gets an email within the same second.

What this means for you:

You don’t manage the queue. No re-indexing, no double-bookings, no “who was next?”
Your headcount is accurate at any moment
Late cancellations produce late promotions, which is the one weak point

You can reorder the waitlist from the admin event page with the up/down arrows, for when someone has a genuine claim on the next seat. Reordering changes the queue; it never promotes anyone straight into the boat. To free a seat, use Remove beside a confirmed paddler on the admin event page. The next person on the waitlist moves up. The paddler you removed gets an email saying their organiser took them off, and they can sign up again while there’s room.

On late promotions. A cancellation ninety minutes before a practice promotes someone who is probably commuting and not reading email. Software can’t fix that; culture can. Say it at the start of the season: cancel as soon as you know, not the night before. Crews that internalise this run noticeably fuller boats.

Point people at waitlist texts as well. It’s a checkbox on their own profile, and a text gets read on the way to training when an email doesn’t. Promotions are the only thing we text about.

Read the waitlist as a signal. A waitlist that never empties means you should be running a second boat or adding sessions. A waitlist that never forms on race day means your entries are at risk. Cheapest attendance analytics you have — check it weekly.

10. Guests and recruits

Two ways someone who isn’t on the roster ends up in the headcount.

You add a recruit. From the admin event page, add a named guest to a practice. Use it for the person who came to a taster session and hasn’t joined yet, so the boat’s headcount is honest before you build a lineup.

A member brings a +1. A confirmed paddler can add a named guest to their own sign-up.

Both consume a seat from the roster cap, both show in “Guests & recruits” on the admin page, and both disappear from the form once the event is full. Guests don’t hold a paddling profile and never appear in the lineup editor, so anyone you plan to seat needs a real roster entry.

On team events, guests don’t take a slot. A pot-luck or volunteer sheet counts dishes and shifts, so a guest adds to the “coming” count on the admin page and the slots stay open for your crew. You can add a guest to a full sheet, and removing one moves nobody up the waitlist. Paddlers add their own once they’ve claimed a slot.

11. Availability: who is actually coming

Signing up is saying you’re coming. There’s no second RSVP to chase, and the admin event page shows a tally card reading, for example, “18 / 20 going” against the people who hold seats.

The day-before ping. About 24 hours out, everyone holding a confirmed seat gets a short “still good?” email with a one-tap link. No login. Waitlisted paddlers and people who never signed up get nothing, because there’s no seat for them to confirm.

A seat-holder gets two answers, not three. Still coming, or give up the spot. “Maybe” and “not going” used to sit there and did real damage: an athlete marked themselves out, believed they were out, and went on holding a seat the waitlist couldn’t reach while your roster still listed them. Giving up the spot cancels the registration properly, so the next person on the waitlist moves up and gets their email.

Watch for the “seat held” flags on your roster. A paddler who marked themselves as maybe or not coming before that option was removed still shows on your roster, badged, because their seat stays taken until the registration is actually cancelled. Use Remove beside their name and the waitlist can reach the seat. The lineup editor warns you if you seat one of them.

When someone texts you instead of answering the ping, take them off yourself with Remove on the admin event page. There’s no button for marking availability on a paddler’s behalf, and removing them is the thing that frees the seat anyway.

12. Your boat house

Boats belong to the club, not to one crew, so every team in the club picks from the same list. Admin → Boats.

Who can change the list. Every team admin sees the boats and uses them in lineups. Adding a hull, editing it, or retiring it needs a club admin, and the Boats page says so when you don’t hold that role. If your club hasn’t entered its boats yet, ask the club admin to add them, or seat the lineup in a host-provided hull in the meantime.

Each boat carries a name, a type, and a seat count. Types cover Dragon boat 20 and Dragon boat 10, the rowing shells (8+, 4+, 4-, 4x, 2x, 2-, 1x), and Custom for anything else. Hull weight, rated crew weight, weight class, and notes are optional, and the rated crew weight is what the seating bot compares your crew against.

Each one also has a status: active, maintenance, or retired. Retiring a hull takes it out of the boat picker when you build a lineup, which is what you want for last season’s boat rather than deleting it and orphaning the lineups it’s attached to. Maintenance is a note to yourselves; it still shows in the picker.

One hull, one time window, at practice. If two practice lineups on overlapping events point at the same boat, the app blocks the second. That’s the check that catches the A boat and the women’s crew both planning to use the same hull at 6pm on Thursday. Race days are exempt: each heat is its own lineup on the one event, and the same hull runs them all.

Boats you don’t own. At a regatta you paddle the host’s boat, and it has no place in your boat house. When you create a lineup or attach a hull to one, the picker lists a Host-provided hull group under your own boats. Pick the size and you get the seat map, the balance panel and the seating bot as usual. The rated crew weight readout stays blank, since nobody has told the app what that hull is rated for.

13. Building a lineup

A lineup hangs off an event — any event, not only a race. Build one every practice if it’s useful.

From the admin event page, or from the Coach tab if you want to skip the drilling, create a lineup, give it a name, and attach a boat, or a host-provided hull if you’re racing in someone else’s (see section 12). The seat map comes from the hull’s type: two sided columns (Left and Right for dragon boat, Port and Starboard for rowing) plus the special seats that hull needs — drummer and steers for a dragon boat, cox for a coxed shell. Sculling boats get one plain column.

Drag paddlers from the rail on the right onto seats. Drag a seated paddler back to the rail to take them out, or onto another seat to swap. The rail shows each athlete’s availability and preferred side, so you’re not guessing.

The balance panel

Above the seat map, the editor shows the boat’s balance. It updates each time you move a paddler, so you see the result before you save.

Three totals. Crew weight, seats filled, and average weight.
Left / Right. The weight on each side and the split as a percentage.
Front / Back. Bow against stern, counting distance as well as weight. A paddler on bench 1 sits far from the middle of the boat and tips the bow more than the same paddler on bench 5. The front can hold fewer kilos than the back and still read front heavy. Your drummer and steersperson count too, at the two ends.
Engine room. Tells you whether your heavier paddlers sit in the middle benches, are spread from bow to stern, or sit toward the ends. It stays quiet until six paddlers are seated.
Center of gravity. A boat outline with a dot. Inside the dashed box, the boat is within 5% of even on both axes. Outside it, the dot turns into a ring and a line shows which way the weight has drifted.

Each reading gets a tick when it’s within 5% of even and a warning triangle when it isn’t. A one-line strip with both splits stays at the top of the screen while you scroll down the benches.

Paddlers with no weight entered count at the average of the paddlers who have one, and the totals show ≈. If nobody in the boat has a weight, the panel balances by headcount and shows no kilos. If a new crew’s boat reads wrong, check for missing weights first. The panel tells you how many.

Paddlers who hide their weight. When one is seated, the panel shows percentages and leaves out every weight total. With live totals you could work out their number by moving them in and out of the boat, and they chose not to share it.

Warnings

Warnings recalculate each time you move a paddler and each time you open the lineup, and none of them block you:

Side imbalance, left against right
A paddler seated off their preferred side
A paddler in the boat who cancelled, or who’s marked as not coming

Hard errors do block: too many rowers for the hull, the same person in two seats, someone who isn’t on the team, a side on a seat that has no side, and, at practice, a boat already committed to an overlapping event.

Treat warnings as information. Seating someone off-side to balance the boat is a normal coaching decision; the warning makes it a decision rather than an accident.

What a balanced boat needs

Side balance. Left and right should be close in total weight and comparable in power. An imbalanced boat crabs and the steersperson fights it the whole race.

Trim. Front to back. The hull is widest in the middle and carries weight best there, so your heaviest paddlers go in the engine room, benches 5–7, and your lightest at the ends. The Front / Back and Engine room readings check both.

Technical seats matched to ability:

Seats	Benches	What you need there
Stroke	1–2	Metronomic timing, calm under pressure, ignores everything behind them
Front	3–4	Clean technique, transmits the rate back
Engine room	5–7	Raw power; timing matters less
Back / rocket	8–10	Power plus timing; hardest seats to follow from

Practical workflow

Close sign-ups mentally a day or two before the event
Create the lineup and attach the boat
Fix the technical seats — stroke pair, drummer, steers — by hand first
Hit Suggest and let it fill the engine room, or drag the rest yourself
Read the warnings and the balance panel
Save, then Print manifest for the dock. The button is on the lineup in every state
Expect to revise it on the morning

Athletes don’t see lineups in the app. The lineup editor and the manifest are admin surfaces, so tell your crew their bench and side yourself: print the manifest, post it in the group chat, or read it out on the dock. Paddlers do see their own preferred side on the roster, which is enough for them to spot a mistake in their profile before you build around it.

14. The seating bot

Suggest proposes a lineup. It puts stroke-eligible paddlers on bench 1, your heaviest paddlers in the middle benches and your lightest at the ends. Then it balances the boat left to right and front to back, keeping paddlers on the side they asked for. It reports back a confidence line, the crew total, the front/back split, and how the crew compares to the hull’s rated weight.

It seats only people who are going: anyone signed up for the event or marked as coming, plus anyone you’ve already placed by hand. A paddler who hasn’t signed up, or who marked themselves not coming, stays out of the boat. If that leaves seats empty, the suggestion tells you.

Nothing commits. Apply loads the suggestion into the seat map, and it’s still yours to edit; you save it or you don’t.

What it’s good at: the tedious arithmetic. Balancing twenty weights across two sides while respecting preferred sides is genuinely fiddly, and it does it instantly and correctly.

What it can’t know:

That two paddlers can’t sit together
That your stroke has been off form for three weeks
That someone’s shoulder means bench 6 and nothing further forward
That you’re trialling a new stroke pair this Thursday
Race tactics, and everything else that lives in your head

It works from weight and has no measure of power, so it fills the engine room with your heaviest paddlers. If your strongest paddler is a light one, seat them yourself.

Garbage in, garbage out. The bot works from the paddling profiles you have. A paddler with no weight counts at the crew average, so a boat full of blanks gets balanced by headcount and nothing more. The suggestion tells you how many weights are missing. If the output feels wrong, check profile completeness before blaming the algorithm.

On privacy. The suggestion reports crew totals and side totals, never one paddler’s number. A paddler who sets their weight to system-only is still balanced correctly; you just don’t see the figure. Once they’re seated, the balance panel drops its weight totals for the same reason.

15. Race day: regattas, manifests, and sub-ins

Create the regatta under Admin → Regattas: name, location, dates. Add the races you’re entering, each with a category (Mixed-500m and so on), a boat size, and a time. Then link the race-day event to the regatta, and tag each lineup with the race it’s for. A three-race Saturday is three lineups on one event, each labelled.

Boats on race day. Every heat’s lineup can use the same hull; the double-booking check in section 12 is for practices. When the regatta supplies the boats, pick a Host-provided hull from the boat picker. When you trailered your own, pick it from your boat house as usual.

Cross-crew fill-ins. Once the event is linked to a regatta, the pool of paddlers you can seat widens from the one team to the whole club, so the B boat’s spare can fill your bench 7 without joining your roster. Link the regatta when you create the event; practices stay team-only either way.

Lock the lineup once you’re happy. A locked lineup allows single-seat sub-ins and nothing else: drag someone onto a seat to replace the occupant, drag a seat out to remove them, and each change saves as you make it. Reordering needs an unlock. That’s the day-of behaviour you want when someone doesn’t show at 6:40am.

Subbing someone out also marks them out for that event, on the assumption they didn’t show. If you were only shuffling the boat and they’re standing right there, the lineup’s warning box offers Clear the mark beside their name. Their seat was never affected either way; the mark only tells the seating bot and the roster what to expect.

Print manifest opens the sheet for the marshalling area, where nobody should be squinting at a phone. It’s on the lineup whether the boat is still open, locked, or submitted, and it saves any seats you haven’t saved yet before it opens. On that page, Email to me sends the same sheet to your own inbox, so from the dock you can forward it to the officials or drop it in the crew chat without printing anything.

There’s also a blank printable lineup sheet on the site, free and with no sign-in, for the gear bag.

Team events use named slots instead of a single seat count. Paddlers claim the specific slot they can cover, and can claim more than one. Each slot has its own limit, and each claim can carry a short note.

Use them for:

Regatta volunteer shifts — marshalling, water station, tent set-up and tear-down, boat loading. Most regattas require a volunteer quota from each club, and this is the cleanest way to fill it.
Pot-lucks and socials — slots for mains, sides, desserts, drinks, so you don’t get eleven bowls of pasta salad
Season meetings, AGMs, coaching clinics
Boathouse working parties and kit maintenance

Getting slots filled:

Post them early, especially regatta volunteer shifts
Name slots concretely: “Marshalling, 8:00–10:00am, north dock” beats “Volunteer shift 1”
Post them at the same time as the race sign-up, so people claim both in one sitting
Chase the gaps a week out rather than the night before

Deleting a slot people have claimed. The app won’t delete a slot with sign-ups in it. Use Remove beside each person in that slot, then delete it. Removing someone from one slot leaves their other slots on the event alone, and their email names the slot they lost.

Unfilled volunteer slots are the thing that lands on one committee member at 6am on race day. Visible, claimable slots spread that load, and most crews find people will take a shift when it’s specific and easy to claim.

17. Reminders and communication

Automatic emails. You don’t configure or send any of these:

Email	When
Event reminder	~24 hours before, to everyone signed up
“Still good?” availability ping	~24 hours before, to confirmed seat-holders
Waitlist promotion	The moment a seat opens for them
Sign-up confirmation, waitlisted notice, cancellation	On the action
Bulk sign-up digest	After a paddler claims several practices at once
Event cancelled	When you cancel
Welcome, added-to-team, password reset, sign-in link	Account events

What they replace: the reminder you’d otherwise post in the group chat twice a week.

What they don’t replace: actual conversation. DragonSignUp isn’t a messaging platform. Keep your group chat for coaching notes, weather calls, and everything else.

Use the event description as your notice board. Kit, meet times, parking, tide, what to bring. It sits with the event, gets read at sign-up time, and doesn’t scroll away.

Tell paddlers to whitelist the sender. A paddler whose email lands in spam misses waitlist promotions, and they’ll assume the app is broken rather than check their filters.

18. The contact directory

Every member can open the team directory and see teammates’ names and email addresses. Phone numbers show only for members who ticked the sharing box on their own profile, which matters because you often type someone’s number in for them when you add them.

Admins can export the directory as a CSV for a spreadsheet or a vCard for a phone’s contacts app.

Reports. Any member can tap Report next to a teammate in the directory. As an admin you get an email with the reason and anything they wrote, but not who sent it. DragonSignUp gets a copy with the reporter’s name and replies to them within 24 hours. If you need to act, take the person off an event from its roster, or remove them from the team on the Roster page. You don’t get a copy of a report about yourself.

19. Running a multi-crew club

One club account runs several crews: A boat, B boat, a masters squad, a recreational squad, a women’s crew. One subscription covers them all, since billing sits at club level.

Structure:

Each crew has its own roster, schedule, sign-ups, and lineups
Boats and regattas are shared club-wide
Paddlers can belong to more than one crew, and their profile follows them
Each crew carries a type (Sport, Community, BCS, ACS, General, or a word of your own), set when you create it. A crew’s admins change it in that crew’s settings, and a club admin can set every crew’s type from the Crews list on Admin → Club. It tells paddlers and the club what kind of crew it is; it does not change how sign-ups work
Admins can be delegated per crew, and a club admin reaches every crew. Crews you aren’t on appear in the team menu under Other crews (club admin) and open on their admin pages
Everyone in the club can see every crew’s schedule and who’s going to each practice, read-only. Sign-ups, the contact directory, lineups and weights stay with the crew’s own roster
Open seats for club members is a club-wide setting on Admin → Club (club admins only, off by default): 24, 48 or 72 hours before a practice, a club member who isn’t on that crew can take a seat that is still open. Only an empty seat, never a waitlist place, and whoever takes it keeps it. They show on the roster and the lineup rail with their own crew’s name, and their side and weight follow them so you can seat them like anyone else

Naming. Set a convention before you create the second crew, because renaming later confuses everyone. “Club Name — A Boat” and “Club Name — Masters” scale better than nicknames only the committee understands.

Delegate per crew. Give each crew’s manager admin on their own crew. Central control of every schedule becomes a bottleneck by week three.

Name a second club admin. The person who created the club is its only club admin until someone else is made one, on Admin → Club. Do it before the season starts, so billing, boats and the other crews don’t depend on one phone.

Watch for these:

Event collisions. Nothing stops a paddler claiming seats at two crews’ practices at the same time. Coordinate schedules between crew managers.
Boat collisions. The app does catch these at practice — two lineups can’t hold the same hull across overlapping practices. Race days are exempt, since every heat uses the same boat.
Shared paddlers between A and B boats. Decide the rule in advance: does A boat have first call before B boat sign-ups open? Software won’t decide this. Write it down and tell people.
Everyone on a roster is an adult. DragonSignUp is for people 18 and over, and you confirm that each time you add someone. If your club runs a junior program, keep it off the platform — there is no consent flow for under-18s and the Terms don’t allow their details here.
The wrong invite link. With several crews this is the most common support issue you’ll field. Label links clearly when you share them.

20. Plans, limits, and billing

Every feature is on every plan, Free included. Paid tiers raise limits.

	Free	Pro	Club	Club Plus
Price	$0	$180/year, or $19/month	$360/year	$720/year
Members	30	75	200	500
Admins	2	8	20	50
Events per month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Boats, lineups, seating bot	✓	✓	✓	✓
Regattas and race manifests	✓	✓	✓	✓
Team events with slots	✓	✓	✓	✓
Waitlists & reminders	✓	✓	✓	✓
Contact directory & export	✓	✓	✓	✓
No ads	✓	✓	✓	✓
Priority email support		✓	✓	✓
Personal setup			✓	✓, for each team

Which plan you need. Free holds one crew: 30 members covers a 22-seat boat with subs, and there’s no cap on how often you practise. The two things that push a crew to Pro are roster size and wanting more than two admins.

Running several crews? Club holds 200 members and 20 admins, which is two co-captains on each of several crews with seats left for club officers. Club Plus holds 500 and 50. Both are on the Billing tab next to Pro, billed once a year. If your club pays by cheque or bank transfer, write to us through the contact form and we send your treasurer an invoice with 30 days to pay instead. With Club we import your roster and set up your first season with you. With Club Plus we do that for each team and check in after your first month.

Bigger than 500 members? A facility or a league gets a plan put together for it. Use the same contact form.

Billing details:

Paddlers never pay. Plans bill to the crew manager or club admin.
Stripe handles payments; DragonSignUp never sees your card number
Pay for Pro by the year or by the month. Club and Club Plus bill once a year. Cancel any time
Paying for Pro monthly? Switch to yearly from the Billing tab. It shows what your card is charged today before you confirm
Move between plans from the Billing tab whenever you like. Moving up charges the difference for the rest of your term, and the dialog shows the figure before you confirm. Moving down credits the unused part against your next invoice

No ads on any plan, free included, and rosters aren’t sold or shared with advertisers. Worth saying to your crew when you roll it out, because it’s a fair question with a clean answer.

21. Season playbook

Pre-season

Roll the roster over: remove people who’ve left, confirm returners
Re-confirm preferred sides and weights for the whole crew at once
Check your boat house: hulls current, retired ones marked retired
Make sure at least two people can post a practice
Post the first month of practices
Post known race dates as early as you have them, provisionally if need be
Check your roster against the 30-member Free ceiling

Early season

Chase incomplete paddling profiles hard in the first fortnight
Set expectations: sign up weekly, cancel early, answer the day-before ping
Build a lineup you’re happy with and rebuild from it each week
Watch waitlists — a persistent one means more sessions or another boat

Mid-season

Refresh weights once, framed as crew-wide housekeeping
Post race-day volunteer slots alongside race sign-ups, well ahead
Review attendance: who’s consistently waitlisted and never getting in?
Adjust capacity if your rotation isn’t working

Race build-up

Confirm crew numbers well before entry deadlines
Create the regatta and its races, then link the event
Build and lock the lineup early enough for paddlers to plan
Post the volunteer team event at the same time as the race
Chase unfilled volunteer slots a week out

Off-season

Drop to Free if you’re dormant over winter. It’s prorated and reversible.
Set an end date on your recurring series rather than deleting them
Keep the roster for next year
Post a season-planning team event while people still remember what went wrong

22. Race-day operations

Two weeks out — race sign-up closed, crew numbers confirmed, entries in.

One week out — lineup built and printed. Volunteer slots chased. Description updated with venue, arrival time, uniform, parking.

The night before — final lineup after any late drops, then Lock it. Re-check volunteer coverage for the early shifts.

The morning of — expect changes. A no-show, a boat that isn’t the size you expected, a steersperson reading conditions differently. Sub-in on the locked lineup from your phone; each change saves as you make it. Print or email the manifest and hand it in; the lineup stays locked, so a late sub-in is one drag and the sheet is one more print.

On the dock, you override everything. The app is a planning tool. When reality and the seating chart disagree, reality wins, and nobody should be arguing with a phone at a marshalling area.

Afterwards — note what worked while it’s fresh. The event stays on your calendar for three days, so you can fix the roster the morning after.

23. Troubleshooting

“Paddlers aren’t signing up.” Usually one of three things: they never finished registration, reminders are going to spam, or nobody told them recurring practices need weekly sign-up. Check profile completeness first.

“My recurring series has stopped creating dates.” Open the series on the events page and read its end date. Dates are generated about 60 days out, so a gap further ahead than that is normal.

“An event vanished from the calendar.” Events drop off 72 hours after they start. Anything more recent is still there, dimmed.

“An event I deleted came back.” Delete it once more. Occurrences removed before mid-2026 return one final time; the second delete sticks.

“Someone’s on the wrong crew.” They used another crew’s invite link. Move them from the roster.

“The seating suggestion is nonsense.” Check for missing weights and unset preferred sides on the roster page. The bot balances what it’s given.

“I can’t attach a boat to this lineup.” Another lineup on an overlapping event already holds that hull. Free it there, or pick a different boat.

“Someone told me they’re out but the seat is still taken.” Marking a paddler as not coming leaves their seat held. They need to cancel, or you use Remove beside their name on the admin event page, before the waitlist can reach it.

“I need to cut capacity below current sign-ups.” Don’t do it quietly. Decide who’s coming and tell the people affected. Then use Remove beside each of them on the admin event page; the app won’t lower the count until the seats are free.

“A paddler says they never got their waitlist promotion.” Check the email on their profile, and check whether the promotion went out close to the event start. Both are common. If they’re usually away from their inbox when seats open, have them turn on waitlist texts on their profile.

“I’ve run out of admin seats.” Free covers two. Pro covers eight, Club 20, and Club Plus 50.

“My roster is full.” Free tops out at 30 members. Remove paddlers who’ve left, or move to Pro.

“Two managers posted the same practice twice.” Delete the duplicate and move sign-ups to the surviving event. Then agree who owns the schedule.

“A paddler wants to leave or delete their account.” Remove them from the roster if they’re only leaving your crew. If they want the account gone, they do it themselves from their profile. You can’t do it for them, and it no longer goes through support. Deletion releases every seat they hold across the club, so the waitlists move up the moment they confirm.

One case where it stops them: if they’re the only admin of a team that still has other members, deletion refuses and names the team. Promote another admin first and it goes through.

24. FAQ

Do paddlers pay anything? No, ever. Plans bill to the manager or club admin.

Is the free plan ad-supported? No. No ads on any plan, and rosters aren’t sold or shared with advertisers.

What do I give up on Free? Headroom. Every feature works, including boats, lineups, the seating bot, and regattas. You’re capped at 30 members and 2 admins.

Is there a limit on how many practices I can post? No. Events are unlimited on every plan, including Free.

Does the seating bot pick my lineup? It suggests one. You apply, edit, or ignore it, and you still have to save. Nothing commits without a coach.

Can paddlers see the lineup? Not in the app. Print the manifest or post it in your group chat.

Can I run non-paddling events? Yes. Team events use sign-up slots for meetings, volunteer shifts, and pot-lucks.

Can I switch plans mid-season? Yes, any time from billing settings, prorated by Stripe.

Can one person be on two crews? Yes, with one profile and separate schedules.

Can I stop someone signing up for an event? Capacity is the main lever. For selection-based entry, set capacity at the real number and manage the waitlist deliberately.

Do recurring practices auto-enrol paddlers? No. Each date needs its own sign-up. Tell your crew this in week one.

How far ahead should I post races? As early as you have dates. Race sign-up is how you find out whether you have a crew before the entry deadline.

What about a Club plan for multiple crews? One account already runs several crews on Pro. When you outgrow 75 members or 8 admins, Club and Club Plus are on the Billing tab (section 20). Running a league or a facility? Use the contact form and tell us what you need.

Where do I see what changed in the app? Release notes lists every change and the day it went live. Worth a look if this guide describes something differently from what you’re seeing. The PDF in your downloads folder ages; that page doesn’t.