Dragon Boat Coach Guide
For crew managers, steerspeople, coaches, and club admins · updated 2 September 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.
18 pages, A4, 189 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.
Contents
- 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 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.
3. Get the sport and timezone right at creation. Both are fixed on the create-team form and there’s no edit for them in settings yet, so a typo means asking the support portal. Sport matters more than it looks: put dragon boat in it and every side label in the app reads Left and Right. Anything else and you get Port and Starboard. Weight unit is the one you can change later, in team settings, and it switches the whole crew between kilos and pounds. The maths underneath is always kilos.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Promote your co-manager to admin. Free covers two.
7. 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 |
| Profile | Reminders, waitlist promotions, the availability ping | |
| Phone | Profile | Optional, and shared with the team only if they tick the box |
| Preferred side | Paddling profile | Drives lineup balance and the warnings you see |
| Weight | Paddling profile | Drives side balance 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 — side balance 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, manages boats and regattas, changes billing. Free covers 2, Pro covers 5.
Org admin — a club-level 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.
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.
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 a problem: decide who comes and tell them yourself rather than letting the software drop someone quietly.
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, cancel a confirmed registration.
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.
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.
Guests apply to practices and race days. Team events use slots instead.
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. Cancel it for them 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, cancel their registration yourself. There’s no button for marking availability on a paddler’s behalf, and cancelling 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.
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. If two lineups on overlapping events both 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.
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. The seat map comes from the boat’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.
Warnings
Warnings recalculate every time you open the lineup, not only when you save, 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 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 distribution. Heaviest paddlers go in the engine room, benches 5–7, not the bow.
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
- Save, then print the manifest for the dock
- 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 balances weight across the two sides while honouring preferred sides, and reports back a confidence line, the crew total, and how that compares to the hull’s rated weight.
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
Fore-and-aft trim isn’t in the maths yet either, so the engine room is still your call.
Garbage in, garbage out. The bot works from the paddling profiles you have. Missing weights and unset sides produce a suggestion that looks confident and balances nothing. 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.
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.
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.
Submit manifest freezes it completely and is what you do once you’ve handed the crew list in. Reopen it if you have to, deliberately.
Print the manifest from the lineup or the manifest page. It’s the sheet for the marshalling area, where nobody should be squinting at a phone.
There’s also a blank printable lineup sheet on the site, free and with no sign-in, for the gear bag.
16. Team events and sign-up slots
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
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:
| 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.
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
- Admins can be delegated per crew, and a club admin reaches every crew
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.
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 — two lineups can’t hold the same hull across overlapping events.
- 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 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0/mo | $12/mo |
| Members | 30 | 75 |
| Admins | 2 | 5 |
| Events per month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Boats, lineups, seating bot | ✓ | ✓ |
| Regattas and race manifests | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team events with slots | ✓ | ✓ |
| Waitlists & reminders | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contact directory & export | ✓ | ✓ |
| No ads | ✓ | ✓ |
| Priority email support | ✓ |
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.
Bigger than that? There’s no Club tier on the pricing page today. A multi-crew club or a league should use the contact form, and the answer comes from a person rather than a checkout page.
Billing details:
- Paddlers never pay. Plans bill to the crew manager or club admin.
- Stripe handles payments; DragonSignUp never sees your card number
- Monthly subscription, cancel any time
- Move between Free and Pro from billing settings whenever you like, and Stripe prorates
- No annual billing yet
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. Submit the manifest once you’ve handed the crew list in.
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 cancel it for them, 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.
“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.
“I’ve run out of admin seats.” Free covers two. Pro covers five.
“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. If you’ve outgrown that or you’re running a league, 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.