It all started with a pickup Ultimate Frisbee game
that kept not happening for years.
For years we enjoyed a Wednesday and Friday pickup game. It died after the winter of 2023 and couldn't be resurrected. The problem: nobody was on the same platform. Some were on Facebook, some wanted email, some used GroupMe. Nobody could commit.
"Will there be a game tonight or no? How the heck would I know. And since I am the 'coordinator' I show up anyway. When other people show up and a game doesn't make, well those people may not show up next time. What a mess when all we want to do is have some fun."
— Wes Long, Commissioner emeritus, Silver Spring UltimateI'm a developer. So I built something — not because I wanted to start a company, but because I was tired of watching a good group of people drift apart over something as solvable as knowing if there were enough people who wanted to play to determine if the game was on. The idea was simple everyone uses text messaging, so if I could get enough phone numbers, I would just send out a mass text to 60 or more people with a specific threshold indicated that we need to call a game is on. If enough people said Yes they would play to reach the threshold, then I would announce, game is on and everyone would have confidence to attend. Simple yet beautiful.
Silver Spring Ultimate has now run 18 weeks in a row without missing a game except for rain. Same group. Same field. Just a lot less friction. The other organizers I built it for are running their own groups too — board game nights, soccer pickup, and could be so much more. SMSGO is the engine that makes it work, and the $5 pilot is the way to find out if it works for your group! The price is genuinely low. And because it delivers by text message, everyone sees the invite — which alone will dramatically improve your group's ability to coordinate.
