If you run a sports club, you already know what the admin load feels like. Game reminders to parents. Membership payment follow-ups. Weekly schedule emails. Booking confirmations. Grant deadlines that sneak up on you.
None of it is complicated. But all of it takes time. And when you're also the coach, the manager, and the person who picks up the cones after training, that time adds up fast.
At Talata Basketball in Copenhagen, we had 53 members, two coaches, and zero admin staff. The admin was eating 20 to 25 hours a week across the coaching team. Time that should have gone into practice planning, player development, and actually coaching.
We fixed it with Google. Not a new app, not a subscription tool. Just the Google account we already had, and a set of automations built with Google Apps Script. Free, runs in the background, works while your computer is off.
Here are the five things we automated first, and how you can do the same for your club.
1. Membership payment reminders
Automatically sends a payment reminder to any member whose dues haven't been logged by a set date each month. The email includes the amount, how to pay (MobilePay number, bank transfer, whatever you use), and a deadline.
Before we automated this, one of our coaches would spend Sunday evenings cross-referencing a spreadsheet with the MobilePay inbox to figure out who hadn't paid. Then writing individual emails. Then following up a week later.
Now the script checks the payment log each month, identifies anyone who hasn't paid, and sends the reminder automatically. We haven't manually chased a payment in months. Collection rate went up, not down, because the reminders are consistent and go out on time every single time.
This alone is worth the setup. For a club with 50 members, manual payment chasing can easily eat 4 to 5 hours a month.
2. Game day emails to parents
Reads your Google Calendar, finds any event tagged as a game, and sends an email to the parent list 24 hours before tip-off. Date, time, location, what to bring, any special instructions. Sent automatically, every time.
Parents want to know when and where. That's it. But writing the same email format 30 times a season, making sure it goes out on time, not missing anyone because someone joined late, is exactly the kind of task that sounds small until you're doing it at 11 PM the night before a game.
The automation pulls the game details straight from your calendar event. If you update the time or location in Calendar, the email reflects that. You don't need to touch it.
For clubs with multiple teams, this scales. One trigger per team, one parent group per team. Set it up once and it runs for the whole season.
3. Booking confirmations
When a gym or facility booking gets confirmed, a structured confirmation email goes out to relevant coaches and staff. Training time, hall name, address, any notes. Logged to a shared Google Sheet at the same time.
Booking a gym in Copenhagen means dealing with multiple venues, multiple contact people, and confirmation emails that arrive in different formats. Before automation, coaches were hunting through their inboxes before every session to double-check the booking details.
With a simple script, confirmations get processed when they arrive, the key details get extracted, and a clean summary goes to everyone who needs it. Nobody shows up to the wrong hall anymore.
4. Weekly training schedule emails
Every Friday afternoon, an email goes to your full parent or member list with the training schedule for the coming week. Sessions, times, locations, any changes. Pulled from Google Calendar, sent automatically.
This one is underrated. Parents of younger players need the schedule in advance to plan pickups, childcare, and their own week. Without a consistent weekly email, you get individual messages all week asking about times and locations.
The weekly schedule email doesn't just save you time writing it. It cuts down on the inbound messages too. Parents know the email arrives Friday. They wait for it instead of messaging you.
At Talata, this one email probably saves us 2 to 3 hours of back-and-forth every week. Multiply that over a season and it's significant.
5. Deadline alerts
Checks a Google Sheet of important deadlines every morning. Sends an alert email when a deadline is 7 days out, 3 days out, and 1 day out. Grant applications, registration windows, gym booking deadlines, board meeting prep dates.
This one is about protecting the club. Missing a DIF or DGI grant application deadline because it slipped through in a busy week is not a theoretical problem. It happens. And the cost can be tens of thousands of kroner in funding.
The system is simple. You keep one Google Sheet with a list of deadlines and dates. The script runs every morning, checks what's coming up, and sends you an email alert at 7, 3, and 1 day out. Nothing fancy. Nothing you have to log into. It just tells you what needs your attention before it's too late.
What this actually adds up to
These five automations, running together, cover most of the repetitive communication and tracking work that fills up a club manager's week. Payment chasing, game reminders, booking confirmations, weekly schedules, and deadline management. For Talata Basketball, they took the admin load from 20 to 25 hours a week down to about 2. The 2 hours that are left are the ones that actually need a person.
The tools are all free. Google Apps Script is built into every Google Workspace account. You don't install anything, you don't create new logins, and you don't move your data anywhere. Everything stays inside the Google account you already use.
The catch is that building this takes time. Setting up each script, connecting it to the right calendar and spreadsheet, testing it, fixing the edge cases. For our setup it took several weeks of evenings. Most club managers don't have that.
That's where Rhynoflow comes in
Rhynoflow builds exactly this kind of automation for Danish sports clubs, foreninger, and small businesses. We take the setup work off your plate. You tell us what's eating your time, we build the automations inside your existing Google account, and we keep them running.
No new software. No migration. No monthly per-user fees for a platform you'll use 20% of. It all runs in Google, where your data already lives.
The Forening plan starts at 1,500 DKK per month. Setup is waived until May 1, 2026 for the first clients who sign on. That means you pay only the monthly, no setup cost, and you're automated before the spring season is in full swing.
See what we'd build for your club.
Book a free 30-minute call. We look at your actual setup and tell you exactly what to automate first. No pitch, no pressure.
Book a Free Demoor email: [email protected]