Here are 3 key insights in 3 minutes on the 3rd day of the 3rd week at 3:33 PM that will hopefully make you want to do one of 3 things: Think more about it, share it with others, or do something with it.
It's the third week of May
Somewhere on my desk there's a cash envelope with "camp payment — Tyler??" scrawled across it. I've got four calendars open trying to work out which one is telling the truth. Two coaches are waiting on me. Budget's due Thursday.
Here's the thing I had to make peace with a long time ago: this isn't a bad week. This is just May. Every athletic director I know hits the same wall at the same time, and most of us were trained to put our heads down and power through it. Eventually I figured out that powering through wasn't a strategy. It was just exhaustion with better branding. So here are three things that genuinely moved the needle for me.
1. Ditch the paper trap
For longer than I'd care to admit, summer camp registration at my school ran on a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a whole lot of optimism. We took paper forms. We chased down cash. And every single year we'd show up to day one of camp with a roster that said seventeen kids and a parking lot that said twenty-three. Parents swore they'd turned in the form. Half the time they had, we just couldn't find it.
I used to quietly blame the families. The honest answer is that the families were fine. The system was the problem. Paper gets lost. Cash disappears into desk drawers. A spreadsheet only reflects reality up to the last person who remembered to update it. By camp week, nobody had the same headcount, and nobody was technically wrong—because nobody actually knew.
The summer we finally moved registration online, the whole thing shifted. One form. One payment link. One confirmation. No sticky notes, no envelopes, no "I'm pretty sure my kid was signed up." The May pile-up didn't vanish overnight, but we stopped feeding it problems we'd created ourselves.
Takeaway: If you do one thing before school lets out, move a single summer program to online registration. Not all of them. One.
2. End the shadow calendar problem
At one point I was personally keeping a wall calendar, a shared Google Calendar, and a master schedule that lived in a spreadsheet. All three were slightly different. None of them was the "real" one, which meant all of them were lies of omission. We were running three versions of reality and acting surprised when things kept slipping through the cracks.
I call it the shadow calendar problem, and it's everywhere in athletics. Every coach keeps their own. Every office has its own copy. The conflicts stay invisible right up until they go off — usually at the worst possible moment, in front of the most people.
The fix was almost insultingly simple: we picked one calendar, declared it official, and required everything else to match it. Simple isn't the same as easy, though. It only works if one person owns that calendar and everyone else gives up their private version — and that second part takes some convincing. But the first summer we ran it clean, three scheduling conflicts we'd fought every single year just… didn't happen. Not because we got smarter. Because we finally stopped working off different maps.
Takeaway: Name your official calendar this week, and tell your staff clearly which one it is.
3. Set up August now, not in August
Most of us don't build August in May. We survive the pile-up, close out the year, and hand the same landmines to whoever walks through the door in July. The late physicals. The rosters nobody can vouch for. The registration scramble the week before fall practice. All of that gets built — or left unbuilt — right now, in the exact weeks we feel least like building anything.
The programs that glide into August aren't grinding harder in the fall. They just did a handful of things differently before summer started. Fall registration opened early. The master calendar got locked and shared. Communication went out before the dead period, not after.
For me, the long-term version of this was putting registration, scheduling, and parent communication in one place instead of three systems that never talked to each other. That's the work we eventually did with Bound, and the practical payoff was that we stopped rebuilding the same mess every May. The pile-up got smaller because we quit recreating it.
Takeaway: Pick one thing you're tired of doing by hand, and fix it before you leave for the summer.
One. Not three.
If you take anything from this, take one of these and run with it—not all three at once. May is not the month for heroics. And while you're at it, go figure out who Tyler is so you can get the man his
receipt.
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