Homewood Baseball & Softball Leagues used Apptoto from 2017 to 2019. This story reflects their experience during that time.
Every spring, more than 900 kids show up to play baseball and softball in Homewood, Illinois. Every one of those games needs an umpire, and every concession stand needs someone behind the counter. At Homewood Baseball & Softball Leagues, parents filled those roles.
That’s the deal when a family registers: play in the league, work a few duties. The hard part was never getting families to agree. It was getting them to show up. Before each game, team parents and league officials emailed, texted, and called to confirm who was coming, and many families never answered.
Former league president and webmaster Nate Olson looked for a fix after noticing how his daughter’s dentist confirmed appointments by text. He found that automated reminders built for medical offices worked just as well for volunteer umpires, once someone was willing to set them up a little differently. Within a season, the league was getting a 99.21% reply rate from parent umpires, and no-shows had all but disappeared. Here’s how they did it.
Homewood by the numbers
99.2%
Reply rate, parent umpires
After the full 3-message sequence
83.4%
Reply rate, stand workers
Same reminder sequence
900+
Kids, ages 4 to 18
54 baseball and T-ball teams, 21 softball
0
Calendar required
Duties loaded from a CSV file
About Homewood Baseball & Softball Leagues
Homewood Baseball and Softball Leagues (HBSL) brings the magic of baseball, T-ball, and softball to more than 900 kids in Homewood, Illinois, ages 4 to 18.
The nonprofit youth sports organization was founded in 1951 and serves Homewood and the surrounding communities south of Chicago. It lets the community’s kids learn the game, build their skills, and compete, and it is 100% volunteer-run and self-funded. In a typical season, that’s more than 900 players on 75 teams, and every family that registers agrees to volunteer for concession stand shifts and umpiring assignments.
Those duties are what keep the league affordable. They’re also what used to keep its directors up at night.
The challenge: hundreds of volunteer shifts, and no way to know who’d show
With 75 teams playing through a season, the league assigned hundreds of umpire and concession shifts to parents who signed up for them months earlier. Before each game, a team parent or league official had to reach every one of them, by email, then text, then phone, to confirm they were still coming.
“Many times, families would not reply at all,” said Nate. “So we’d have no idea who was actually going to show up to work their assigned duties.” When someone didn’t, the fallout landed on whoever was closest: stand directors scrambling to hire teenagers at the last minute, game commissioners pulling parents out of the bleachers to umpire. The confirmation chase alone was eating hours of volunteer director time every week of the season.
What every game week cost
- Three rounds of manual outreach per shift: email, text, then phone.
- Silent families, so nobody knew who was coming until game time.
- Last-minute paid replacements when a stand worker didn’t show.
- Parents pulled from the stands to umpire on the spot.
Why Apptoto: reminders ask for confirmation, and no calendar required
The idea came from a dentist’s office. Nate noticed that his daughter’s appointment reminders didn’t just announce the time; they asked him to reply and confirm. If that worked for a cleaning, it could work for a Saturday umpire shift. So he went looking for a service that did the same thing.
Most of what he found was built strictly for medical practices, or required a separate booking system to feed it appointments. The league had neither. What it had was a spreadsheet of duty assignments and a need to hear back from every family.
After finding Apptoto and easily chatting with Apptoto’s reps on the website (who answered all of Nate’s questions), he determined Apptoto was exactly what Homewood was looking for.
“Apptoto was the only one I found that had the ability to request responses, not just send reminders, and that also would allow us to import our scheduled duties directly into their system, without having to have another piece of software or our own booking/calendar system.”
Nate Olson, Homewood Baseball & Softball Leagues
Reminders that get replies
Every message asked the family to confirm or request a buyout. The answer was logged automatically.
CSV import, no calendar
Duty assignments uploaded straight from a spreadsheet with player, league, team, and field.
Auto-replies + instructions
A reply triggered an automatic response with arrival time and where to pay for a buyout.
Daily director summary
One email a day: who confirmed, who bought out, who hadn’t answered.
Making an appointment reminder tool work for ballfield volunteers
The league signed up for a free trial and got something it didn’t expect: a free setup session. Nick spent an hour with Jessica from the Apptoto team walking through what the league was trying to do, which was not a typical appointment workflow by any stretch.
“I understand that our use of their system is NOT typical, but Jessica was able to make the system do exactly what I was envisioning,” he said. “She really had to do some creative setups for us, but in the end it is working perfectly.” At one point, he emailed a change request at 5 p.m. on a Friday. The auto-reply setup was redesigned that same evening.
The setup: Parents get 3 reminders + day-of text
Confirm parent’s duty or let them request a buyout
Text
Only sent if no reply to the initial email
Automated Call
Only sent if no reply to initial email and text
Final reminder
Shift time, or buyout payment deadline
Each step only fired if the one before it went unanswered, so a family that confirmed on day seven didn’t hear from the league again until game day. The day-of message did double duty: confirmed and silent volunteers got their shift time; families who had requested a buyout got a payment reminder instead.
What a buyout is
Homewood let a family pay a fee instead of working a shift, and the league used that money to hire a replacement. Building the buyout option into the reminder itself meant the choice got made a week out, not the morning of.
Custom fields carried the details that matter to a parent reading a text on a Tuesday: which kid, which league, which team, which field. The auto-reply after a confirmation added arrival instructions. The auto-reply after a buyout request said where and how to pay.
EXAMPLE DAY-7 EMAIL (ILLUSTRATIVE)
Hi, this is Homewood Baseball & Softball. Your family is scheduled to umpire on Sat, May 10 at 9:00 AM, Field 3 (Jake, Mustang League, Cubs). Reply 1 to confirm, or reply BUYOUT to pay the fee instead, and we’ll cover the shift.
The results: 99% of umpires answer & no-shows vanish
“Since we began using Apptoto, we are averaging a 99.21% reply rate from our parent umpires, and 83.44% from our stand workers, once all 3 messages have been delivered.
This is an amazing rate of reply. It is way better than any of us expected, and way better than we ever got previously doing it manually.
Nate Olson, Homewood Baseball & Softball Leagues
The league never tracked its old no-show rate. Nate was candid that “the problem was rampant” and that “something needed to change drastically for the program to continue.” They could say no-shows dropped to close to zero, and families who asked for a buyout paid on time because the deadline arrived in a text on the day it was due.
Parents noticed. The league introduced the system at its January and February registration events, and the reaction was positive before a single reminder went out. Once the season started, replies came back thanking the league for the day-of texts and for the auto-responder details about when to arrive and where to pay.
“Our parents are busy, and we understand that,” says Nate. “This system is just what we needed to provide the appropriate reminders at the right times to make sure they don’t forget about their duties. And it allows them [parents] to concentrate on what’s important: making sure the 900+ kids in our leagues have the best possible experience playing the games we all love!”
Questions youth sports and volunteer organizations ask
Yes. Upload a spreadsheet of shifts or assignments as a CSV, and Apptoto treats each row as an appointment, with whatever columns you include (player, team, field) available as message fields. Homewood ran its entire season this way with no booking system at all.
Yes. Reminders can ask the recipient to confirm, cancel, or reply with a keyword, and each reply is logged against the assignment. Auto-replies send back a tailored response, so a “YES” gets arrival instructions and a “BUYOUT” gets payment details.
Yes. Each step in a message sequence can be set to send only if there’s been no reply to the earlier ones. That’s how Homewood escalated from email to text to call without bothering families who had already confirmed.
Yes. A daily summary email lists confirmed, declined, and non-responding participants for upcoming assignments, so directors see the full picture without opening the dashboard.
Yes. Every account can book time with our expert Customer Success team, who can help guide you on how to configure non-appointment uses like volunteer shifts, deliveries, and classes. Homewood built its entire sequence in one call.
