OnDeck +4

OnDeck is the best swim team app available. It has helped save time with meet entries, billing, account information, communications and much more. It’s a great tool that all coaches and admins should have. The best part is that it’s included with our TeamUnify website. The merging of MainSet into OnDeck is an added plus! Looking up swimmers times and data is so quick and easy. TeamFeed and texting to parents are the biggest improvements and helps tremendously with team communication. Taking attendance and athlete tracking is head and shoulders above any other software companies’ offerings. Check it out today!!!

Update: severe bug with FaceID: if OnDeck is the active app, and the phone goes to sleep, it goes into a state where it takes numerous (and I mean *numerous*) tries to swipe up to get the phone to wake. It just keeps showing a FaceID confirmation, but it stays on the lock screen. Anyone with an iPhone X, XS, or XR should beware. Presumably the new 2018 iPad Pro will also be affected.

I'm writing this from a parent's perspective. I imagine a coach would have a different view. The new app looks much better than the old, and acts much more like a modern iOS app. Neither old nor new versions make finding things easy. There are a *lot* of features, and it usually takes me a while to find what I'm looking for. Combining parent & coach apps seemed like a reasonable idea, until I saw all of the coach features cluttering up the screen. One feature I used a lot is either missing in the new app, or else is well-hidden: keying in the heat and lane assignments for events. I'd much rather have that info on my phone than carry around a paper meet program. The new app is slower than the old. It seems to load every page on-the-fly from the cloud, which is sluggish. On the meet entries display, 3-digit event numbers are truncated, which is a pretty severe problem. Touch ID is buggy - it often requires password entry, which kind of misses the point of Touch ID. The app really needed a refresh, but this version is a swing and a miss.

Typically I recommend all the parents on our team use OnDeck vs our website but it just keeps getting “worse”. My biggest issue at the moment is there is a known bug in the system that times achieved during the new season (Sept 1 and after) are reflected in the swimmer’s best times but is NOT shown in the Time Standards section of the app. I keep following up and the response is “We do not have a specific timeline to resolve this issue.” This feature is sooooooo helpful to swimmers (and parents) and swimmers love to be able to see their progress toward a goal (seeing their name above that line).

I also do not like all the “features” that have been added to TeamUnify and pushed down to OnDeck but you don’t have the option to personalize for your team. We don’t do our billing through TeamUnify so having “My Finances” and “My Wallet” as soon as you log in is very confusing. We should have the option to turn this off. I also don’t need “Class Management” but again can’t turn that off.