This article is an overview of the PlayerFirst backend for club and event admins — what the main sections are for, how they connect to each other, and where to go for the step-by-step articles on each one.

Overview

Accounts, households, and logging in — every family shares one account; understanding that model explains a lot of what you'll see in User > Users.
The Dashboard — your brand's high-level activity snapshot, tailored to your role.
Program > Registration Details — every program your brand runs, and where new ones get created.
Team > Team Management — rosters, coaches, and roster-acceptance invites.
Team > Team Reporting — event eligibility, active roster status, and messaging coaches/managers.
Sales > Invoices — every invoice generated across your brand.
User > Users — searching accounts, and what to do about duplicates.
Communication — creating, scheduling, and reviewing mass messages.
The hierarchy: Programs, Divisions, and Teams — how everything above nests together.
Working with tables — the grid you'll use on almost every page in the backend.
Common buttons and icons — the visual shorthand used throughout the backend.

1. Accounts, Households, and Logging In

A PlayerFirst account is a household, not an individual — one username and password covers every parent, guardian, and athlete profile in that family, across every club or event on the platform. That's worth keeping in mind as an admin: a "duplicate account" support request almost always means someone in a household ended up on two separate logins instead of one, which is exactly the scenario User > Users is built to fix (see Section 7).

Admins sign in through the same login page customers use — enter your email, username, or phone, then either a password or a one-time emailed/texted code. Once you're in, what you see next depends entirely on your role: staff with backend access land on My Dashboard; everyone else lands on their household's account page.

2. The Dashboard

Once you're signed in with backend access, PlayerFirst opens to My Dashboard — a role-filtered activity snapshot for your brand (or all your brands, if you manage more than one). The header reads "[Your Brand] Activity," and which of its tabs you see — Snapshot, Tryouts, Schedule, Sales, A/R, Statistics, Communications, Teams — depends on your permissions. A finance-only admin, for example, won't see the same tabs as a full program admin.

NOTE: If your account doesn't have any admin, finance, or program-director rights, you won't land on the Dashboard at all — you'll be sent straight to your own household's account page instead. If you believe you should have backend access and don't, that's a roles issue, not a bug.

3. Program > Registration Details

Program > Registration Details is the master list of every program your brand runs — tryouts, leagues, camps, clinics, whatever you've set up. It's also where new programming gets created: look for the small + button above the list (its tooltip reads "Add Program"). That button only appears for admins with program-management rights, so if you don't see it, that's a role, not a bug.

Each program can be broken down into Divisions, and each division into Teams — see Section 9 for how that hierarchy fits together.

4. Team > Team Management

Team > Team Management is where club teams actually get run day to day. After you filter down to a program and division, the page splits into three tabs:

Roster Management — add athletes to a team (new or existing player) and move or unassign athletes between teams.
Coaches & Managers — add or remove the coaches and team managers attached to a team.
Team Management — team-level settings (cost overrides, parent-email requirements) and, per team, the email shortcut for roster-acceptance invites.

"Sending a team invite" isn't a dedicated button — it's a targeted email. From the Team Management tab, the envelope icon next to a team lets you message All, Unconfirmed, Accepted, or Declined participants; choosing Unconfirmed is what people mean by "sending invites" — it drops in a pre-built template with each recipient's roster-acceptance link.

5. Team > Team Reporting

Where Team Management is about building rosters, Team Reporting is about whether those rosters are event-ready. It shows every athlete's eligibility status for an event at a program or individual level — an athlete only counts as eligible once their roster spot is Active, their waiver is valid, and they pass the birthday/grad-year check. Waitlisted teams don't appear here at all. The page has five tabs: Teams, Rosters, Coaches & Managers, Recruiting, and Coach Packet.

The Rosters tab is where you both check and fix eligibility — each athlete's Active status can be toggled individually (click the status pill and choose Activate/Deactivate), or in bulk across several athletes at once via Activate Selected Rosters (there's no bulk-deactivate, only the per-row toggle). That same tab is also where roster uploads happen: once you've selected a program, an Upload Rosters button appears and hands off to the Import to Roster page.

The Coaches & Managers tab here is for messaging, not editing rosters — Email Selected or Email All opens the same quick-email modal used elsewhere in the platform, letting you notify coaches and/or team managers filtered by roster status. A separate Remind Selected button, visible only if your brand auto-sends Code of Conduct reminders, sends just that reminder rather than a general message. Note that removing a coach or manager from a team isn't done here — that action lives on Team Management instead (Section 4).

6. Sales > Invoices

Sales > Invoices lists every invoice generated for your brand — who it's billed to, what's owed, what's been paid, and due dates. Click into any invoice's number to open its full detail view, where you can see line items and take payment actions.

7. User > Users

User > Users is where you search for a specific account — by first/last name, company, email, phone, username, or user ID. Open a result and you'll find tabs for that account's Invoices (its full order history) and Communications History (every email/text sent to them) alongside their profiles and roles.

NOTE: on the account view, the tab labeled "Invoices" opens a panel titled "Order History," and the tab labeled "Communications History" opens a panel titled "Communication History" — same data, just inconsistent labeling between the tab and the page it opens.

Merging duplicate accounts — this is an in-app tool, not a support-ticket process: from User > Users, the Merge Accounts page lets you pick which of two accounts to keep and move every profile into it, and each individual account also has its own Merge Profiles tab for combining duplicate profiles within it. There's also a Possible Duplicates tool that surfaces likely matches automatically, though that one's limited to System Engineer/Root Admin roles. A support ticket is still the right path for anything these tools don't cover (e.g. a cross-brand merge), but "submit a ticket" shouldn't be the default answer for a routine duplicate.

8. Communication

Communication is where mass messaging lives, split across three left-nav pages: Create Message, Messaging Schedule, and Messaging History.

Create Message is a multi-step wizard rather than a single form: you pick a brand (only the ones you have access to show up), a message type (Transactional Email, Transactional SMS, Transactional Email & SMS, or Marketing Email), and a recipient group (Athletes, Parents, Coaches, Team Managers, College Coaches, or unregistered imported profiles), then layer on filters — Program, Team, Grad Year, Age, Zip Code, Balance Due, Waivers, and dozens more — each one narrowing the recipient list further. A Preview List lets you spot-check the total count and first 200 recipients before you compose, and once you're ready you can send immediately or save the message for later, either unscheduled or scheduled for a specific date and time.

Messaging Schedule is where those saved-for-later messages sit until they go out — every message that hasn't sent yet, scheduled or not. You can adjust the scheduled date/time right in the row, reopen a message in the full wizard for bigger edits, or delete a draft you no longer need.

Messaging History is the record of everything already sent, with per-message analytics (opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes) plus quick actions to preview, print, or copy a past message into a new one.

9. The Hierarchy of PlayerFirst

Everything in Program > Registration Details and Team > Team Management nests the same way: a Program contains one or more Divisions, and each Division contains one or more Teams. It's a strict, one-way hierarchy — a Division always belongs to exactly one Program, and a Team always belongs to exactly one Division — which is why moving something (a registration, a roster spot) always means moving it into another division or team, not the other way around.

NOTE: Divisions don't get their own left-nav item — you manage them from inside Program > Registration Details, alongside the program they belong to.

10. Working with Tables

Nearly every list page in the backend — Programs, Team Management, Invoices, Users, and more — uses the same underlying table/grid, so the same tricks work everywhere:

Reordering columns: drag a column header to move it, or open the Customize Table button (the list icon above the grid) for an "Order and Hide Columns" panel with the same drag-and-drop, plus up/down arrows if you'd rather not drag. Column order and visibility are saved per user, so it'll stick the next time you visit.
Filtering: that same "Customize Table" panel also has a per-column filter (Contains / Equals / Does not equal, or Greater than / Less than for numbers) — but unlike column order, filters reset once you leave the page. Some pages (Programs, Invoices, Tournament) additionally have a separate Advanced Search Options button with its own page-specific "Advanced Filters" panel — that's a different feature from the per-column filters, not a more powerful version of it.
Exporting: the Export To Excel button (the file icon above the grid) downloads whatever rows are currently showing as a real .xlsx file, named after your brand and the page. For very large exports (500+ rows) it'll warn you before the download starts.

11. Common Buttons and Icons

These icons show up throughout the backend with the same meaning wherever you see them:

Pencil — edit this row
Trash can — delete this row (usually asks you to confirm first)
Eye — view details, or, in a status column, "Visible"
Eye with a slash — (status column) "Hidden"
Plus (+) — add a new item; the exact label is in the tooltip, since the button itself is icon-only
Envelope — message/email the people in this row
Green checkmark — confirmed/complete
Red X — not confirmed/failed
Orange triangle — changed; something here needs a second look
Hourglass — pending

NOTE: these are consistent conventions used across most backend pages, not a single enforced standard — an occasional page may deviate. There's no gear/settings icon convention for rows, and no general drag-to-reorder for rows (only for table columns, per Section 10).

PlayerFirst 101