From my kids' hockey fundraisers to Locker Room Fund

I launched Locker Room Fund this week. It's a home for season-long fundraiser games that youth sports teams run with their families, and it's the biggest thing I've built for teams so far. So this week's log tells the whole story: where it started, why I built it, what it does today, and where it goes next.

Where it started

It started with my kids' hockey teams. Like a lot of youth teams, they raise money all season, so in July I built a football squares app for their fundraiser: one shared grid for the whole season, fresh numbers every Monday night, and prizes every quarter. The rule that made it work was simple. A square only plays in a week if it was paid for before that week's numbers were drawn, so the team can keep selling all season without a late signup winning a week that already happened.

Then there was a weekly football picks fundraiser I play in. Each entry picks three pro football teams, their points add up, and the highest total wins. It runs the way most team fundraisers run. Picks come in through an online form, the scores live in a spreadsheet, and the winners get posted to the group chat and sent out by email. It works, and it raises money, but it leans hard on whoever keeps that spreadsheet.

Two fundraisers in, the pattern was clear. The game is the easy part. The work is everything around it: who paid, who picked, who won, what the team still owes in prizes, and what it can actually spend. So the squares app snowballed into something bigger: one place where a team can choose the game that fits its families and run it all season.

Why I built it: it's about the kids

Every youth team runs on parents who show up. Somebody drives to the early morning practice. Somebody keeps the snack schedule. And somebody raises a hand to run the fundraiser, which usually means a spreadsheet, a pile of reminder texts, and a few late nights figuring out who paid.

Those fundraisers matter more than they look. They help cover the things that make a season happen, like ice time, gear, tournament fees and travel. They help the kid whose family is stretched thin play on the same team as everyone else.

I wanted the fundraiser to be the easy part. The parent who volunteers shouldn't spend Sunday night adding up scores by hand. A grandparent across the country should be able to join from a phone and feel like part of the team. And everything the team raises past the prizes should go where it was always meant to go: the kids. Locker Room Fund takes no cut of it.

A season-long game does something a bake sale can't. It gives families a reason to check in every week, give each other a hard time about their picks, and stay close to the team all season. If it helps keep one more kid on the ice or the field, it's worth building right.

What Locker Room Fund is today

Locker Room Fund is one home for team fundraiser games, and Points Pool is the first. Each game stands on its own, with its own settings, scoring and pages, and they all share the basics: teams, players, sign-in, the schedule and scores, email, and the team's ledger. That's what lets me add games without starting over each time.

Parents sign in with a code sent to their email and stay signed in across every game. A team admin sets up the game: the entry amount, the prizes, the weekly deadline and how many weeks it runs. Parents join, support the team with their entry, and make their picks. For now, Locker Room Fund is invite-only, and I set up each team myself.

How Points Pool plays

• Each entry picks three different teams playing that week, and their combined points are the score.
• The team sets a weekly pick deadline, and it never lands after the week's first kickoff. If a game moves earlier, the deadline moves with it.
• Everyone's picks stay hidden until the deadline. After that, live totals update as the games are played.
• The tiebreak is a guess at the combined points in the week's last game. Entries still tied after that share the prize.
• One win per person per week, so a parent with three entries can't take the whole podium.
• Miss the deadline and the app picks three teams for you at random. It draws once, when the deadline passes, and never redraws. An auto-picked entry has no tiebreak guess, so it loses every tie, and the email tells the player that up front.
• A week only scores once every game in it is final. A canceled game scores zero for both teams.
• Each place can win a prize, free entries for the next week, or both. A season entry plays every week from the next deadline on, and an extra entry covers one week.

All of it runs on its own. Every hour the app checks the schedule and the scores, draws missed picks once a deadline passes, scores the week once every game is final, and emails results to the players and a recap to the team admins.

The money goes to the team, not through me

Locker Room Fund is free for teams right now. It never holds or moves money, and it takes no cut. Parents pay the team directly, with the payment apps they already use or with cash handed to an admin, and an admin confirms each payment. A payment counts for a week if it was sent before the deadline and confirmed before the week is scored.

Each game's dashboard gives the admin four numbers:

• Collected: payments an admin has confirmed.
• Prizes still owed: prizes for every week not yet scored.
• Won, not yet paid: prizes awarded that the team hasn't handed out yet.
• Safe to spend: what's left of the money collected after those two come out. It's the number a team treasurer actually wants: what the team can put toward the season right now.

Prizes lock at the first deadline. Families signed up expecting those prizes, so nobody can change them partway through the season, me included.

Making sure the math is right

Prizes matter to the families who win them, so I treated the scoring like it mattered. Before launch, I ran three weeks of results from the picks fundraiser I play in through it, and it matched every recorded total and the organizer's top three.

Room to grow

This is a first version, on purpose. Here's what's next:

• More games. Pick'em, where you pick the winner of each game. Survivor, where you pick one team a week, can't use a team twice, and the last one standing wins. And a new version of Squares on the same base. Each will stand on its own, so a team can choose the game that fits its families.
• The team's own look. Team branding in the emails, and a little more personality in what they say.
• A real test run. Before a team uses it, I'll run a free game with friends and watch it work through live weeks.
• More teams. It's invite-only for now. As it proves itself, more teams get to use it.