Group Texting and Sport Text

Richard Butler

Sport-text has been developed by Richard Butler. Butler had been immersed in GAA activities all his life with his club Ballymartle. As a player he served at left corner-back on a side that won a junior county title back in 1986 and after that filled a variety of selector and committee roles. He won many All Ireland medals in Athletics in his youth and also has an All Ireland medal for hurling playing on the same team as Brian Corcoran with CIT.

In recent seasons he noticed the exorbitant costs that his club and others were racking up when it came to contacting players and club members about club news. So he decided to act, devising a system whereby sports clubs could contact members through text without having to use a computer. Thus his company Sport-Text came to fruition.

The Concept

Sport-text is the easiest way to send out group text messages for a coach/manager, all he/she needs is a phone. One call to sport-text and the message is sent out. No logging on, no inputting data, no downloading software.

Security

Security has also become an issue for many managers involved in organising and sending out of texts to under age players. Sport-text will store all the numbers but none of the names so that no local manager/coach need have all the numbers of all the members of the team in his/her locality.

Supporters

The clubs that have been using sport-text have reported that when a text is sent out to the supporters on the day of a match it can increase gate receipts

The Future

Texting is an emerging business, in the past clubs would have got their messages out via land line, more recently via e mail, however this is not always reliable as many people do not access their e mail regularly and very often the event is over by the time they have looked at the mail. In the past few years the use of texting is becoming more prevalent, in his market research Richard found that most coaches/managers are trying to send out texts via different methods, such as web text and group text from own phones and also through web based companies, all of this while it works has proved to be time consuming and can work out expensive for the individual manager/coach.