CASE STUDY
How Dallas United Crew runs a growing multi-sport club of 1,000 athletes with CrewLAB
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Dallas United Crew is a nonprofit rowing and dragon boating club based at White Rock Lake that has grown from four Highland Park high schoolers in 2002 into an organization serving close to 1,000 athletes across the Dallas area. DUC runs a variety of programs, from a competitive youth program to adult rowing, dragon boating, and veterans’ rowing.
That range is also what makes the administrative side of DUC unusually hard. A single season means coordinating competitive youth athletes and outreach families with widely different access to time and technology — across programs that historically operated in silos.
Running a growing club on nine disconnected platforms
Before CrewLAB, DUC’s operations ran across nine different platforms: two sports management software platforms, Monday.com, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Band, Slack, Wix, and QuickBooks.
For DUC, the deciding factor for CrewLAB was the cumulative cost of running an organization this size across nine disconnected tools.
“Essentially, my day-to-day involves keeping the plates spinning instead of focusing on the growth and development where I should be.“
— Austin Brooks, Executive Director, Dallas United Crew
The challenges
Registration admin was buried in clutter and manual work. Previous sports management software had accumulated hundreds of registration “sale items” that couldn’t be archived, cluttering every dashboard search with years of duplicate entries — and with no bulk refund tool, refunds to 100 families had to be processed one at a time.
Registration and monthly subscriptions were hosted on two umbrella platforms that didn’t communicate making compliance labor intensive.
Coaches couldn’t trust compliance data. Two disconnected waiver systems and a manual swim-test cross-check meant coaches were never certain they were working from current information.
Communication was scattered with no confirmation of receipt. Coaches, athletes, and parents were split across Band, Slack, and email, with no way to confirm a message had ever been seen.
Urgent updates took five separate steps. A single schedule change meant a Band message, a calendar edit, a website update, an athlete self-report, and a spreadsheet entry. Skipped steps left conflicting information everywhere.
Our solution
One SafeSport-compliant communication channel. Coaches no longer field the same question 30 times across Band, text, and email.
“We looked at our coaches having to answer the same 30 questions, 30 different times, in all these different spaces… it’s like just be answered once and buy back the coach’s time. [CrewLAB] helps us consolidate communication to one place.”
Real-time compliance visibility. Coaches can check who’s paid and who has current waivers directly from their phone.
“The coach needs to know who’s compliant, who’s paid, who’s got their correct waivers — by pulling out their phone and checking, versus ‘I have to wait for someone in administration to tell me. I think it puts more education back into the people who are actually running your programs”
Full visibility into shared club logistics. With one calendar across every program, coaches and admins can see what’s happening club-wide in real time.
“You can see how the two Dragon Boat teams will work together much more in synchronicity inside the app.”
No more cross-checking across separate systems. Registration, payments, waivers, and communication live on a single platform.
“The hours our coaches and staff reclaim from administrative busywork go directly back into coaching.”
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Coaches spend less time re-answering the same logistics questions across multiple channels, freeing up time for actual coaching.
$100,000+ in annual financial aid is now trackable through auditable coupon codes instead of manual reconciliation.
Real-time compliance visibility removes the need for manual payment audits.