You know the parents I mean. The four or five who turn up, drop their kid off, sit in the car for an hour, and drive home. They don't volunteer. They don't help with kit. They're not unfriendly — they're just checked out.
Here's the thing: those parents aren't checked out because they don't care. They're checked out because they don't know how to plug in. Grassroots football is full of unspoken culture — who's the head coach, who's the team mum, who runs the WhatsApp, what's the etiquette for shouting from the sideline — and if you didn't play football yourself you're stepping into a foreign country every Saturday.
Parents' Player of the Match is the simplest, lowest-cost mechanic I've found for fixing this. Here's how it works and why.
The problem with Coaches' POTM
Coaches' Player of the Match is fine, but it's a top-down award. The coach picks the kid they thought played best, hands over the certificate, and that's that.
For the recipient it's brilliant. For everyone else — including the parents — it's a moment that happens to them rather than with them.
The parent of the kid who didn't get POTM just shrugs and goes home. The parent of the kid who did mostly cares because their kid is happy, not because they had any part in it.
What Parents' POTM changes
Parents' POTM is the same award, but the parents vote.
This sounds small. It isn't. Three things happen the moment you introduce it:
- Parents actually watch the match. Not just glance up from their phone — watch, because they're going to be asked to vote. The eyes-on-pitch percentage in your sideline crowd doubles.
- They talk about the game on the way home. "Who did you think played well?" is a much better car-ride conversation than "Did you have fun?" It treats their kid like a teammate, not a participant.
- They start having opinions about other people's kids. A parent who's voted for someone else's child three weeks in a row has a genuine, personal interest in how that kid develops. That's team. That's the thing you've been trying to build all season.
The voting itself takes 20 seconds at the end of the match. The cultural shift it triggers takes a few weeks but it's real and it's lasting.
How to set it up (the manual way)
If you want to try this without an app:
- After the final whistle, ask all parents to text you one name. Just the first name of one player they thought played well.
- Count the votes in the car park or that evening. Whoever got the most wins.
- Announce it on the team chat that evening. Include the vote count if you want to lean into it ("Charlie wins this week with 6 votes!").
- Pin a season-long leaderboard somewhere — a Google Sheet that the parents can see, or just a screenshot of the running totals.
That's the whole system. It works.
The friction points: you have to remember to do it every week, you have to count the texts manually, and parents miss the prompt about 50% of the time.
How Squadd does it
Squadd has Parents' POTM built into the match flow. Once a fixture is marked complete, linked parents can vote from the fixture screen — tap a name, done. Takes literally seconds.
The votes are anonymous between parents — they can't see who voted for whom, which matters for politics-avoidance. The coach, however, does see voter names: useful for spotting which parents are engaged vs which are voting for the same kid every week.
A season-long Parents' POTM count also appears on the stats screen against each player, so over the season you can see who the parents have rated most often. It's a nice end-of-season talking point at presentation evening.
A couple of design choices worth knowing:
- Parents can vote for any player on the squad, including their own child. This is deliberate. Parents watch the entire match from the touchline; if their kid genuinely played the best, they should be able to say so. The coach sees the full vote breakdown — including who voted for whom — so any parent voting for their own child every single week is visible, and a single biased vote rarely swings the result when the rest of the parents are voting honestly. We chose visibility over a software-enforced ban.
- You can switch Parents' POTM off for the whole team in settings. Per-fixture disable isn't there yet — on the backlog for heated cup matches where you don't want the politics.
The retention angle
Engaged parents = retained kids.
Kids quit grassroots football when the team stops feeling like their team. The kids whose parents are checked out are the kids most at risk of drifting away, because nobody at home is reinforcing that this is a meaningful thing they're part of.
A parent who's voted for Parents' POTM 15 weeks in a row is, by their own behaviour, invested. That investment travels home in the car and shows up in whether their kid wants to come to training on Tuesday.
It's the cheapest retention lever in grassroots football, and it costs you 30 seconds a week.
TL;DR
- Coaches' POTM is good. Parents' POTM is a different tool — it gets disengaged parents to participate, not just spectate.
- It takes 20 seconds per parent per week. It changes the culture of your touchline within a month.
- Manual version: text votes after the final whistle. Counts as homework but works.
- Automatic version: push notification on full-time, parents tap, done.
Squadd's Parents' POTM is included in the free trial. Worth running for a month even if you go back to nothing afterwards — the parent engagement uplift will outlast the trial.