Scheduling software for sports officials and the people who assign them.

The roster is the thing everything else depends on, and it is usually the thing nobody owns. Every official needs a name, a way to reach them, and — the part most rosters skip — which channel they actually answer on. Some read email within the hour and never look at a text. Some are the reverse.

Ref Grid stores a preferred channel per official, and refuses to let you assign someone it has no way to contact. An official with “text” marked and no phone number is a game that quietly goes unfilled.

Assigning against guesswork produces a schedule you then have to renegotiate one official at a time. Collecting availability first costs a week in August and saves the whole season.

The trap is the format. Forty replies saying “most Saturdays, not the 19th, and I can do Sundays after 1” is not availability — it is forty messages you will read again every time you build a weekend. See how to collect referee availability for what to ask and how to ask it.

This step happens outside Ref Grid. There is no availability collection in the product today — a form, a shared sheet or the availability sheet in our free template all work. Ref Grid picks up at the board, once you know who is around.

One row per game, one cell per position — however many positions that game has. A three-official crew, a two-person crew and a single official are all just a game with that many cells, so a multi-sport organization is not fighting a layout built for one sport.

Assigning does not notify anyone. Choosing an official stages a draft, and drafts accumulate while you work, so you fill a weekend in one sitting rather than sending twenty-two separate messages as you go.Ref Grid warns you when an official you have picked is already holding an overlapping game.

When the weekend looks right, you review the batch and send it. Text and email are one step, not two systems: each official gets the message on the channel they are marked for, and the send is reported per assignment rather than as one “sent!” toast — sixteen delivered and one failed tells you which one to chase.

Every assignment carries a link the official uses to accept or decline. They do not need an account, a password or an app, which is the single biggest reason officials fail to respond to a scheduling system.

Officials who reply by text or tell you in person can be marked accepted by hand — that acceptance is just as real, and pretending otherwise is how a schedule ends up disagreeing with reality.

A field floods, a game moves, an official pulls out on Friday night. A decline reopens the position rather than overwriting the record that someone said no; the replacement is a new assignment, and the history of who declined survives.

The process for the worst version of this is worth having written down before you need it: what to do when an official cancels at the last minute.