What Event Night Actually Looks Like for a Concession Coordinator

It is 5:50 PM on a Friday. First pitch is at 7:00. The coordinator for the Westlake Baseball booster club has arrived at the stand carrying a cardboard folder, a tablet, and a personal phone. They are about to spend the next 70 minutes moving between three different screens and two paper documents to do what is, on paper, a single job: know who is going to work tonight's event, make sure they show up, and get the books balanced before the cash drawer goes home.

The job hasn't changed in decades. What has changed is the number of places it lives.

What's in the folder

The paper part is always the same:

• The signup sheet from the volunteer portal, printed on Tuesday because it was "final" then. Two families have since swapped workers. Nobody updated the print.
• The stand assignment list from last season, annotated in pen with which spots fill fastest.
• A handful of late-cancellation texts screenshotted and stapled to the back so the coordinator doesn't forget to mark them as no-shows.

The tablet has the volunteer portal open in one browser tab and the settlement tool open in another. The personal phone has the family group chat, which is where most of the late changes actually happen — a mom asking if her college-age son can swap in for his sister, two families coordinating a ride share to a game that moved to a different diamond.

The five-screen ritual

Between arrival and first pitch, the coordinator does each of these at least once:

1. Open the roster. Confirm who is actually showing up. Match paper print to the current online list. Cross out the two workers who got swapped. Add the swap-ins by hand.
2. Switch tabs to the event detail page. Check whether all stand positions are covered. Discover that stand 3 is uncovered because the person assigned there cancelled at 3:45 PM and nobody saw the message.
3. Text the family lead of a standby worker. Ask if anyone can cover stand 3. Wait.
4. Open check-in. Start marking people as they arrive. The list of names is sorted differently here than on the roster screen, and two of the names don't match what's on the paper sheet because families added nicknames.
5. Switch tabs to the spreadsheet the treasurer sent. Enter the starting cash count into row 7. Promise yourself you'll remember to come back and enter the ending count later.
6. Go back to the roster. Mark the two no-shows. Make a mental note to ask the admin whether the standby who stepped in should be credited as "attended" even though she wasn't originally assigned.

The game starts. The coordinator works the line for twenty minutes. The phone rings.

It is a family asking why they were charged a no-show fee last month when their daughter did work the event — she just worked a different stand than what was printed. Nobody updated the system. The coordinator promises to look into it and doesn't quite mean it, because looking into it means opening the settlement from six weeks ago, figuring out which stand the worker actually worked at, and hoping the audit log captured the shift.

What changed

The old version of StandShare reflected this reality too faithfully. The event list was a grid. Clicking a row expanded an inline panel with workers and stands. Editing an event took you to a separate page. Settlement was its own page. Check-in was its own page. Roster editing was its own modal. Each of them worked. None of them were the same place.

A coordinator running an event touched five different screens to do the one job.

We rebuilt the event workflow around a single question: if a coordinator clicks a concession event, what should they see?

The answer is now the Event Detail page. Click an event from the Events Hub — which is itself just two tabs, List and Calendar — and you land somewhere that holds everything that concerns that event:

• The roster sits in a drawer that opens from the page. Assignment, re-assignment, stand swaps, attendance edits, check-in, and "mark all attended" are one panel. You open it, make changes, close it. You stay on the event.
• Settlement is a drawer, not a separate page. Click Settle from the Event Detail, enter stand revenue, commit. If the event is already settled, the drawer opens read-only so you can review without risk. When you close the drawer, you are still on the event.
• The stand layout is on the page. You see it, assign workers to it, and later (when revenue gets entered) see per-stand commission against it. Stand CRUD moved into a Stands tab inside the Edit Event modal — no more hunting through the signup sheet for add/edit controls.
• Messages are on the page. A per-event message board replaces "find the right group chat" — coordinator, family leads, and cross-org partner workers all see the same thread. The gate-meetup clarification, the "who's bringing ice?" question, the stand swap — all in one place scoped to the event.

The coordinator still has the cardboard folder. That is a real choice, and some things really do belong on paper. But the number of screens between the folder and the truth has dropped from five to one.

The small stuff that adds up

A few smaller changes compound into the feel of the new flow:

• The list itself is useful. A coverage bar on each card shows the fraction of slots filled — red under 50%, amber to 80, green above. A coordinator scanning tomorrow night's events sees the understaffed ones immediately.
• Temporal grouping. The list groups into Today, This Week, Later This Month. You stop scrolling past next July to see tomorrow.
• State-aware cards. A settled event looks different from an upcoming one. A full event shows "Full" instead of making you math out capacity. A family card adds a "Worked" pill to events you attended so you can tell at a glance which past events count as yours.
• Slots, not stands, for capacity. A single physical concession stand can have four workers. Counting "stands staffed" was never capacity; counting slots is. The coverage bar now says 12 / 20 workers and means it.

None of this is glamorous. It is the slow, boring work of noticing that a coordinator is switching tabs five times to do one job, and then not making them do that anymore.

What we didn't touch

We deliberately kept:

• Paper as a first-class fallback. Concession stands are real places with unreliable Wi-Fi. Check-in works offline. Roster exports to CSV. Nothing in the new flow assumes a live connection to be useful.
• The ability to run an event from a phone. Mobile card layouts got the same love as desktop. The drawers stack vertically on a 375px screen. Coordinators do not need to bring a laptop to the stand.
• The audit trail. Every assignment edit, attendance change, and settlement commit is still logged with who did it and when. The "who worked stand 3 six weeks ago" question has a real answer now, not a shrug.

If you run concession events

Open the Events Hub the next time you have an event coming up. Click into the event. Notice the drawers. You will not need all of them in a single session, but when you do need one — a late swap, an uncovered stand, a last-minute "who is bringing the float?" — they are all right there on the same page you started on.

The cardboard folder can stay. It is a good folder.