CourtReserve

The app is pretty good overall but drives me nuts that it appears you can control the type of notifications you receive from each club you are a member of but it’s just smoke and mirrors. I keep getting notifications from multiple clubs advertising their Friday night or low volume hour open plays and experimented with every different selection on the notification option page until I finally just unselected them all. This however did not stop those type of notifications, not sure if there’s an under the hood emergency notification option that allows the clubs to push notifications through. It’s a shame because now I turned off notifications from the iPhone settings for the app when I would really like to still receive notifications for certain things, like waitlist openings, just not at the expense of nonstop marketing messages.

I am an end user (club member) and have been pleased with all CourtReserve’s main features. It’s (usually) convenient and it’s free for end users like me. It doesn’t always work as stated. As space becomes free due to cancellations, and you are No 1 on a waitlist to attend that session, you are supposed to automatically be bumped up and register as an attendee. Twice it’s failed to do that for me. Once ppl lower on the list bumped up past me. Yesterday, I was the only one waitlisted, someone canceled, and I remained on the waitlist. It sounds trite, but is annoying if you’ve been trying to get into that session for some time. (Thankfully I noticed at the last minute the empty spot and my name still waitlisted, canceled the waitlist, and registered for the session.)

This app is great and would work really well if the “find tennis players” feature worked a little better. No one has time to email everyone on the list to see someone wants to play. Why not allow broadcasting? I.e, send out a message to everyone including time to play and rating. This would have such an upper hand to apps like TennisPAL because everyone is already a member to the organization. Also, the list of players should be sorted in such way that would increase the chance of players finding each other who want to play. I.e sort by people who logged on most recently, have messaged people recently, etc… If you need any help with development feel free to contact me. I’m a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.