Setup takes about five minutes. The order that works:

1. Create your account at the sign-up page. Use a password or Continue with Google — either way you’re the first admin.

2. Create your crew. Name it what your paddlers call it, so “Allegheny Dragons A Boat” rather than “Team 1.” If you’ll run several crews, read section 19 before naming anything.

3. Get the sport and timezone right at creation. Both are fixed on the create-team form and there’s no edit for them in settings yet, so a typo means asking support. Sport matters more than it looks: put dragon boat in it and every side label in the app reads Left and Right. Anything else and you get Port and Starboard. Weight unit is the one you can change later, in team settings, and it switches the whole crew between kilos and pounds. The maths underneath is always kilos.

4. Add two or three people by hand — your co-manager, your steersperson, yourself. You get to check the roster fields and the paddling profile before twenty people arrive at once.

5. Post your first two weeks of practices. An empty schedule is a bad first impression. Paddlers who open the app and find nothing to sign up for don’t come back.

6. Promote your co-manager to admin. Free covers two.

7. Share the invite link. Only now, with a real schedule waiting for them.

That ordering matters more than it looks. The most common failed rollout is sending the invite link on day one, having everyone create an account, seeing nothing, and never returning. Give them something to do on arrival.