Every sports calendar, one family schedule

I started BlendedCal to solve my own problem. My wife and I are the epitome of busy sports parents and our calendar is absolutely filled with practices and games. We have three kids that are all active sports kids. Our oldest son plays competitive soccer and baseball as well as recreational league basketball and volleyball. Our middle son plays semi-competitive baseball and recreational soccer and basketball. And our daughter - our youngest - plays semi-competitive volleyball as well as recreational soccer and basketball. On top of all of that, I play in an "old man baseball" league as well as pickup basketball, and my wife plays in a volleyball league as well as a pickup volleyball night every week.

We all love sports, and while our schedule can be a bit over the top sometimes, we want to let our kids play the sports they want to play while they can. It's good for their health, it builds character, it's good for them socially, and it's just a lot of fun.

But our calendar was difficult to manage. We have at least two or three different sports scheduling apps in play at any given time. They each give us calendar links we can subscribe to, which is incredibly helpful. Every time we're in a new season, a new team, or an app changes, I would go get the calendar URL, add it to my Google Calendar, set the color for the calendar to the right color to match the other calendars for that person so everything is color coded, sync it to my phone, then login to my wife's Google account and do the same thing for her.

This was a hassle, but it worked. We would have the calendars in our Google Calendar view and on our phones.

But now my parents and my wife's parents would want to keep up with the kids schedule and having them always updating links was not really going to work. I really wanted to give them one link to either sync to their calendar or just to view any time they wanted to check the kids sports schedule. But that wasn't possible.

And thus BlendedCal was born. BlendedCal gives me one place to import every calendar that our family needs, and then I can generate as many calendars as I want out of those events.

For our family, I create six calendars. A sports calendar for every kid, myself, and my wife, and then combined kids sports calendar. Those are all tag based calendars, so for my personal sports calendar it's just based on all sources with both "sports" and "max" tags. Any event in a source calendar with those two tags will become part of "Max's Sports Calendar" and will show up in our family calendars automatically color coded correctly.

Now every time we get a new calendar, the only step I have to do is to add a new source, paste in the URL, and give it the appropriate tags: "sports" and "person's name". Everything syncs to our phones, and the grandparents can always look at the "Kid's Combined Sports Calendar" webpage and see what games the kids have coming up. Always up to date. Always all inclusive.

It really has made our calendar management so much simpler and I know there are plenty of families out there that could benefit from it the way we do.