Home / About the author
The person behind the rosterJimenez Julien, publication director of SnackRoster
I build small, sharply focused software for people who volunteer their Saturdays. SnackRoster is the one I run for youth sports, and my email address is on every page of this site for a reason.
Reach me directly
Demo requests, bug reports and feature arguments all land in the same inbox.
Why a rotation builder for youth sports exists
The first version of SnackRoster was a spreadsheet with conditional formatting, built on a Sunday night for a U10 soccer team that had gone eleven weeks without a working snack schedule. The team parent had a laminated sheet on the fridge, a group text with thirty one people in it, and a habit of buying the oranges herself whenever the assigned family forgot. By the end of that season she had spent something close to two hundred dollars of her own money and every Thursday evening on the phone. Nobody had asked her to do that. The job simply expanded until it filled whoever was standing closest.
What struck me was how ordinary that story is. Talk to twenty youth sports volunteers in the United States and you will hear the same shape of problem twenty times: the work is not hard, it is just endlessly fiddly, and it never sits still. A rainout moves three duties. A family goes on spring break and the driving list breaks. A coach adds a scrimmage on Wednesday and now somebody needs to bring water to a field the team has never visited. Software is genuinely good at this kind of bookkeeping, and yet the tools sold to leagues are usually giant registration platforms where duty scheduling is a forgotten tab behind a paywall.
So I built the narrow thing instead. SnackRoster does one job: it takes a roster and a schedule, deals a fair rotation across snack duty, carpool driving and volunteer field jobs, and then keeps that rotation truthful all season while people swap, cancel and forget. It is not a registration system, it is not a payment processor, and it will never try to become your league's website. Narrow tools stay understandable, and a tool a volunteer can understand on the first evening is a tool that actually gets used in week nine.
What I learned about this trade
Three things reshaped the product. First, fairness has to be visible or it is not believed. Parents accept a turn cheerfully when the grid shows everybody else taking one too, so the season view came before any clever scheduling logic. Second, the reminder timing matters more than the reminder itself: two days out is when a working parent can still buy oranges, and three hours out is when they remember to put the cooler in the trunk. Third, a swap must never require the manager. The moment a change goes through a human, the whole system falls back into the group text it was supposed to replace.
I also learned to respect the calendar of the sport. Baseball has doubleheaders and rain makeups. Basketball has tournament Saturdays with four games in a gym and no snack duty at all. Soccer has fields that switch at short notice. Any scheduling assumption I made from the outside was wrong at least once, so now every rule in the app came from a conversation with somebody holding a clipboard.
How I work with the people who run teams
I run demos myself. When a club administrator in Ohio or a Little League volunteer coordinator in Washington fills in the form on the home page, the reply comes from me, usually within a business day, and the call is a screen share where we import their real roster rather than a slide deck. I spend the first two weekends of the fall and spring seasons on call, because opening weekend is when a scheduling tool proves itself or embarrasses you. Feature requests that come from three different organizations go on the build list. Feature requests that would turn SnackRoster into a registration platform get a polite no and an explanation.
What I am accountable for
I am the publication director of this site and the person responsible for what it claims. Every number on the home page comes from aggregate product data across active rosters, not from a marketing estimate. Every testimonial is from a named person at a named organization who read and approved the quote. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell me and I will correct it, and the change will be dated.
Experience and expertise
- Fifteen years building and shipping small web products, the last six of them focused on scheduling and coordination tools for people who are not full time administrators.
- Four seasons volunteering as a team parent and assistant coach, which is where the original snack spreadsheet came from.
- Hands on work with 1,842 active rosters across 31 states, covering rec soccer, Little League baseball, travel basketball and middle school programs.
- Direct responsibility for onboarding calls, support replies and the product roadmap at MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes SnackRoster.
- A working knowledge of the schedule export formats used by the major US youth sports platforms, because half of onboarding is reading somebody else's CSV file.
How this product is built and maintained
SnackRoster ships in small increments. Changes go out on a weekday morning, never on a Friday, and never during the opening weekend of a season. Every release note is written in plain English and sent to account owners, not buried in a changelog nobody reads. Support requests are answered by the people who write the code, which keeps the feedback loop honest.
Editorially, this site follows three standards. Claims carry a source: if a figure appears, it comes from product data or from a customer who agreed to be quoted. Pricing on this page matches what you are charged, with no hidden per family fee added later. And we do not describe features that are not live today, which is why you will not find a roadmap teaser dressed up as a capability. When something changes, the page changes with it.
Published articles
These nine pieces make up Sideline Duty, the magazine I write alongside the product, each one checked against league rulebooks, state statutes and the people who actually work the sideline.
- How to Run a Team Snack Rotation That Works With Food Allergies
- Background Checks and SafeSport Training for Volunteer Coaches
- Pitch Counts and Required Rest Days, by Age, for Youth Baseball
- Stop Play Checklist: Lightning, Heat and Head Injury Calls
- Rec League or Club Travel Team: What Actually Changes at Home
- Carpool Mistakes Youth Teams Make, and the Fixes That Stick
- A Saturday on Field Duty at a Twelve Field Soccer Complex
- The Youth Referee Shortage: Why Your Game Time Keeps Moving
- How One Rec League Made Duty Shifts Stick With a Refundable Bond
Read Sideline Duty, the SnackRoster magazine
Contact the author
The fastest route is email: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Tell me your sport, how many teams you run and when your season starts, and I will reply with a time to talk. If your question is about billing, privacy or a data export, write to the same address and it will be handled by me rather than a ticket queue. You can also find me here: