How to Run Your Cricket Academy on Skipper
Everything an academy owner does in Skipper, step by step. Ten jobs, each one a couple of minutes.
1. Create Your Academy
- Tap Academies in the bottom bar. It is in the app menu too, if that is where your thumb goes.
- Tap the + in the header.
- Add your academy name and pick your city. That is all that is required.
- Want a short address like @tiruppur-ca? Type a handle, or leave it blank and we make one for you. Add a logo if you have one handy.
- Tap Continue, check the details, read and accept the academy terms, and tap Create academy.
Done. You are the owner, and you land on the Home tab. Your academy starts private; when you are ready to be found in search, open the Get verified card on your academy's home screen, tap Request verification, and our team will take a look. The card then sits quietly as "Verification pending review" until we get to it.
Worth knowing before you worry about it: the academy directory ranks by distance for anyone who has shared a location, and by newest first for everyone else. It does not rank by how many students you have. A one-coach academy that opened last week is not buried under the big names.
To bring in your staff, go to the More tab, tap Add, and invite them by phone number with a role: admin, head coach, coach, or manager. Each person sees only what their role needs, and the differences are real. A manager, for instance, handles fees, the store, and notices, and does not get the Students or Batches tabs at all.
2. Manage Batches
- Open your academy and go to the Batches tab.
- Tap New batch. Name it the way you already talk, like U-16 Evening.
- Set the age group, capacity, and a colour, and assign a coach.
- Open the batch. It has three tabs, Overview, Students, and Sessions. From Overview, open the schedule and pick the training days and timings, and a ground if you like. It opens as its own screen, so a batch that trains six days a week is as easy to set up as one that trains twice.
That is your week set. Sessions appear on their own, every week, from the schedule you saved. Attendance on practice day is the coach's one-minute job, covered in section 8.
3. Manage Students
- Go to the Students tab and tap Enroll student. It opens as a full screen, and it starts with a search box.
- Already on Skipper? Search by phone number, email, or name, and link them in.
- New to the app? Type their name, add a date of birth if you want, and the parent's phone number. The parent gets an invite to follow everything from their own phone.
- Add the student to a batch. When you save, the screen stays where it is and offers Enroll another, so a new season's intake is one sitting rather than twenty trips back to the same tab. Tap Done when you have finished.
Tap any student to see their attendance and fee status in one place. And because a student on Skipper is a full Skipper player, there is a doorway from their profile straight into their match stats and analysis. Your coaching and their weekend cricket, finally on one page.
4. Manage Your Store
- Go to the Store tab and tap Add product.
- Add a name, price, and photo, and sizes if it is kit.
- When a parent places an order, it lands in your orders list. Tap Confirm.
- They collect and pay at the academy. Mark it Delivered and you are square.
5. Manage 1:1 Bookings
- From the More tab, open 1:1 classes.
- Tap New 1:1 session. The session and its weekly availability are set up on one screen: a title like Batting · 1:1, the duration, the price, the coach, and the days and windows that coach is free. One Save covers the lot.
Parents and students pick from the open slots and book. The app holds the slot and blocks double bookings, so two students can never land on the same hour. Payment is collected at the academy.
Coaches get a 1:1s tab of their own in the academy, so they can see what has been booked with them without going through you.
6. Announcements
- Open Notices and tap to post.
- Write a title and your message.
- Choose who it reaches: everyone, staff only, or one batch.
- Pin it if it matters all week.
Rain washout, timing change, tournament news: one notice, and every phone that needs to know gets a notification. No more forwarding the same message through five WhatsApp groups.
7. Fee Reminders
- Go to the Fees tab and create a fee plan: a name, the amount, and how often, monthly, quarterly, or one-time.
- Assign the plan to each student. Skipper raises the invoices automatically, every period, on time.
- When fees come due, tap Send reminders. Everyone who owes gets a polite nudge on their phone, app notification and SMS, so you never have to be the bad guy.
- When a parent pays at the ground, cash or UPI, tap Record payment on their invoice. It is marked paid and a receipt lands in the parent's app.
The Fees tab opens on a collection meter, so you always know how much of the month's money is in and who is pending. Payments are collected at the academy for now; online payment is on its way.
8. For Coaches: Mark Attendance
- On practice day, open your academy. Coaches land on Today, with the day's session right there.
- Tap Mark attendance.
- Tap each student: Present, Absent, Late, or Excused.
- Tap Save attendance. Done, in under a minute.
Coaches see their own batches under My batches, and only theirs. Every saved session builds into an attendance percentage on the student's profile, so when a parent asks how regular their child has been, the answer is a number, not a guess.
9. Academy Teams
- Go to the More tab and scroll to Linked teams. It is a section on that tab rather than a screen you open.
- Link your academy's playing sides, the same Skipper teams you already use for matches and tournaments.
Now your academy and its teams are one family. Your students train under the academy, play matches under its teams, and their scores and stats build on the same player profile in both places.
10. Get Found
Everything above is the inside of your academy. This is the outside.
From the More tab, open Public page. This is the page a stranger sees: what you do, your facilities, your programs, what you have won, photographs, and your coaches. Every word of it is written by you. Nothing on it is counted or scored or averaged by us.
When someone lands on it and taps Contact admin, their enquiry arrives in Requests on the same More tab, with a badge when something new is waiting. Open one, and you can start a chat with them in a tap.
To send people there, use the share action in the academy's app bar. It shares a link to your academy that works for anyone, in the app or out of it, which is what you want in a WhatsApp status or a poster.
There is more to the public page than fits here, including how coaches choose whether to appear on it and the one image trap worth avoiding. It has a guide of its own: Your Academy's Public Page.