Players & captains interviewed
Tobin sat down with beer leaguers, recreational players, and league commissioners to understand what actually went wrong every week — not what looked good in a feature list.
Home The story behind RosterBuilt by a player.
Built by a player.
For the people.
Tobin K. · Hockey player, lifetime beer league member
I didn’t set out to build a software company. I set out to build an app for the hockey community with the added benefit of never wondering if we had enough players.
“You’d be amazed at how much admin work there is to do as Commissioner”Brian · Tobin’s league commissioner
10Years with a BenchApp account before building Roster
4Apps tested before deciding to build his own
The OriginWhy I built
Why I built
Roster.
Since 2016 we used a different app for the teams. It worked well for surface-level items like calendar and planning. But as I moved into a more community-oriented league with fantastic people, I realized that we could benefit from a more personal app experience.
Our league used everything. Excel for schedules and drafts, esportsdesk for standings and player stats, team text threads. Nothing solved the actual problem: having one app for everything… literally everything.
So while driving back to Ohio from our annual family vacation, I planned out Roster. Four months later, some of the players had a working beta app to test.
The ProcessBuilt with the
Built with the
whole bench.
Roster wasn’t built in isolation. I spent a full season talking to captains, coaches, and commissioners before release.
Competing apps tested in full
He ran his own league through every major app on the market for at least one season. He documented what worked, what failed, and what drove his players crazy.
Beta leagues before launch
Before the public launch, three real leagues used Roster through a full season. Every bug, workflow gap, and confusing screen was fixed based on real feedback.
The result is an app that’s built around how recreational hockey actually works — not how a product manager imagined it might work. Every feature in Roster exists because a real captain asked for it, struggled without it, or wasted time working around the fact that it didn’t exist.