Core concepts

Who this is for: everyone Applies to: all platforms (Android, iOS, web)

What this page covers

This page explains the ideas that Groupset is built around, in plain language: what an event is, how attendance and the readiness ladder work, what each payment status means, the different kinds of chat channels, how the activity feed and time trials work, how group change requests move an athlete between groups, and how the app behaves when you have no signal. If a word is unfamiliar, the glossary has a one-line meaning for it.

Events: practices and races, in one list

An event is anything scheduled on the team calendar. There are three kinds:

Practice — a regular team ride or training session.
Race — a competition, with timing and results.
Social event — a non-riding team gathering (team dinner, meeting), with its own RSVP list.

All of them live in the same events list (sometimes called the events hub), so the team's whole season is in one place. Each event shows its time, location, and who's going. Locations can carry a geofence — an invisible circle around the spot, drawn for check-in context; it is shown on the event's map but is not currently a hard block on who can check in.

RSVPs: who's coming

For any event, people reply Going, Not going, or Maybe. Events and social events each have their own RSVP list — an event's replies and a social event's replies are kept separate, and both update live so the organizer sees who's coming without refreshing.

Attendance and the readiness ladder

Attendance is the record of who was at an event. Before a practice, athletes move up a two-step "readiness ladder" that coaches check at check-in:

Pit-zone invite — A team admin invites the athlete to the pit zone (the staging area). This only happens once the athlete's team fee is paid, so it doubles as a quiet check that fees are settled.
Practice-ready — After the pit-zone invite, the team admin marks the athlete practice-ready, meaning they're cleared to ride.

At the event, a coach or team admin checks athletes in (and later checks them out). On race day, a parent can check their own athlete in and out — that's the one case where a non-staff member can record attendance, and only for races, not everyday practices. Athletes never check themselves in, and social events don't have check-in at all (RSVPs cover those). Each attended practice adds to an attendance streak — only practices that have already happened count, so a week full of upcoming practices won't pause or break a current streak. Streak milestones (for example, three or ten in a row) show up in the activity feed, and coaches see their group's streaks as a streak heat map in the Coach insights report — one circle per athlete, darker the longer their current streak.

If your team exempts younger grades from attendance (for example grades 7–8), those athletes still appear in attendance reports and the heat map, but no coach "reach out" follow-ups are created about their attendance.

Coaches see a readiness badge on the attendance screen that tells them who has cleared the ladder. See roles-and-permissions.md for who can do each step.

Payment statuses: what each one means for your family

Every athlete has a payment for the season's team fee. A payment always shows one of these statuses:

Status	What it means for your family
Pending	The fee is due and hasn't been paid yet. You'll see it on the Pending payments screen until it's settled.
Paid	Done — the fee is settled.
Failed	The card charge didn't go through. You can try again (retry) with the same or a different card.
Processing	The payment just went through and is being confirmed. It usually changes to Paid or Failed shortly after.
Partially paid	Only part of the fee has been covered; the rest is still owed.
Refunded	The money was returned. The fee no longer needs to be paid.
Canceled	The payment was stopped or voided before it completed.

What a family pays is the team fee — one flat amount, or the amount for the athlete's grade from the team's fee schedule (each grade-range row is a fee tier). Two other costs come out of what the team receives rather than being added on top of the family's amount: the payment provider's processing charge and the platform fee (by default $20 per athlete, with younger grades exempt if the team sets a minimum grade). A team can't actually collect fees until it has connected its payout account with the payment provider — until then, registering families aren't asked to pay.

See faq.md for how to pay, and glossary.md for terms like promo code, fee schedule, and platform fee.

Chat channels: the rooms inside team chat

Team chat is organized into channels (chat rooms) rather than one big feed:

Team channels — every team automatically gets a main channel, plus any extra team-wide rooms the admin creates.
Training-group channels — a team admin can create a channel linked to one or more training groups, so a group's riders and coaches can talk among themselves.
Role channels — rooms for a whole role, such as all the coaches.
Organization-wide channels — a room that reaches every team in the organization, for things that span all teams.
Conversations — small one-off rooms (including one-to-one chats) that a team admin starts for a specific topic; they're grouped under a Conversations heading in the channel list.

You can reply to a single message in a thread so side conversations don't crowd the channel, tag someone or a whole role with a mention, and set per-channel notification choices or mute a channel you don't want pinging you. Admins can archive a channel to close it while keeping the history readable.

One safety rule worth knowing: athletes can read any channel they're in, but they can post only when the channel includes an adult member too — an all-athlete channel stays read-only for them. Creating channels is a team-admin (or owner) action.

The activity feed: what happened

The activity feed is the scrolling "what happened" list on the home screen. It shows rides, attendance streaks, personal records, season bests, announcements, and volunteer requests when the team needs hands for an upcoming event. You can switch its scope to see only your training group, your whole team, or the whole organization — so it works for a small group and for a multi-team club alike.

Feed cards have reactions so teammates can cheer each other on. The default reaction is a high five; holding the button reveals more positive emoji reactions. To keep things friendly, reaction counts and who reacted are shown only to the person who posted the card.

Time trials and segments

A time trial is a timed route a coach defines (for example, a specific climb). A coach can split the route into timed segments — sections within it. When an athlete's synced ride follows the route, the app matches the ride to the segments automatically, quality-checks the match, and records the rider's time on each segment. Segment matching runs in the background, so a newly synced ride's segment times and PRs can trail the ride itself for a little while — that's normal.

From those records the app recognizes two achievements:

A PR (personal record) — the athlete's best time on that segment.
A season best — the athlete's fastest time on that segment so far this season.

PRs and season bests appear in the activity feed and can feed performance dashboards, so coaches and athletes can see improvement without anyone typing times in by hand. See glossary.md for PR, season best, and percentile.

Coaches see the numbers on the performance dashboard — three swipeable cards: Group Volume (rides and miles against the group's median, with an overload mark on riders 20% or more above it), Group Skills (best climb and descent times against the group's medians), and Segment Performance (dot plots and percentile ranks). Every assigned coach can open the dashboard, whatever their NICA license level; viewing an athlete's medical information is a separate gate that needs Level 2 or higher. A climb or descent time on the Group Skills card, and a rider's dot on a Segment Performance chart, open that athlete's Time Trial Efforts — their season bests on each segment. (The panel's caption reminds you that it always shows season bests, while the Group Skills card uses the reporting window you picked.)

Group change requests: moving an athlete between groups

A group change request is how an athlete moves from one training group to another. A coach (or a team admin) files it for the athlete, naming the target group and a rationale. The form backs the request with numbers: a percentile preview shows the athlete's uphill and downhill rank against their current group and, once a target group is picked, a projected placement against that group's riders.

The request lands in the team admin's review queue. The admin can accept it — the athlete is moved to the target group automatically, and the old and new coaches, the parents, and the athlete (if they have their own login) are notified — deny it with a reason, or cancel it. The submitting coach can edit or withdraw a request while it's still open and follows its status under My Reports. Moving a group also moves the athlete's chat channel memberships.

Live updates: things change by themselves

Groupset updates live. Chat messages, attendance during an event, RSVP counts, race results on race day, and the activity feed all refresh on their own — when someone checks in, replies, or posts, other people's screens update without a manual refresh. If you're looking at a list and it changes in front of you, that's working as intended.

Offline: the app still works without a signal

Groupset is designed for trailheads where the phone has no bars. When the app can't reach the service:

Recent data stays viewable. Screens you've opened recently keep showing their data from a local copy on your device, so you're not staring at blank screens.
Check-ins queue up. If a check-in or check-out is recorded while offline, the action is saved and sent automatically once the connection comes back. A banner and a small badge show that there are pending items still to sync.

Maps and location

The maps inside Groupset are built in and work offline — there's nothing to install and no separate map app to download. An event's page can show a map pin with the geofence drawn as a circle around the location (for check-in context — it's not a hard boundary; see above). The app may ask to use your location services (your phone's GPS setting) for location features like maps; if you're asked to allow location access, this is why.

Glossary — one-line meanings for every term
Roles and permissions — who can do each of the steps above
FAQ — quick answers to common questions
Welcome to Groupset — where to start

More in: Attendance, Payments, Team chat, Performance analytics, and Activity feed (guides); Check-out reporting: group change requests; Troubleshooting: offline and sync.