I Spent 4 Years Looking for the App That Should've Existed. So I Built It.

I have 10 million tabs open in my brain at all times.

Not browser tabs. The kind where you’re mentally flicking between client deadlines, what time practice starts, whether the uniforms are clean, what time you have to leave to beat traffic (which is different from when you should probably leave), who’s picking up one kid while you’re on the other side of town picking up the other, whether you responded to the coach’s email, if there’s anything defrosted for dinner, and oh, you were also supposed to call the dentist three days ago.

I’m a mom of two competitive soccer players and a former player myself. For the last four years I was a volunteer coach for multiple teams, a business owner, a homeschooler, and various other volunteer roles and responsibilities. I wear a lot of hats. But the one that takes up the most mental space, the one I didn’t really plan on, is being the total operational center for my entire family.

Hi, I’m Tara, and I’m building SeasonKeeper: the app I’ve needed for the last four years but couldn’t find.

The job nobody interviews for

Here’s how it works in our house. My girls play with their club teams. They guest play and train with another club. They beg to never miss an opportunity for extra group sessions. My oldest is on the state ODP team. Between all of that, there are five or six different soccer schedules floating around at any given time, and that’s just soccer.

Layer on the rest: I’ve run a podcast production agency for eight and a half years. I homeschool both kids. And we live in a small community where everything is 30 to 45 minutes away, sometimes longer.

The average travel sports family spends up to 15 hours a week on practices, games, and the logistics around them, and about 75 percent of that coordination falls on moms (HopSkipDrive). I don’t need the statistic. I feel it every single week.

The hardest part isn’t any one task. It’s that everyone comes to me for everything. My kids, my husband, the grandparents: “What time do we need to leave?” “Which field is it?” “Cleats or turfs?” “Can you send me their schedule for this weekend?” I’ve already answered most of these questions, sometimes more than once, and then someone asks again and I have to go dig the answer up all over again, because there’s no quick place to pull it from.

There is no centralized place where all of this lives. It’s just… me.

What did I try before building an app?

Like every parent deep in this life, I tried to piece something together. Here’s the honest scorecard:

Nothing was encompassing everything required to actually function as a mom, a business owner, a parent, a coach, a human. Everything was scattered. Our family didn’t have a centralized command center that was always with us and accessible to whoever needed it.

So I did what every travel sports parent does. I Frankensteined it: four apps, two email accounts, a group text that pings at 11pm with “FIELD CHANGE TOMORROW,” and me doing the mental math on what that actually means for our morning. It was held together with duct tape and caffeine, and I was exhausted.

The day I blocked off half a workday to update a calendar

This past season, I hit my limit.

I blocked off half a working day, time I could have spent on client work, to sit at my computer and get every schedule into Google Calendar. Laptop open, notebook out, phone flipping between five or six apps, websites, and emails, hunting dates and locations for both kids. Spring bleeding into summer camps, clinics, ODP, guest play. All of it. And that half a day turned into a full workday. And even then, everyone still came to me with the questions anyway.

Here’s the thing about me: I run a business. I use AI so much it’s a running joke in our house; my husband uses it like Google, and I use it like a team of super-powered employees. I build systems for clients. Technology is the thing I’m good at.

So I tried to make AI do this job, and it failed completely. The information was spread across too many sources for any tool to pull together. I spent hours and couldn’t make it work. That frustration felt personal. If I can’t make this work, with my skill set, who can?

And when I finally finished entering everything by hand, I looked at my beautiful, complete calendar and realized it covered maybe 10 percent of what I actually needed. Dates and times. That’s it. No travel time. No when-do-we-actually-leave. Nothing connected to who’s driving, what needs packing, or what the weather’s doing. Without buffers in the calendar, clients book calls right when I should be getting ready to leave. Then I’m late, and I’m back to doing time math in my head at every red light.

The mental math never stops. And no calendar does it for you.

The assistant I almost hired

Around this time, I seriously looked into hiring help. A personal assistant. A mom’s helper. Someone whose actual job was managing the chaos.

After a full-on meltdown session with a friend, telling her what I really needed, she joked, “You need a wife.” I laughed. She wasn’t wrong.

But the more I researched it, the more I saw the problem: an assistant would just be another person to manage. I’d have to train them on every app, every group chat, every team’s schedule, which kid has what where and when. And everyone would still come to me with the questions, because the information lives in my head.

Hiring a person doesn’t fix that. The core problem was that there was no system: no single place where everything lived, where a change could ripple through automatically, where anyone in the family could look and get the answer without asking me.

What I actually wanted was something I could forward a schedule to and it would just handle it. Something I could send a voice note to from the car, “this changed, update everything,” and it would be done.

Not another person. A second brain.

The drive where SeasonKeeper started

I was on the way to practice, an hour and 45 minutes away, and I was in my head. It had been one of those days. I’d gotten stuck needing to finish something for work, so our planned stop at the children’s museum had to get skipped entirely. I spent almost the whole drive running a mom guilt loop: I should have been more organized, I should have done the timing math better.

Sitting in the car, watching the road, I started designing the fix.

I’d already started building software for my other company, so my brain was living in that world. And this wasn’t supposed to be a company. It was supposed to be a system for us: one place where I could say “game moved to 3pm” and everything downstream would just update. The calendar. The departure time. The packing list against the new weather. The person driving.

But the more I designed it, the more I kept seeing every other parent I know living the same chaos. The ones in the parking lot on their phones trying to decode next weekend. The ones who missed the schedule-change text and drove 45 minutes for nothing. The ones running a logistics operation that nobody trained them for and nobody pays them for.

And I got this nudge: people really need this.

What is SeasonKeeper?

The simplest way I can explain it: you tell SeasonKeeper what changed, and it handles everything downstream. A game time moves? Your departure time recalculates. The packing list adjusts for the weather at the new time. The right person gets notified. The family calendar updates. You don’t touch anything.

One change. Everything updates.

Coaches already have their team apps, and leagues have their admin systems; those tools work fine for the job they do. SeasonKeeper lives on the other side, the family side, so that when life happens (and it always happens) you’re not the one manually updating six different things at 10pm. It’s the second brain I couldn’t find anywhere. The centralized command center our family never had. A true family operating system.

The name comes from our house, by the way. One of my daughters is a goalkeeper. She stands in front of the net, tracks everything happening on the field, and holds the last line of defense, the whole picture at once. I watch her do it every weekend, and somewhere along the way I realized I run the same position for our family, just off the field. Every travel sports family has a keeper of the season: the parent who knows the schedule, has the backup cleats in the trunk, calculated the departure time before anyone thought to ask, and answered the same question three times today without losing it.

They’re almost always running on fumes. SeasonKeeper is built to give that person their life back.

This is an invitation

I’m not here to sell you something. The app isn’t finished yet. I’m building it, and I’m doing it the way most companies don’t: with real families from the start.

I’m looking for founding families. Parents who live this every week (working parents holding two calendars together, I especially see you) and want to shape what this becomes. Not beta testers. Co-builders. People who will tell me what’s working, what’s missing, and what I haven’t thought of yet.

SeasonKeeper is almost ready, and founding families get early access before launch, a real say in which features to add (the ones you actually need), and the first look at everything as it comes together.

If you’re a travel sports parent running on 10 million mental tabs, managing a logistics operation nobody trained you for, and wondering why nobody built something that actually helps: I built this for you.

Because I am you.

Join the founding team at theseasonkeeper.com. You’ll get first access when it’s ready, and a direct line to the person building it. I’ll see you at the fields.