Javelin Sports alternative — Brunchie for multi-sport organizers in Canada

If you organize a recurring sports group in Canada and you've been using Javelin for volleyball, you've probably hit the same wall: it's volleyball-first, the chrome and templates and copy all centre on volleyball culture, and the moment you try to run a badminton drop-in, a pickleball ladder, or a hockey shinny, the product fights you.

Brunchie is the multi-sport alternative. Same organizer-first wedge — RSVP tracking, capacity caps, waitlist, court fee collection, automatic open-spot notification to pending invitees — but built for whatever sport your group plays.

What Brunchie does that Javelin doesn't

Multi-sport from day one. The wizard ships templates for volleyball, pickleball, badminton, basketball, soccer, hockey, padel, and tennis — each one drops in a sport-specific cap suggestion (12 for two badminton courts, 10 for full-court basketball, 14 for 7-on-7 soccer, etc.) and a venue-agnostic "court / ice / field rental" cost-split note. You don't translate volleyball assumptions to your sport.

Deeper event surface. Each sports hangout carries the full Brunchie surface: itinerary blocks for warmup → drills → scrimmage → cool-down, posts feed for game photos and "great kill from Maya in the third set," polls for next-week venue choice, seating chart for lane allocation (swim, bowling, courts), shared expenses for the after-game beers. Your weekly group gets a real home, not just a recurring RSVP card.

Free for hosts. Brunchie is free per the Free forever page — all core features, no premium tiers, no per-player pricing, no hidden costs. The only fees that ever apply are payment-processor fees + a small platform fee on optional in-app fee collection (Stripe Connect, behind an experimental toggle you flip on under Settings → Experimental Features — no waitlist), explicitly broken out to your players.

Why we don't try to out-Javelin Javelin on volleyball

Because Javelin is great at volleyball. Their public-event browse is a real funnel for Canadian volleyball players to find pickup games. We're not chasing that.

What we're chasing: the host who runs a recurring private group across multiple sports and wants one app that handles all of it without making them feel like a second-class user because they're not playing volleyball this week. That's the gap.

So what — what to actually do

If your group is volleyball-only and you love Javelin's public-pickup browse, stay on Javelin. Honestly.

If your group is multi-sport, friends-first, recurring, or includes any sport other than volleyball, here's the migration path:

Decide

Pick the sport template in the Brunchie hangout wizard. Each template is concise on purpose — title, description with cap suggestion + cost-split note, sport-specific thumbnail. If your sport isn't in the list (squash? table tennis? cricket nets?), pick Court Session — it's the consolidated multi-sport template that handles anything court / ice / field-based with setup-question toggles for capacity, cost-share, skill-level survey, and practice run-of-show.

Then the "Repeats?" step turns one session into a series — Weekly, Every other week, or Monthly with an optional end date (labelled "Ends on" in the form). Brunchie pre-creates the next sessions so your players see the next month at a glance.

Coordinate

Share one link in your group chat (Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, group SMS — wherever your group lives). Players RSVP without needing an account. Set the capacity cap — once it's hit, the next would-be player joins the waitlist instead of seeing an error toast. When someone declines, Brunchie auto-promotes the head of the waitlist — no host action required.

If there's no waitlist (or it's empty when someone drops), Brunchie automatically notifies your pending invitees that a spot opened up. They tap once to claim it. If you want to recruit beyond that invited list, post in the hangout — it fans out to all attendees through the existing notification pipeline.

Spend

Two paths, your call:

• Free events with manual settle-up — track court rental + after-game tab in the Expenses section inside the Planning tab. Settle up directly through Interac (available in your wallet under additional payment methods), Venmo, or whichever payment method your group uses. The expense splitter does the math; your players see what they owe and to whom.
• Paid events with Stripe Checkout at RSVP — set a per-player fee on the hangout, players pay through Stripe Checkout when they RSVP, money lands in your bank (behind an experimental toggle — flip on "Stripe Checkout at RSVP" under Settings → Experimental Features and you're in). All line items broken out transparently to players. The platform fee is small (5–10%, host-paid, transparent line item) and the rest is Stripe's processing fee + your net cut. No more chasing.

Remember

Posts tab carries the photos, the "we tried switching servers and it actually worked" notes, the next-time-bring-better-shoes reminders. Each session in a recurring series carries its own posts and tweaks while the back-link to the series template is one tap away from the hangout's hero card.

Personal notes from the founder

I started building this because I run a weekly badminton group with friends — two courts, twelve players, $40 split across whoever shows. Javelin would have been overkill (and volleyball-shaped) for what's basically twelve people who want to play badminton on Tuesdays. Brunchie's sports surface is the founder's-own-itch product. If your group's specific quirk isn't covered, tell me — I add organizer requests.

The Stripe Connect fee-collection path is shipping behind an experimental toggle so organizers can opt into it deliberately, not so we can gatekeep — anyone can flip it on under Settings → Experimental Features today. If you've got feedback once you've tried it, that's the kind of note the founder actively wants — but you don't need permission to start.

TL;DR — switching from Javelin

Set up a recurring sports group on Brunchie at brunchie.app/hangouts/new — pick your sport template, set the cap, share the link, stop being the group-chat janitor.

For the full recurring-group walkthrough, see the Run a recurring sports group on Brunchie pillar guide.