Starting 5

Starting 5 trains young basketball players out of a facility in Valencia, in the Santa Clarita Valley. Its business runs on a weekly training calendar: grade and gender grouped sessions, drop-in day passes, and recurring monthly memberships like Open Shooting. Parents book, players show up, the schedule turns over, and it all repeats.

The whole operation is run by a handful of people. That single fact shaped every decision in this project.

Starting 5 wanted a mobile app, but a small team cannot afford to run two disconnected systems. If the website said one thing and the app said another, parents would end up at the gym on the wrong day.

The harder constraint was operational. A training schedule changes constantly. Announcements go out on short notice. New photos go up. If every one of those routine updates required a developer, or worse, a new build pushed through Apple and Google review, the app would be stale within a month and the staff would quietly go back to using the website.

So the app could not be a separate product. It had to be another window onto the business the team already ran.

We designed and developed the Starting 5 app for iOS and Android, and shipped it to both stores. It carries the parts of the business a member actually touches:

• Training calendar, the live weekly schedule of sessions by grade and group, matching the website exactly.
• Day passes, drop-in purchases for each grade and gender group, bookable including same day.
• Memberships, recurring monthly plans such as Open Shooting, with subscription billing.
• Register, a direct route from the app into sign-up, wired into the bottom navigation.
• Announcements and notifications, published by staff and delivered to members as push alerts.
• Profiles, so members have an account that carries across the app and the site.

The decision that makes this app work is that it has no back end of its own. The Starting 5 app and the Starting 5 website are both driven by the same WooCommerce admin panel the staff were already using.

The practical effect: staff change the training calendar, swap images, post an announcement, open a new membership for purchase, or fire a push notification, and it lands in the app immediately. No developer. No release. No waiting on Apple or Google. The only time a store review is involved is when the app's actual code changes, which is rare.

For a business run by a few people, that is the difference between an app that stays current and an app that gets abandoned.

We handled the parts of a launch that clients should not have to learn. Both builds were prepared, submitted, and shepherded through Apple App Store and Google Play review, including Google's Digital Services Act trader verification, which we filed on the client's behalf.

We also kept changing the product right up to the end. After a final review of what the app was really for, Starting 5 decided to drop the Roster feature entirely and put Register in its place in the bottom navigation. We made the change and resubmitted rather than ship a feature the client had stopped believing in. Alongside it we hardened the day pass checkout flow so bookings, including same day ones, complete cleanly.

The Starting 5 app went live on the App Store and Google Play in July 2026, and the facility announced it to its members. It is covered by a 90 day warranty and free support through October 2026, and the website and app are moving onto a single maintenance agreement so both stay current under one roof.

Starting 5 now has two front doors, the site and the app, and one place to run them from.