u/tmiller_naperville

I posted here when I launched playGrades like 2.5 months ago. Got some great feedback (heres that post).

The site has some HUGE updates since then (plus I'm at >500 reviews now, which I think is cool)...

• Expansion across Chicago suburbs
• upvote/downvote system
• Organizations can "claim" their pages and get updates when reviews are submitted
• Mapping teams/organizations across the suburbs (searching for travel baseball teams nearby? never been easier).

For Naperville parents....This is a bit of self promotion sure. But I think this app is an even more useful / powerful tool than it was when I first posted about it a while ago, so thought I'd share it again. Hope thats ok!

Check it out, leave a review (takes 1 min) for whatever team / activitiy / summer camp your kid loves / hates, let me know what you think!

I'm a parent from the Chicago suburbs who got tired of having no good way to get feedback on teams/activities before signing up my kid. So I built playGrades, which is basically yelp but for kids activiteis / sports / teams etc.

I launched it in April had have >500 reviews for activities across the Chicago suburbs.

I've been manually adding Chicago-area activities, but it seems like fastpitch parents just love writing reviews? It's by FAR my most popular category.

What it does differently from googling:

• Parents rate coaching, value, facilities, and organization separately (not just a star blob)
• Review types: season in review, mid-season, first impression
• Reviews are at the program level...so a team with camps, clinics, fall-ball etc can get reviews for each of those independently. Or a park district with 100 programs can collect feeback on all of them that'll start showing up in google searches.
• Age/gender context so you know who's actually reviewing
• Orgs can claim their listing and respond to reviews

It's pretty much Chicago suburbs only right now but thats just becuase I live in the area. posting here in case there's interest. Users can add a team and start reviewing. Organization owners / leaders can claim their page and manage their presence.

Been making updates and getting a lot of good feedback. Anything that's missing?

Feel free to add your team and start reviewing! Curious what will happen if people outside of the Chicago area start adding stuff.

Hey r/chicagosuburbs, I'm Tyler, lifelong Naperville resident, dad of two (8 and 6).

My wife and I spend too much time trying to figure out which sports leagues, camps, and classes are actually worth enrolling our kids in. Crawling old FB posts, asking a friend of a friend, etc. It's a bad process. So I spent the last few months building something to make it easier.

It's called playGrades, basically Yelp for kids' activities in the Naperville area and surrounding suburbs. You can look up programs, sports leagues, camps, and birthday party venues, and read reviews from other local parents before you sign up. Launched a week ago.

We've got about 80 reviews and ~200 programs listed so far....Naperville-heavy right now (Youth Soccer, NPD programs, etc.) but the whole point is to expand across DuPage and beyond. It's early, and some categories are still pretty thin.

playgrades.app — free, no account required to read or leave a review.

If your kid is in any local program, I'd genuinely love a review. Good or bad. Or just tell me if this is even useful.