MushMate by Skimate.eu has always known how to follow one kennel: its dogs, its plans, its logbooks. What it could not do is the thing a club does naturally on a Saturday morning — compare notes, agree on a meeting point, tell each other which trail is worth the drive.
That is what the new Club tab is for. And as with any feature that puts several kennels in the same room, the question that matters most is not "what does it do?" but "what do the others see of me?". Let's start there.
1. A club member is a KENNEL, never a musher
This is not a vocabulary detail. It is the decision that shapes everything else.
In MushMate, every piece of data belongs to a kennel: a dog, a plan, a session, a vet visit. If a club grouped people, every row in the database would need a second question asked of it — "and for this person, what is visible?" — in thousands of places, which is a thousand fresh chances to get it wrong.
So a club groups kennels. You join with your kennel, you answer an outing on behalf of your kennel, and you appear on the leaderboard under your kennel's name. If four people share your kennel, none of them has anything to configure.
2. What the other members see of you
The list is short, and it is exhaustive:
- your kennel name and its region, as you entered them;
- your cumulative kilometres and your session count for the period on screen;
- your trails — name, distance, elevation gain, surface;
- the outings you propose to the club, and your answers to everyone else's.
And here is what never leaves your kennel, not even for the club's founder:
- your dogs — no names, no ages, not even how many;
- your training plans, loads, fitness, paces;
- your health records, weights, body-condition scores, vet visits;
- the detail of your sessions: an 18 km run counts as 18 km, and nothing else about it is readable;
- your teams, your gear, your enclosures, your litters.
A club, here, is not shared access. It is a total and a calendar.
3. The leaderboard runs on the calendar year, not the season
Every member kennel appears with its kilometre total, for the current calendar year or for all time.
Why not the season, when MushMate thinks in seasons everywhere else? Because a season does not start on the same day for two kennels: one begins in September on a rig, the other in November on snow. Ranking them on "their" respective seasons would compare unequal stretches of time. The calendar year is the only clock everyone shares.
A member who hasn't run yet stays listed, at 0 km. That was the least obvious thing to build, and the most important: in a named, closed group, a kennel that vanishes from the list reads as a kennel that left the club. In reality it just had a bad week.
4. Joining is the consent — there is no second switch
A club's leaderboard is a public page, at mushmate.eu/club/your-club.
Shareable by link, not indexed by search engines: it won't surface in a Google
search, but anyone holding the link can read it without an account.
The join form says so, in plain words, before you confirm. We deliberately rejected the idea of an extra "agree to appear on the leaderboard" checkbox: it would have produced half-empty leaderboards where a missing kennel reads as a snub, and it would have dressed up as a choice something that joining a club already is.
If you'd rather not appear, don't join — or leave, which removes you from the leaderboard immediately. Your outings stay yours either way.
5. Joining, inviting, leaving
- The kennel that founds the club is its founder. Its owner generates a join code valid for 14 days, reusable by several kennels: you hand it to the group, not to an e-mail address.
- A kennel joins by entering that code. Its owner does it — a handler cannot commit the kennel.
- The founder sees which codes are still valid and can revoke one at any time. A code that travelled further than intended gets cut before anyone plays it, without touching the others.
- A member kennel can leave whenever it wants. The founder can remove a member; when that happens, every still-active code is revoked in the same move, so the code that kennel already knew won't let it back in.
- The founding kennel itself cannot leave the club it administers. The club dissolves with it.
6. Group outings
Any member kennel can propose an outing: a title, a departure date and time, a meeting point, an optional trail, and free-form details.
Each kennel answers I'm coming, Maybe or No. Change your mind as often as you like — the answer is replaced, never stacked. The card shows who is coming, by kennel name, with the counts.
The organiser can cancel their outing; so can the club's founder, when tidying up is needed. The answers go with it, and the confirmation says so first.
Three details that don't jump out, each of which was a decision:
- An outing stays on screen for its whole day, even after it has left. The programmer's reflex is to drop it at departure time — which is precisely the moment the late arrival is looking up the meeting point on their phone.
- An outing nobody has answered yet still shows. It was just proposed: it's the one that most needs to be seen.
- An outing whose organiser left the club stays on the calendar. Six kennels had the date written down; a seventh walking away doesn't erase it.
7. Trails
The Trails tab gathers the member kennels' routes: name, distance, elevation gain, surface. That's where you pick a track to attach to an outing.
Nothing new is exposed here. Routes recorded in MushMate are already readable by other accounts — that is what makes the per-trail leaderboards in Chronos work. The tab simply filters them down to your club's kennels, and adds the name of the kennel that mapped each one.
The reference traces shipped with the app (Femundløpet, Finnmarksløpet) are not included: they belong to nobody, and therefore to no club.
8. What it doesn't do — and this isn't "not yet"
Worth writing plainly, so nobody waits for it:
- No notifications. No e-mail, no push, no outing reminder. A proposed outing is discovered by opening the tab.
- No comments, no threads. MushMate has no ambition to become one more social network; your group chat already does that better.
- Web only. The Club tab works in a browser, phones included, but the mobile app doesn't carry it.
- No transfer of founding. If the founding kennel wants to hand over, there is no gesture for that yet.
These gaps aren't oversights, they're choices — and they can change if the clubs using this tell us they get in the way. Tell us.
Getting started
A kennel owner opens Club in the menu, next to Team. With no club, the screen offers exactly two things: join with a code, or found one. Founding asks for a name and, if you want it, the public address of the club's page.
Then generate a code and hand it to the kennels you want to see turn up. They have two weeks.