How families are named
There are two names for every family, and they’re for different people.
What you see: the athlete
Everywhere in the coach tool — the family roster, the family page heading, the message audience picker — a family is labelled by its athletes.
Rosa Alvarez’s family · also Mari Alvarez
You’re looking for a kid, not a household, so that’s what the tool shows you.
What they see: whatever they chose
On their own page, a family sees the name they picked for themselves. They can change it any time from their settings sheet.
This matters more than it looks. Married parents often have different last names, and separated or remarried parents can leave as many as four different surnames attached to one athlete.
A surname can’t name a household. The only people who know what to call a family are that family, so the field is theirs.
It never affects how you find them. A family can rename itself to anything at all and your views don’t change, because your views don’t read that field.
Siblings appear once each
This is the bit worth knowing. In the message audience picker, a family with two kids shows up twice:
- Rosa Alvarez’s family
- Mari Alvarez’s family
Same household, both entries. Search “Sara” and you find her without needing to know she has a brother.
Picking both still sends one message. They’re two ways in to the same family, not two recipients — the system collapses them.
When you create a family
The name box fills itself in from the first athlete — Rosa Alvarez’s family. It’s a starting point. Edit it if you want, and know the family may change it later.
If a family has no athletes on file yet, the tool falls back to whatever name is on the record, since there’s nothing else to use.
Where you see both
The family’s detail page is the one place that shows both names — the athlete-based heading, and underneath it:
They call themselves Team Rosa & Mari
That’s where to look if a name ever needs sorting out.