The Squadeno theme

A classic WordPress theme for sports clubs — built as the companion to the Club Sports Manager plugin, and complete without it.

What it does

The theme provides the presentation: a hero slider you fill from the Customizer, section pages for every public post type, fluid typography that scales without breakpoints, and cards that respond to the space they sit in rather than to the window.

Self-contained by design

No external fonts, no CDNs, no third-party requests at all. That keeps it fast, and it keeps visitor data on your own server. The stylesheet is a single file, and the slider script loads only when a slider is actually running.

Works with the plugin — and without it

Install Club Sports Manager and its sports, training times, coaches and venues appear in the theme automatically. The theme does not know the plugin by name: it reads whatever public post types exist. Pick an overview page in the plugin and the breadcrumb follows it, with that page's title instead of a generic archive label — asked over a filter, so it stays silent when the plugin is absent. Nothing breaks if you never install it.

Accessibility and performance

Skip link, visible focus, keyboard-operable menus, a carousel that follows the ARIA authoring practices with play and pause, and touch targets of at least 44 pixels. Full right-to-left support. Light mode only, on purpose.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later, like WordPress itself.

Preview

Approved for the WordPress theme directory

The review at wordpress.org is through: the theme is approved and waiting to be added to the directory, so it cannot be installed from there just yet. Until it appears, you can download the current build here and install it under Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme.

Try it in your browser first Download the preview

The demo is also available in German

ZIP · 432 KB · GPL-2.0-or-later · requires WordPress 6.7 and PHP 8.1

One thing worth knowing: a theme installed this way is matched against wordpress.org by its folder name. Once Squadeno is published there, updates arrive through WordPress as usual — the first directory release may carry a different version number than the build offered here.

What it looks like

A demo site with an invented club. Every image in these screenshots is drawn from the theme’s own colours and shapes — no stock photography.

Click any screenshot to enlarge it.

The front page: hero slider, intro, link tiles and the latest posts.

A section page. The heading takes the place name from the Customizer, so a search for a sport in your town has somewhere to land.

One sport with the plugin active: header image, training times, contact person and upcoming dates.

A venue with its address and what takes place there.

Coaches as cards. Any public post type gets this treatment, not just the ones the plugin brings.

The club calendar on a normal page, as a month view.

The blog with its sidebar and the footer widgets.

In detail

What is actually in the package.

Customizer

Five entries, not a long list. Header, Colours, Front page, Sections, Contact.
Header: everything above the content in one place — the bar with logo, search and an optional sticky position; the area behind the page title with its gradient, opacity curve and height, which applies to the slider on the front page too; the hero slider with five slots, each either an image with a heading and text or simply a page you pick; and WordPress' own header image, which stands in when no slot is filled.
Colours: brand, dark brand, accent, text and button text — set once, used everywhere. The background colour sits with them instead of in a separate entry of its own.
Front page: four link tiles with an optional heading, plus a call to action with its own button label.
Sections: one panel for all section pages and one per post type — heading, intro, place name, header image, date display and a switch that puts the featured image beside the entry instead of into the header area. Turn that on for your people, whose portraits would be cropped to a strip up there; everywhere else the featured image keeps filling the header area. Heading and header image of a section apply on its overview page and on every entry below it, and without a header image the gradient from Header fills the area — so every page of a section looks the same.
Contact: postal address for the footer, marked up as an address element.

Templates

Front page, page, single post, blog index, archive, search results and 404.
Comments with threading, a search form and a blog sidebar.
Two menu positions (primary and legal) and two widget areas (footer and blog sidebar).
theme.json v3 plus editor styles, so the block editor shows the same typography, spacing and colours as the front end.

Editor

Three block patterns: a training times table, contact details, and a join-the-club call to action.
Three block styles: accent quote, accent button and card group.
Wide and full alignment, responsive embeds, featured images and a dedicated hero image size.

Under the hood

One stylesheet, 44 KB uncompressed, no @import. Two scripts totalling 9 KB, both deferred.
Zero third-party requests. System font stack, no icon font, no bundled images beyond the screenshot.
A corrected sizes attribute for responsive images, high fetch priority on the hero and lazy loading everywhere else.
Exactly one h1 per page, an unbroken heading hierarchy, time elements for dates and address elements for venues.
Breadcrumbs as plain navigation semantics, without schema.org markup. On a detail page the middle step is the overview page you picked in the plugin, carrying that page's own title; without one it is the post type archive.
Escaped output throughout, a sanitize callback on every setting, and no inline scripts or styles.