Custom built tools to run great events.
June 6, 2024 by Guest Author in Sponsored with 0 comments
This post is written and sponsored by Ultie.org.
Recently, across the fields of Europe, three ultimate events thundered simultaneously over a single weekend—Tom’s Tourney in Belgium, Bibione in Italy, and qualifying matches for the Nationals in Austria. What united these three tournaments, featuring 94 teams and around 2,000 players, you may ask? All these tournaments were conducted under a new competition organization platform — Ultie.org.
A distinctive attribute of this platform is the total elimination of paper clutter from sporting events. One might think there were no such solutions before, attempting to automate the entire competition process. But now any device with a web browser can be used to help manage your event.
Let us not delve too deeply into the commonplace functionality already offered by other solutions in existence, such as statistics or group calculations. Rather, let us explore what interesting and novel Ultie.org has brought to the market.
Scheduling
The dev team worked on this module for over three years, and by the end of the summer, this system will be available to all organizers. For now, it is in closed beta testing phase.
We don’t know how much time the Tom’s Tourney organizers would have spent compiling the schedule manually in Excel for 64 teams playing on 13 fields. But Ultie.org did it automatically and instantaneously. Finally, our support spent just a couple of hours more addressing the special scheduling wishes of organizers by hand. You can see the final result for yourself. The organizers of Bibione completely entrusted the schedule to Ultie.org, and it took no more than an hour.
Organizers can select the format they like, their time and field constraints, and let Ultie.org’s algorithms design optimal potential formats. From there, the schedule can be edited and customized, with the software assisting in proofing the changes to help ensure there are no errors.
A New Type of Bracket
It is well known that in ultimate, bracket places are played out to the end, and a 32-team single-elimination bracket in its classical form looks simply monstrous.
The bracket view on Ultie.org looks much more compact, and by clicking on any team, you can see which stage it progresses to.
The platform also allows for creating brackets of any complexity, including group repeats, consideration of previous games, and much more.
Quick Game Management
Ultie.org has also developed a smart way of assisting staff members (a.k.a. field assistants or scorekeepers) managing games, enabling score additions in a couple of clicks. Additional prompts allow even inexperienced staff to use it.
The platform calculates the halftime start time, the score for soft cap, prompts to notify players that there are five, three, and one minute(s) left in the match. It also calculates how many timeouts are left.
The team behind Ultie.org doesn’t intend to stop there, and an improved score addition system in the form of a pin pad will be released in the middle of this summer, further simplifying staffs’ lives. Unfortunately, Tom’s Tourney did not have enough staff members on the fields, but we were able to build a custom quick results addition system to be implemented for them.
SOTG Protocols
As paper protocols are a thing of the past, after each game, players received a notification in their profiles to rate the Spirit Of The Game. And the players coped with it perfectly.
At three tournaments, more than 700 protocols were automatically processed, which definitely saved players a lot of time with paper clutter, nerves of the staffs in counting such a number of protocols, and at least one tree won’t be cut down for a single pack of paper.
Rosters
The tasks of creating teams, assembling players, and submitting applications are entirely delegated to team managers. They no longer need to keep track of their players’ current data. The teams are actually self-managed. Players add themselves to a roster and managers add rostered players to their event roster with a simple tap.
On the other hand, legacy solutions require manual addition of players and roster submissions, making it impossible to gather player statistics and their participation in tournaments within one account. It’s also impossible to collect waivers from players online.
Very soon, Ultie.org will launch a new invitation system, speeding up team formation by several orders of magnitude.
Reactivity and Data Update
The platform is written in React, and all data is updated in real-time; you always see in the brackets and schedule who is playing whom and what the score is at the moment. Organizers see in the control panel how teams rate the spirit, who hasn’t rated it yet, who is more likely to get the MVP, and much much more.
What Users are Saying
Here is some feedback from select organizers and players.
“The collaboration with Ultie.org enriched our event. Both the Scores and Spirit were completed quickly and easily. The remote support during the event was also very good.”
-Wolker Lemahieu, Tom’s Tourney Organizer
“Overall impression: We had all the Austrian Nationals on Ultie.org this year and really loved it. The system is very user friendly and the support before and during the events is out of this world. Providing livescores for our fans at home was a big step forward.
“It‘s really easy to add/delete points, start timeouts, or track stats like assists and goals. You have a good view over the game.”
“Managing SOTG is super easy as an organizer as well as spirit captain or player. There are just a [f]ew clicks to do on both sides.”
-Koen Joshua, Austria Nationals Organizer
“Using Ultie.org during our last Bibione Beach Tournament has been amazing! We were able to run the entire Schedule and SOTG with the simple usage of a mobile phone. The platform is very easy to use for both organizers and teams and saved us a lot of time and stress as we didn’t have to build any excel sheets nor make any calculations. It’s great to have a platform that does all the work in an automatic and straightforward way.”
-Bernier Aline, Bibione Organizer
“We received only positive comments from the teams.”
-Paul Bernier, Bibione Organizer
“First time using your app. We love it!”
-Magic Disc d’Angers, France
“And by the way the Ultie.org app is just crazy! It’s the first time that it was so easy to find and check the results! Can’t wait to use it for every other tournament!”
-Reph Jonkers, Mooncatchers
What’s Next
The folks at Ultie.org don’t plan to stop or slow down at this functionality. After each tournament, they gather feedback and release a new update every month. There are already more than 20 features in Ultie that we haven’t covered in this article—you can check them out at Ultie.org
In the near future, global profiles for teams and players will appear on the platform, showing the entire history of respective performances and statistics. A tad later, an automatic scheduling system will be released for general use. The team is also working closely on accepting players’ and teams’ fees on behalf of the organizers, and on a set of features for large organizations and federations, where you can have your tournament calendar and internal statistics.
You might ask, why such love for ultimate? The answer is simple—the entire team has been passionate about this sport for over 20 years and has visited hundreds of tournaments in a dozen countries, but at the same time, they have significant expertise in product development.
The more tournaments and feedback there are, the better Ultie.org system will be.
