Running a pool league isn’t easy. In fact, its quite difficult! In most cases committees are volunteer led, by a few dedicated people putting in a lot of effort just to make pool night happen. And a lot goes into that which many captain’s and players sometimes don’t appreciate.
One of those areas is the management of competitions. Creating and publishing draws, distributing them, collating results and then repeating that process over and over is tiresome.
As part of our dedication to making running a pool league easy, we’ve been squirrelling away for the last few weeks to finally bring the last big pice of the puzzle to the platform – how do you solve a problem like competition management?
Well, here’s how we’ve done it.
Covering All The Options
Singles, doubles, mixed doubles, 3 man, veterns, open, ladies, team… the types of competition can sometimes seam endless. Couple that with the types of competition – straight knockout or grouped round robin? It can get really complex really fast.
We’ve designed our competition wizard to make this process as easy as possible and to cover almost all the bases.
And when you’ve designed the competition, you may have different types of round? Maybe you want a group stage for round 1 and a knockout beyond that – we’ve got that covered. Need to run a preliminary round to get down to the 2/4/8/16/32/64/128/256 entries? We can do that too.
And then thers the draws. Do you want to spend hours pulling numbers and names out of a hat and then transcribing them into the system? Well we can support that if you wan’t… but why not let the system do this for you?
If you are running a knockout and you still have matches outstanding, we can handle that to. Set them to Advance and when the dependent match is played the next match that is linked will be automatically updated.
Distribute Matches
Not only are the competitions automatically listed on your RackEmApp league page, but the system can email your team captains and individual participants themselves to notify them of the results of the draw.
The Printable Draw Sheet will list all the matches, their numbers, competition specific rules and by-laws and instructions on how results can be entered by the players themselves, saving competitions secretaries hours per week.
Electronic Scoreboards
Matches being played use the Scoreboard feature to allow your players and fans see live scores in real time, whilst doubling up as a great visual aid if being used in a venue. Run it on a tablet near the table and keep the frames updated as you go. It serves as a great reminder for who is breaking next too!
Woven Into League Operations
In many leagues, the competitions are as important to the success of a season as the league itself. As such its crucial that these competitions integrate fully and seamlessly with the captain and player experience we’ve already built.
Thats why we include all competition Fixtures and Results in your main fixture and results list, so your players and casual fans cane asily see whats going on when in your league. statistics in your player profiles. This means its easy for captains to see and access the electronic scorecards for their team competitions and manage them in the same way they do league matches.
Complete Player Profiles
All this data is great, but its nothing if you don’t have it appearing on your player profiles. Players want to see their full history, not just what they’ve done in the league. Well, our competition functionality will display all competition data for all competitions they participate in in any RackEmApp registered league, giving your players an all-in-one place to track their pool careers.
If you want to host a private competition that doesn’t appear on profiles, we can do that too! Great for when you are in the pub with a group of mates and want to add a quick competitive edge to your practise nights.
Big Screen Experience
If you are hosting an all day competition you want to be able to provide real time feedback to the people in your venue as to how the competition is progressing. Use or Big Screen Mode on a TV or projector to have a sky sports style scrolling update to keep your players up to date with the very latest standings.
Get started!
Thats quite the list. We hope you like it. As always we are always looking to improve and if you think of something great to add, or find any issues please drop us a line at hello@rackemapp.com – we’d love to here from you!
Meanwhile if you want to give this great functionality a try, either Login or Register your league today!