Whiteboard rotations were killing our club nights - curious how other rec groups handle it
Hey,
I play in a small rec group and for years we ran court rotations on a whiteboard - someone always forgot to mark a game, the same people kept getting paired up, and by the end of the night the board was unreadable.
I'm a developer, so I eventually hacked together a small web app to do it for us. You add the players who showed up and the courts you have, hit Dispatch, and it fills the courts with matchups. When a game ends, you tap in the score and it dispatches the next group.
The part I'm actually proud of is the matchmaking - it has a few modes: a "social" mode that maximizes partner variety, a king-of-the-court ladder, an Elo mode, and a fixed-group rotation with promotion/relegation. It also auto-tracks win ratios, partner history, and play time, and shows current courts on a TV at the gym.
There's also a tournament mode (round robin or single elimination) for one-off events, and players unlock little achievement badges as they play (Century Club, Hot Hand, Comeback Kid, etc.) - the regulars got way more into that than I expected.