If you’ve ever played in a pickleball tournament, there’s a good chance you have encountered PickleballTournaments.com. From the registrations, to bracketing, to tournament management, their software is the backbone of many tournament operations.
PickleballTournaments.com, like most great inventions, grew out of necessity. Fifteen years ago, Bob Lanius was directing tournaments and spending huge amounts of time creating brackets, seeding players, and managing matches by hand. Looking at the hours he and his volunteers were pouring into this manual system recognizing how error prone it was, Bob rolled up his sleeves and created the software that would evolve into PickleballTournaments.com.
Since that time, PickleballTournaments.com has become the default tournament management software for pickleball tournaments of all sizes. With the explosion in the popularity of pickleball came a growth in both the number and size of pickleball tournaments. According to PickleballTournaments.com, in 2004 there were 94 large tournaments running on PickleballTournaments.com. Fast forward to 2019 and PickleballTournamets.com has supported 475 tournaments in just the first 3 months.
Any organization experiencing that kind of growth is assured to have some growing pains, and PickleballTournaments.com is no exception. With a website that was built to originally host a hundred tournaments a year quickly became cluttered and difficult to navigate when the number of tournaments reached the thousands. The number of players also grew exponentially and that expansion put a major strain on the backend infrastructure. This led to frustration from players trying to register for tournaments only to receive a blank screen.
PickleballTournaments.com is at a moment in time that will define its entire future. It seems that the team at PickleballTournaments.com is ready to move its software into the future by embracing a complete redesign of the PickleballTournaments.com website and upgrade to their databases. According to Melissa McCurley, president of PickleballTournaments.com, the redesign will bring a lot of very substantial upgrades.
There are 3 key updates that users will notice. First, the new website will have a completely updated design which will be much more mobile friendly. This is great news for those who surf the web on their phone or tablet. Second, integrated search and filter options. Currently, the only search options on PickleballTournaments.com are the ones built into the user’s browsers, which are basically simple word searches. This made discovering new tournaments players might be interested in very difficult. According to Melissa the new website will will allow you to search by keywords, date, country, state, player group, format, and others. Finally, the new PickleballTournaments.com will have greatly improved registrations. They are accomplishing this by revamping the front end and upgrading to to an Amazon web hosting service. This should help when a mass of players all try to register for a tournament at the same time, like when registration first opens.
Has PickleballTournaments.com cracked the code (or perhaps I should say “written the code”) that will give the pickleball community the modern tournament experience they’ve been asking for? We will find out this May when the redesigned PickleballTournaments.com is due to release. If you have questions or comments for PickleballTournaments.com, shoot them an email at feedback@PickleballTournaments.com
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Hope one of the filters will identify senior play at specific age/skill or age groups beyond SIPPA.
You will be able to search by ‘keywords’ and also by ‘format’. PickleballTournaments.com didn’t specifically say you could search by age, but I would bet you can.
Excited to see the updates. Thank you
Thanks Rita!
Search for tournaments by town/city, not just state.
Display up front any brackets/divisions that are already closed (or the ones still open).
For Players needing Partners, use subheadings to more clearly separate skill levels and/or ages. Also use more easily identifiable abbreviations for the categories so we don’t need a key or legend.
Good ideas Bob, and from my research, several of those search filters will be in the upcoming redesign. I asked specifically about searching by location, either by city or within a radius of a location. It appears that we will only be able to search by state or region in this coming update. That is one of those feature that they need to know that players want. you can email feedback@pickleballtournaments.com to suggest that.
I’d like to see tournaments that have brackets for wheelchair players.
I know there will be a search field for ‘keywords’. I’m betting if there is a tournament with a wheelchair bracket, it would find it.
Terrific ideas. Can we have software that will notify us of a tourney in a given region? I could use a notification that a tourney registration is open. Shucks, I can barely keep score let alone remember to register by a certain date!
Many thanks!
Sooz
Mount Shasta Pickleball Club
Calif
Can an option be that when registering they must pay the registration/tournament fees? A lot of time is spent
following up with players to pay.
Mobile notifications during tournament with court assignments.
PBT is the site that determines our UTPR yet they let people register for non-sanctioned tournaments using their Legacy rating which can be lower than their UTPR. This promotes sandbagging…. case in point…. US Open 4.0/65 MD bracket has at least two teams where both players have a UTPR of 4.5. Why are they allowed to register as a 4.0 team? For any tournament, PBT should first screen on UTPR and then on Legacy…. or…. post a players UTPR next to their name in the brackets…. shame the sandbaggers for playing down in skill.
I’d like to see a format that accepts foreign addresses and phone numbers.