Pickleball

PlayPickleball is a multi-tenant, web-based tournament management system that enables sports organizations to register players, schedule matches intelligently, and manage leagues with minimal manual effort.

Key Outcomes

• 80% reduction in tournament scheduling time
• 100+ tournaments successfully managed
• 5,000+ players onboarded
• $1,500+ revenue per tournament

Quick Facts

• Industry: Sports & Recreation
• Platform: Web (Multi-tenant SaaS)
• Tech Stack: Laravel, Bootstrap, MySQL
• Integrations: Stripe, Google SMTP
• Services: Product Architecture, Backend Engineering, Scheduling Logic, Admin Systems

Background

Tournament organizers running pickleball leagues were relying on a patchwork of spreadsheets, shared documents, and manual coordination to manage registrations, schedules, and results.

As participation grew, this approach became unmanageable. Scheduling conflicts increased, court utilization dropped, and organizers spent hours coordinating what should have been routine tasks.

The client needed a centralized, scalable platform that could support multiple organizations, handle complex scheduling logic, and deliver a better experience for both administrators and players.

Challenge

Operational Challenges

• Tournament creation and player enrollment were entirely manual
• Match scheduling took over an hour per tournament and still resulted in conflicts
• Entering results and calculating standings was error-prone
• Communication with players relied solely on manual email updates

Technical Challenges

• Supporting multiple companies on a single platform without data overlap
• Building a custom scheduling engine that respected court capacity and team availability
• Providing real-time standings and rankings across leagues
• Designing role-based access for admins, coordinators, and players

Solution

Stackup Solutions designed and built PlayPickleball, a public-facing, multi-tenant tournament management application purpose-built for pickleball leagues and events.

Platform Architecture

• Web-only SaaS platform with logical tenant separation by company
• Role-based access control:
  • Super Admin
  • Company Admin
  • League Coordinator
  • Player
• Dedicated hosting for performance and reliability

Custom Scheduling Engine

At the core of the platform is a custom-built round-robin scheduling system that:

• Assigns matches based on team availability windows
• Optimizes court usage by location
• Automatically generates complete league schedules in under one minute
• Allows manual overrides for real-world adjustments

Core Features

Tournament Registration & Payments

• Online registration for players and teams
• Stripe-powered payment processing
• Automated confirmation emails via Google SMTP

Multi-Company Management

• Separate dashboards per organization
• Isolated data and reporting per company
• Platform-wide visibility for Super Admin

Team & Player Management

• Player profiles and league participation
• League-specific schedules and standings
• Point-based rankings updated instantly after match results

Reporting & Visibility

• Tournament performance tracking
• Participation and results per league
• Revenue visibility per tournament

Implementation Process

Phase 1 – Discovery & Architecture

• Audited existing spreadsheet-based workflows
• Defined scheduling constraints and league rules
• Designed a scalable, multi-tenant architecture

Phase 2 – Core Platform Build

• Developed tournament creation and registration flows
• Implemented the custom scheduling engine
• Built role-based dashboards and permissions

Phase 3 – Automation & Optimization

• Automated standings and rankings updates
• Integrated payments and email notifications
• Performance tuning for concurrent tournaments

One of the biggest technical wins was designing a scheduling engine flexible enough to handle real-world constraints while remaining fast and predictable.

Results

Quantitative Impact

• 80% reduction in scheduling time
• 50% reduction in admin workload
• 100+ tournaments managed through the platform
• 5,000+ players actively using the system
• $1,500+ revenue per tournament, enabling sustainable scaling

Qualitative Outcomes

• Organizers gained confidence in scheduling accuracy
• Players could easily view schedules, results, and standings
• Companies scaled tournament operations without adding staff