Backstory
At my gym, we have a yearly “Battle for the Blue Belt” tournament where we get all the white-belts together and watch them fight while we eat and drink and have a good time. Truly, it’s a magical night.
What isn’t so magical, however, is the process of setting up a tournament, complete with brackets, TVs, no-shows, mat coordinators, etc. Really the only name in the game when it comes to jiu jitsu tournaments, is SmoothComp. However, SmoothComp is pretty clearly intended for large, well-organized tournaments with all the bells and whistles that need to be included in such an endeavor. But it became very clear during the past few years that there’s an opportunity for a smaller, more focused website with less features to make running in-house tournaments easier and less stressful.
Enter GrappleGrid. (name pending 😂)
Dead simple. Minimal frills. Built to enable gym owners to easily put together fun tournaments for their gym.
Registrations
With GrappleGrid, you can easily send a link to your gym, and have competitors register with just an email, no account needed. It was designed with parents in mind as well, you can use your email to manage multiple registrations if you have multiple kiddos signing up for a tournament.
Televisions
GrappleGrid comes with dedicated TV-views which can be hooked up to any number of televisions to ensure that information is at-hand when needed.
Admins can choose from various different screens depending on what information is needed:
Of course, matches can be displayed on televisions, with live updates:
And the admin has a dedicated view of the match, so they can easily manage it:
One of the big ways in which in-house, or association tournaments can differ from bigger regional tournaments is that the competitor is the end-user. They are the client that you’re trying to serve. In a regional tournament, you get the experience you get, and that’s it. Whereas with an in-house tournament (especially a kids’ tournament), you really want the experience to be fun.
To that end, great care has been taken to ensure that the gym owners are in control of the bracketing and seeding. GrappleGrid makes it dead-simple to move your competitors between brackets based on a variety of attributes:
- Gender
- Belt
- Weight
- Age
And you can mix-and-match these attributes to get the brackets you want, while still making exceptions where necessary. This enables coaches to pair competitors where it makes sense, and give Byes to the competitors that need them.
Want to try it out?
I ended up suspending the server GrappleGrid was running on for now since no one is using it. If you want to try it, let me know and I’d be happy to fire it up again!
Create an account and try it for free (for now!), at: https://grapplegrid-latest.onrender.com
The Future
This software is still very much a work in progress, but it is (in my humble opinion) getting better and better each day. In fact, we recently ran our first-ever kids’ tournament on it!