Pickleball Magazine 2-3 | Page 12

INDUSTRY PROFILE

Pickleballtournaments

. com

UNITING PLAYERS AROUND THE WORLD ONLINE

If you ’ ve ever registered for or organized a pickleball tournament , chances are you ’ re familiar with pickleballtournaments . com . And , like most websites that you use daily , you probably don ’ t think about who ’ s behind the website that brings players together year-round in an orderly and organized manner .

Melissa McCurley and Greg Thompson are the brother and sister team behind the site . The duo took over the site in 2014 and have cultivated it from a small , free service assisting about 90 tournaments nationwide , to a modern tournament-tracking behemoth and adding a complete package of tournament-orchestrating services to the menu of offerings for tournaments directors .
“ We revamped the front-end experience , the home page , to make things more modern . We added advertising , incorporated tournaments more prominently in the design and implemented a state-of-the-art communication system to easily contact over 25k players ,” Thompson said . “ We now have texting notifications for players and are slowly rolling that out , and we have a new support portal rolling out , which will be a self-serve , modern ‘ wiki ’ of solutions that you ’ re used to seeing on other sites . Community forums will be on there soon , so players can talk to one another , and we ’ ve added new charts and formats to satisfy the needs of the tournament directors , like triple elimination charts .”
Part of the success of pickleballtournaments . com has come from the fact that McCurley and Thompson not only implement features to the site that keep it current and functional , they actively seek out feedback from pickleball players on a regular basis to see what new features they can add to the site to satisfy every pickleball need .
This feedback comes by way of McCurley and Thompson ’ s own personal passion for the sport , but also professional through McCurley ’ s global travels to run tournaments for clients worldwide .
“ We have premium services that are much higher in demand than either one of us could have guessed ,” McCurley said . “ Tournaments bring us on board to manage their entire event , registrations , payments , schedules , brackets , coming on site with our equipment to run the tournament , every last detail . We have 30 of those this year , where we ’ re in the trenches with players , tournament directors , volunteers , spectators , vendors and staff . We travel to multiple states and different countries , so when we ’ re in the field , we hear the voice of the players , not just from players in one area or region . We ’ ve trained over 200 tournaments and partner with the USAPA to help sanctioned tournaments meet USAPA sanction requirements as well as train them on the standard processes , procedures and tools to run their tournament . And it ’ s interesting to see the different stages of pickleball in different places that we go . We ’ re not just a software service company ; we live in this world 24 hours a day loving this game right along with our fellow competitive pickleball family !”
Keeping the company true to its original mission — which is to be a useful service to pickleball players and tournament directors first and foremost — has been the linchpin of pickleballtournaments . com ’ s growth and success . Thompson said that when they took over the company , they did so with eyes and ears wide open and an “ if it ain ’ t broke , don ’ t fix it ” attitude .
“ I have a strong sports background and corporate experience , but , when we came in , we let the experienced people show us the ropes ,” he said . “ That process that was ingrained
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