Digitizing My Sports League Scoring


The challenge

After joining a sports league, I saw an opportunity to digitize a painstakingly manual process that involved collecting 20+ scorecards, working through each of them and calculating the respective scores—then sending out a unsorted, hard-to-follow word document each week via email. This was taking the organizer hours to work through!  
 

The super-scrappy MVP 

I wanted test the water and demonstrate how simple digitization of the league would elevate the engagement, make the scores simpler to enter and easier for everyone to access.

The solution had to be free and easy for the organizer to use, so I rustled up a Google Forms and Google Sheets solution in no time.  

Old way (7 steps, several hours)

  1. Play golf 
  2. Leave scorecard in a Bucket
  3. Organizer collects bucket
  4. Organizer reviews every scorecard
  5. Organizer inputs the scores in a Word doc 
  6. Organizer sends the word doc via email
  7. View the results 

Better way (4 steps, several minutes):  

1. Play golf
2. Scan the QR code 

2. Enter your score

4. View the dashboard 

After submitting, the results go into a read-only Google Sheet, embed on a webpage, that can be accessed by anyone in the league. The URL is shared in the confirmation message, after the score is submitted. It isn’t pretty, but I did say MVP, right?  

Conclusion

It’s always fun to digitize analog activities. We don’t need to create an app or full-blown browser experience to meet our objectives. Afterall, sport should bring us together in its simplicity and our time should be spent taking part. Even golf, a seemingly solitary sport, is weekly opportunity to meet new people, share in camaraderie and enjoy a sense of community. So making the process easier for everyone makes sense.  

If you’d like my Google Sheet and Google Form to do this for your league, I’d be more than happy to share.