Tournaments breakin the samesix places.
We ran taekwondo events the old way — clipboards, printed brackets and a spreadsheet with one person who understood it. TOP exists because every tournament hit the same walls. Here they are, and what we did about each one.
Six failure points.
Fixed by design.
Each one cost us hours on event day before it cost us a feature to fix it.
Registration lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
Entries arrive by text, email and paper. Names get retyped three times, athletes land in the wrong weight class, and the night before the event someone is still reconciling payments against a 2,000-row sheet.
One registry, validated at entry.
CSV import with per-row validation, weight and height classes resolved against the division table, duplicate detection, and entry status tracked from pending to verified — so the roster is clean before anyone steps on a scale.
Weigh-in morning is a bottleneck that eats the schedule.
Hundreds of athletes, two scales, one clipboard. A missed weight means hand-fixing a bracket that was printed last night — and every correction ripples into the match schedule.
Weigh-in feeds the bracket directly.
Staff verify weight and ID at the scale on a tablet. Over-weight athletes are flagged against tolerance on the spot, brackets regenerate from verified entries, and the schedule syncs automatically.
One scratch, and the draw is redrawn by hand.
A no-show in a 16-draw means re-penciling byes, re-numbering matches and re-briefing the table officials — while the first round is already being called.
Bracket surgery, not bracket demolition.
Fill a bye slot, swap seeds, merge a lone athlete into a neighboring class or add a play-in to a locked draw — the bracket and its schedule stay consistent through every late change.
"When is my athlete up?" — asked two hundred times a day.
The schedule exists on one laptop at the control table. Coaches crowd it, parents guess, and an athlete misses a call because nobody could tell them which mat and what time.
A live schedule in every pocket.
Every bracket, mat assignment and match status is public the moment it changes — spectators follow along on their phones, no app install, no account.
Paper scoresheets settle nothing.
A disputed result comes down to a scoresheet someone has to find, read and believe. Protests stall the mat, and the record of what actually happened is a stack of carbon copies.
Every point, timestamped.
Scoring happens in the system — rounds, gam-jeoms and results are recorded as they happen, every match carries its full history, and standings update the moment a match completes.
The medal tally is wrong at the awarding ceremony.
Manual tallies from twenty mats disagree. A school protests its standing while the podium waits, and the organizers re-count results on the stage stairs.
Standings that compute themselves.
Medals derive from match records, not a side ledger. Team standings, medal counts and printable reports reconcile against the brackets — before the ceremony starts.