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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