Designing the first central platform for the Tomlee Open
From spreadsheets to one place everyone could trust
A tournament that outgrew the way it was being run
A local community tennis tournament in Vancouver, the Tomlee Open had grown quickly by its second year. Player registration increased by nearly 50%, and the number of matches more than doubled. But like many grassroots events, the operations had not scaled at the same pace.
I joined as the product designer to help the tournament keep up with that growth by designing one central home for players and organizers.
The information was there.Getting to it was the hard part.
Spreadsheets and PDFs were the easiest way for organizers to share information, but they became harder to manage as schedules changed and results were added. Players could not always tell whether they were looking at the latest version, so they often contacted organizers to confirm what was happening.
As the tournament grew, I could see this process creating more confusion for players and more manual work for organizers.
One home for everything.
The information already existed, and I realized the problem was not how the tournament was being run. It was that there was no reliable way for people to access that information as things changed.
So I started designing one place where schedules and results could stay current, players could check what was happening on their own, and organizers would not have to keep answering the same questions.
From word of mouth to one shared schedule
Surprisingly, schedules were not shared beyond the players involved. Since players arranged matches directly with each other, the time and location often stayed within those conversations.
But I started seeing other people message around, asking when matches were happening or trying to find someone who knew. People clearly wanted to follow the tournament, but they had to rely on word of mouth to do it.
So I designed a central schedule hub where people could see upcoming matches, find out where they were happening, and check the results afterward.
Pending
Scheduled
Completed
A clearer view of tournament progress
As tennis players, we're naturally competitive. We want to see how the entire tournament was progressing, from the latest results to the evolving standings and potential contenders.
I wanted to make that information easy to access. Standings, brackets, and match results across every category were available in one place and updated throughout the tournament. This helped players stay informed without relying on organizers or other participants for updates, reinforcing trust in the platform as the tournament's central hub.
One place for the people behind the scenes
Behind the scenes, organizers were working from the same fragmented set of spreadsheets and files as everyone else. They had to cross-reference player details, track match history, and reconstruct the current state of the tournament as it evolved. It was functional but fragile and time-consuming.
I consolidated this into a single operational view where player data and match history lived together, giving organizers a reliable source of truth to run the tournament more efficiently.
It became the only place anyone needed to check
Every player and organizer used the platform. Not most, all of them. The manual work the committee used to carry dropped noticeably, and the repetitive questions that once filled their weekends mostly stopped coming.
After the tournament, we ran a short survey asking about the website. The feedback was positive across the board: people said it was easy to use and they knew where to find things. For a first version built within a volunteer committee, it successfully made the tournament easier to follow and manage.
of surveyed participants
Fewer repetitive tasks
Consistency and ease
From one place for all, to one place for each
The platform gave everyone one place to check. The next step is making it feel more personal.
I would like to explore a player-focused view where people land directly on their own schedule, standings, results, and upcoming matches instead of navigating the tournament as a whole. As natural competitors, players would also want to see things like their own rank and win rate at a glance.
You can probably tell I was definitely not designing from a distance.
This project has been especially rewarding because I was not designing from a distance. As someone who spends a lot of time playing and following tennis, I understood the small frustrations, the excitement around each match, and why people wanted to stay connected to what was happening. There was a tennis behaviour and a design question here that I could not stop thinking about.
What pulled me in even more was watching what people did when the system did not support them. Players messaged each other and passed updates around, while organizers built their own reports and datasets to track matches and tournament progress. I kept noticing these workarounds and wanting to understand why they existed. That made the project feel less like a set of features to design and more like a system I could keep learning from and improving.