The wooden peg board, retired.
BPS is our digital court manager for badminton club nights - fair rotation, court management and the waiting queue, live on iOS and Android. It replaces the wooden peg board hanging in every sports hall.
Every club night, the same peg board arguments.
Most badminton club nights are run by a wooden peg board: everyone's name on a peg, and someone shuffling the pegs between games to decide who plays next. It mostly works - until the hall is busy.
Then the familiar failures: pegs skipped or quietly rearranged, the same strong pairs engineering games together, new members waiting too long, and disputes about whose turn it is that nobody can settle, because the queue is whatever the board happens to say.
Worst served is the organiser. Whoever runs the board spends the night managing pegs and fielding complaints - and plays less badminton than anyone else in the hall.
Fair rotation, decided by the app.
BPS is a court manager app. Players are marked in as they arrive, courts are set, and the app runs the rotation: who's playing, who's next, who's waited longest. Auto-rotation puts fair games together and shares court time evenly - and because a person isn't doing the shuffling, there's no favouritism to argue with.
One engineering decision matters more than any feature: BPS is offline-first. Sports halls have terrible signal, so the app doesn't depend on having any - the whole night runs on the organiser's device, connection or not.
It's built with Flutter from a single codebase and is live on both the App Store and Google Play, so it doesn't matter what phone the organiser carries.
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Pegs shuffled by hand between every game
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Whoever runs the board barely plays
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Queue disputes nobody can settle
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Rotation decided fairly and automatically
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The organiser gets their evening back
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A queue everyone can see, on any phone
Club night, run from a phone.
The organiser opens the app, marks who's in, and the night runs itself forward: courts fill, the queue advances, and the next game is already decided by the time the last one finishes.
The disputes largely stop, because the order is visible to everyone and the rotation has no favourites. New members get even games instead of long waits; the strong players still get their competitive games - just not by monopolising a court.
And the organiser plays badminton again. The peg board can stay on the wall.
Have a process like this?
If your team is doing a job the computer should be doing, tell us about it - we'll give you a straight answer on whether software can fix it, and what it would cost.