Background and Challenges
A city amateur basketball league’s organizing committee runs 24 teams across 8 courts on game days. Until recently each court had a volunteer with a stopwatch calling the time aloud: remaining time depended on shouting, missed and wrong calls were common, and switching between timeouts, quarters and overtime was chaotic — with one court’s delays cascading into the next tip-off. Renting a professional timing system quoted well beyond the committee’s budget, on top of dedicated operator training.
Our Approach
We deployed our general-purpose timer, an Android-tablet app, with one tablet per court. Each day’s games are preloaded from the schedule, and countdowns chain automatically with no manual restarts; voice alerts announce the last 2 minutes and final 30 seconds, and the horn sounds automatically at the end of each quarter and game. Every court can customize its background color and team names, readable from the stands. The app runs fully offline with no venue network required, and the schedule survives a power cycle.
Before the tournament we helped the committee batch-import all 8 courts’ schedules, and volunteers were up and running after a half-day walkthrough.
Results
- Zero manual time-calling throughout: missed and wrong calls dropped to none, and timing disputes disappeared (sample data, to be verified);
- All 8 courts tipped off on schedule in sync, with quarter and game transitions needing no human intervention (sample data, to be verified);
- Equipment spend was a small fraction of the professional rental quote (sample data, to be verified);
- Volunteers needed no training — handover between shifts is just restarting the app.