Case Studies
Hutt Water Polo Club
Hutt Water Polo Club is based just north of Wellington in Lower Hutt using Naenae Pool as its venue.
They are a busy, progressive club encouraging participation at all age groups while fostering an environment for the highest level of competition and personal sporting achievement. The Hutt Water Polo Club is the largest water polo club in the Wellington Region.
Kathy Bryant (Honorary Treasurer & Register) explains that apart from NZWP or WWPB competitions, the main competition they run is the schools competition, which runs weekly during Terms 2 & 3 each year. This competition has been held annually for at least 20 years. It has primary, intermediate, junior secondary, and senior secondary school divisions, and attracts teams from Kapiti and Wellington as well as the Hutt Valley.
Normally they have at least 3 different grades of primary school and intermediate teams. In 2018 they had 55 teams in total, with over 550 competitors, but they have had up to 80 teams compete in previous years.
Prior to beginning to use the SportsRunner software over 7 years ago, Hutt Water Polo did everything by hand for the draws and results. They did everything on bits of paper, so it was easy to make errors.
Kathy says that “SportsRunner has made it so much quicker to complete the draws. We probably don’t use it to its full benefit, but this year we have started including the referees into the draws as well”.
Kathy goes on to say:
“The things I love about using SportsRunner are:
– It has saved a lot of time in creating the draws.
– It has significantly reduced the chances of errors (court double ups or time clashes etc)
– It is easy to email out the seasons draw to schools/coaches etc. They love getting the whole seasons draw ahead of time and not just from week to week.
– It is easy to communicate to our teams via the email function.
– Results and points tables are easily updated and easy for teams to look up and find on our website.
– Parents can easily check the draw on our website.
– The different formats of printouts of the draws etc that you get are handy for us (by time, or by venue etc)”.
Selwyn Netball
Selwyn Netball are an organisation catering to the netball community of Selwyn, providing netball programmes and services to more than 2000 members. Selwyn Netball have been using SportsRunner for 7 years.
They cater to a huge variety of players, covering all school age players from Year 1&2, right through to Premier level, and also offer Social and Masters grades which have proven popular. Selwyn currently have more than 30 grades playing on a Saturday.
Emma from Selwyn netball says that a major challenge is admin. As their competition grows the resource required also grows. She says that having software that makes their life easier is a real bonus! The greatest joy is seeing thousands of happy netballers down on the courts on Saturdays throughout winter.
Prior to using SportsRunner, all draws and results were being completed manually. Emma tell us: “As you can imagine this was a fairly time intensive task, and with the growth in our centre we needed to move to a automate system such as SportsRunner.”
Emma told us about the benefits from using SportsRunner being the time saved in completing draws/results is significant, and the ability to easily display up to date draws and results in user friendly formats is great for their members.
Selwyn Netball’s favourite features of SportsRunner include:
– The ability to easily change rounds is very handy.
– Umpire names being saved and automatically appearing when you start typing their name saves a lot of time.
– The clash of venue feature is also excellent.
“We would definitely recommend SportsRunner to other organisations. The programme is user friendly, fairly intuitive, and a massive time saver. We don’t often require support from the SportsRunner staff as we never have any trouble with the programme, but on the odd occasion we’ve required assistance the service has been excellent.”
Koru Games
Selwyn Sports Trust is an incorporated charitable trust with the vision to ‘Inspire Participation through Opportunity in Selwyn’.
SST is made up of two arms of operation – Events, and an Activator team. They have been using SportsRunner since 2015 for one of their events, the Koru Games. The Games are a South Island year 7 & 8 three-day tournament. In 2019 we offered 15 sports, which equated to 31 competitions. The nearly 3,000 individual participants made up 430+ teams at the Games from 56 schools.
Michael Wilson from SST says “the greatest joy for us comes from watching young people at the Games develop both their sporting skillsets and as people through their involvement in and commitment to sporting pursuits”. The greatest challenge for all sporting experience is ensuring that all participants are given a legitimate opportunity to experience and celebrate success which in turn will result in greater enjoyment and longer term engagement and participation in physical activity.
Before using SportsRunner they were manually generating the draws and results in the Games’ first year in 2014. This required a huge amount of additional work and in hindsight was much less effective as a communication tool for those not actually at the sports. Using SportsRunner has made the generation of draws and results a lot less time consuming and easier, and also allowed SST to share them with a wider range of people and in a timelier manner.
Since using SportsRunner, Michael says the workload has been reduced and made more manageable as they have grown the Games. It has allowed them to present and communicate this information in a more professional way, and made access to the information much easier for all stakeholders, prior to, during and post the Games.
Michael tell us that it is hugely valuable having the range of possible tournament formats there to consider prior to taking entries. Which has allowed them to structure their competitions to suit the variety of stakeholders and fit the facilities and time available.
Michael finishes by saying: “Get SportsRunner!!! Steve is great to deal with, the product is fantastic and logical to use. Steve is receptive to suggestions for future developments and supportive of us during our ‘needy’ times.”
SportsRunner is part of the SportsNow group.
