Kiwi sport relies on volunteers
It’s not for the faint-hearted. Across Aotearoa New Zealand there are over 30,000 sports administrators, most of whom are volunteers for sports clubs and associations. A further 50,000+ volunteer coaches, team managers & scorers make up a small army of people donating their time to make sport happen.
Sporty.co.nz provides the tools that volunteers need
Most organised sport relies on technology from Sporty.co.nz to register participants, allocate players to teams, manage competition fixtures, submit team sheets and live-score games.
The scale is huge. The output of the 80,000+ volunteers is relied upon by over 1 million Kiwis every month to learn when and where they or their children are playing, and to keep updated with results and information related to their sport.
How does Sporty do it?
To handle so many millions of interactions, the Sporty platform has auto-scaling infrastructure that monitors traffic second by second, automatically spinning up new servers to handle load as required. Importantly, it is also supported by a team of highly dedicated technical and support staff.
Uptime typically exceeds 99.99%. Outages are extremely rare. Sporty achieves this by having 24/7 uptime monitoring, fail-over servers, and separate environments for software testing before releasing enhancements to the platform every fortnight.
What if something goes wrong?
Very occasionally something can go wrong that results in downtime or slow performance. The platform is designed to try to resolve things automatically, failing over to standby servers and restarting primary servers. Errors are logged and software engineers painstakingly work to identify the cause of an issue, then implement changes to avoid it happening again.
How do users respond?
People tend not to contact Sporty when things are going well, which is over 99.99% of the time. Occasionally we receive contact from someone just to say ‘thank you’ for the Sporty service, especially since so much is included for free.
If something goes wrong, the Sporty team will probably already be working to resolve it before people are even aware of an issue. However, you’re still encouraged to report anything to support@sportsground.com just in case it hasn’t already been noticed.
What about abusive people?
It can be frustrating if technology isn’t working for you, especially when you’re a volunteer trying to complete a task. If there’s ever a rare outage, most people are patient in the knowledge that the Sporty team will be doing their utmost to restore service with urgency.
Very rarely though, someone will abuse our staff or service via phone or email. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards abuse. Repeated abuse may result in people having their access to Sporty revoked or other remedies consistent with Sporty’s Terms of Service.
We're on the same side
We appeal to everyone to remember that our team are human and doing their best. It's lovely when people send chocolates, but we'll happily settle for everyone just working together with respect and goodwill to keep making sport happen.