Built from running tournaments the hard way

What it was like at Emory

Club volleyball is one of the best parts of college sports. Teams arrive early, compete all day, and care deeply about getting every match right. As club president, I experienced the other side too: organizing pools, building brackets, collecting rosters, assigning courts, and keeping scores accurate while answering the same questions across multiple chats.

The tournaments themselves were great. The tools were not.

Every event depended on a patchwork of Google Sheets, shared Docs, Instagram posts, GroupMe messages, and verbal updates that never reached everyone who needed them. When something changed on court, captains, players, and spectators often found out last.

Why I built brackt

Those frustrations weren't unique to Emory. Nearly every collegiate club tournament I attended followed the same pattern: dedicated hosts trying to run great events with tools that were never designed for tournament day.

Instead of focusing on the competition, organizers spent hours rebuilding the same systems from scratch and solving avoidable problems throughout the weekend.

brackt is my answer to that.

I wanted a single platform for hosts to manage registration, build divisions, generate pools and brackets, schedule courts, and update live scores—without worrying about whether everyone has the latest spreadsheet.

I wanted captains to be able to register their teams, manage rosters, and always know where they're playing next. I wanted players and spectators to refresh one page and trust that the information they're seeing is accurate.

What I'm building toward

brackt is built for collegiate club volleyball first because that's the community I know best.

The goal isn't to create another generic tournament platform. It's to build software that understands how our tournaments actually operate: early mornings, limited courts, tight turnarounds between pools and playoffs, and hosts who are often players or alumni volunteering their weekends to make the event happen.

If brackt can save a host from a stressful Saturday morning, make a tournament run a little smoother, or help one team find the right court at the right time, then it's accomplishing exactly what it was built to do.