The club stopped depending on one person to exist online.

Four teams post their own results, squads, news and shop items. No technical help needed to publish anything.

39sign-ups received in 48 hours
66players published across 4 teams
27approved and published
0times technical help was needed to publish

Status: Live · still being improved
Website: cdsanmartin.cl ↗

Partido en la cancha al atardecer, con el cielo rosado sobre el pueblo.

Club Deportivo San Martín de Curicó — Homepage

What was the problem?

The process that had to go.

“If that one person isn't around, the site still shows last week's result.”

There's no quote from the client, but the project folder still holds the tools they used, and each one shows what job it was doing: a three-sheet Excel file for the stats, a folder with 18 club crests to build the league table as an image, three versions of a stock spreadsheet and seven versions of a website template.

Every single time

01Someone at the club asked in the WhatsApp group for players to send their name, photo and team.
02Players replied in the group, mixed in with every other conversation.
03That person downloaded the photos to their computer, one by one.
04They renamed them, cropped them, made them smaller.
05Only then did they type each player into the site.

What kept breaking

The same fact written three times. One goal lived in the results sheet, in the top scorers sheet and in the squad page: three places where it could go wrong.
The bottleneck was one person. If they weren't around, the site kept showing last week's result.
The work was the photo, not the information. Receiving, downloading, renaming and shrinking 60 photos takes someone several hours.
Versions that disagreed: three stock files and seven templates. Work got done twice because there was no single file anyone could trust.
The site went stale between matches. When posting is hard, people post very little.

“I want to make a Google Form to send to the WhatsApp groups asking players to send their name, photo and team, so I can use it afterwards to fill in the website.”

The pain is in the last few words. The client had already accepted that he'd have to type in by hand everything that came in. He was asking for a tidier way to receive the manual work, not a way to stop doing it.

What was decided?

The decision.The club enters the match, and everything else works itself out.

The system doesn't store stats. It stores matches. From that one record come the top scorers table, the games each player has played, each team's season, the record against each opponent and the squad cards. There's no top scorers table to keep up to date: there's just the sum of the goals entered. The three-sheet Excel file is gone because there's no longer any way for three sheets to disagree.

What I ruled out, and why

~~A Google Form, which is what the club asked for~~
It still ended up as a spreadsheet, and someone had to copy it into the site by hand. The copying didn't go away. It just moved somewhere else.

What was built?

What was built.Each piece removes a problem.

League table

Replaces the image that was put together by hand with 18 crests after every round.

Player sign-up

The player signs up from his phone and his photo is made smaller before it's sent. This is where the hours of downloading, renaming and shrinking photos from the WhatsApp group ended.

1
Where the photo hours ended
The player signs up from his phone and the photo is shrunk before it leaves. Nobody downloads, renames or resizes anything.

Dashboard · Sign-ups

Sign-ups come in on their own and are approved or turned down with one click. Nobody types anything in.

Dashboard · Publish

Publishing is one button. Right next to it is the backup, because whoever publishes isn't technical and will make a mistake at some point.

1
Publishing is one button
No strange programs, no calling anyone. And a backup right next to it, because whoever publishes isn't technical.

Enter a match in four stepsWhat it removes
The three-sheet Excel file. You pick the match, put in the score and who scored: the table reorders itself, the scorer moves up the ranking and the player's stats change on his card.
Different access for admin, team managers and pressWhat it removes
The one-person bottleneck. Each team's manager enters his own matches and squad; press posts news, shop items and photos. Everyone only touches their own part.
Protection against losing workWhat it removes
The risk of two people working at the same time and wiping out each other's changes. The system notices someone else published in the meantime and warns you instead of overwriting.

What happens on its own

Top scorers, games per player, each team's season, record against each opponent and the run of the last five matches. All of it is worked out on its own; nothing is written by hand.
Photos are made smaller on the player's phone before they go up. Nobody downloads or fixes them.
WhatsApp on every page, and each shop item writes the order message with its name already filled in.
When a match is entered, the system offers to write the news story right there and posts it next to the result.
To add a video, you just paste the YouTube or Google Drive link.

What the client does without me

Enter a match and its result
Record who scored
Reorder the league table
Add or edit players with a photo
Approve sign-ups that come in on their own
Post news with a picture
Change the homepage banner
Post shop items and prices
Add match videos
Add sponsors with their logo

What changed?

What changed.

Where it shows most is in the sign-ups, because you can count before and after inside the same system.

The squads filled up on their own: from a handful of players to 66 player cards across four teams, 41 with a photo, without anyone typing anything in.
The club can now be picky. Eleven sign-ups were turned down. Before, checking meant throwing away work already done; now saying no takes one click, so the club can set a higher bar.
The site is alive. In the first three days there were posts by the club in 15 different sections, including a squad update at 23:17 — done by the club, without asking anyone for anything.

In the business

39sign-ups received in 48 hours
66players published across 4 teams
27approved and published
0times technical help was needed to publish

What is still missing

We still don't know how much time the club saves each round, or whether members, sales or sponsors went up. Those numbers aren't made up: we wait for them.