One live score that the bracket, the scorer, and the broadcast all read from.

Challenge

A pickleball tournament does not wait for slow software. Organizers juggle brackets, seeding, schedules, live scores, and broadcast graphics at once, and most of them do it with spreadsheets and generic scoreboard apps.

When the scorer, the schedule, and the stream each read from a different place, they drift apart. A wrong score on the stream or a match sent to the wrong court is how game day falls apart in front of players and viewers.

Before CourtCommand, events ran on Google Sheets for brackets, a free scoreboard app for scores, and hand-built OBS overlays. A score typed into the wrong tab meant a wrong bracket, a wrong match on the stream, and a referee walking over to ask what happened. Every event cost late brackets, missed matches, and an extra staffer whose only job was keeping the three tools in sync.

We treated CourtCommand as an operations problem first and a product problem second. It had to be fast, serve many organizations at once, and keep every screen in sync, so the backend had to be trustworthy before a single screen was designed.

That meant building the engine first: tournaments, leagues, seasons, brackets, live scoring, and scheduling as one tested API. The broadcast overlays were planned as another reader of the same live data, not something bolted on later.

Solution

The backend is Go 1.24 on the Chi router over PostgreSQL 17, with type-safe queries generated by sqlc and migrations run by Goose. Redis 7 handles pub/sub, sessions, and rate limiting, and six WebSocket channels push live state to every connected screen.

It landed as more than 170 API endpoints across eight build phases, 29 database migrations, and 62 automated tests, all before the UI work began.

Two products sit on that backend. The management platform covers tournaments, leagues, brackets, live scoring, scheduling, venues, and player, team, and organization records. The overlay suite draws themeable broadcast graphics from the same live data and sells bundled or on its own.

Results

CourtCommand is live at courtcommand.app. Anyone can browse public tournaments, leagues, venues, and live matches, and it installs to a phone’s home screen like an app.

It reads as operating software for live pickleball, not a scoreboard skin. Live events now run on it end to end: scorers entering from the courts, brackets advancing on their own, and viewers watching overlays that match the score on the floor.

Stewardship

RelentNet still runs CourtCommand. It is hosted on Coolify with Docker Compose, the same way RelentNet runs its own systems.

RelentNet monitors uptime, patches dependencies, and ships new features on a steady cadence; since launch. Next on the roadmap: player ratings that carry across leagues and seasons.