Ten years around disability football

It started with disability football in Shizuoka.

I designed logos, made flyers, helped run tournaments and events. I work in design, so that’s how I found my way in.

From there I ended up involved in the national high school championship for players with intellectual disabilities, and the national powerchair football tournament. Football for players with intellectual disabilities, limb differences, mental health conditions, visual impairments, hearing impairments, cerebral palsy, severe disabilities — each with its own rules, its own competitions, its own way of being organized. I spent about ten years around all of it.

We were using SportsPress

At one point I was helping publish match results to a website in real time during a tournament. That’s how I came across SportsPress.

It’s a well-made plugin. Everything you need to run a league is in there — player databases, season management, statistics.

But something kept nagging at me while I used it.

A tournament that runs over a weekend doesn’t need any of that.

Every match finishes in two days. The teams are already decided. What you want is to get the results out. That’s it. Nobody’s tracking a player’s form across a season or managing transfers for next year.

The data these organizers had was almost always in Excel. A fixture list, with results written in as they came. Against something that simple, the tool felt oversized.

Looking at other sports confirmed it

Working in disability football got me curious about other disability sports.

And once I’d started building, I went back and looked properly at the websites of various sports federations. One thing stood out.

An awful lot of them publish results as PDFs.

You build the table in Excel, export it to PDF, upload it. It’s the quickest route. The text is unreadable on a phone, search engines can’t index it, but if there’s no better option, that’s what you do.

Some organizations displayed scores through a separate program. But even the ones that started out carefully listing full squads couldn’t keep it up once they were publishing results for a hundred-plus fixtures a year.

That’s when it clicked. Simpler is probably better.

So I built it

What was needed looked like this.

You enter the result, and it comes out looking good. One shortcode, pasted once. You can update it from your phone at the ground. And it doesn’t drag along season management or player databases — things a weekend tournament will never touch.

That’s the thinking behind SPOSCOR. Not a tool for running a league, but a tool for publishing match and tournament results, and having them look right.

Including the sports nobody covers

SPOSCOR Core, the foundation, works on its own as a generic match type. Any sport where two teams score across periods.

On top of that, individual sport plugins. Soccer, basketball, and baseball first. After that, volleyball, table tennis — and sports like boccia and mölkky.

I intend to include the sports that existing plugins have never covered. If a sport has few participants, nobody builds tools for it; without tools, its records don’t get kept. If that’s the order things happen in, maybe the tooling is a place to start.