A competition series that had outgrown the shop it was sold in.

Starting point

Die Ruderei runs the Alster Ergo-Cup, an online competition series on the Concept2 rowing machine, alongside the Ergo-Marathon, the Holy-Shit Challenge and the Summer Erg-Series. All of it ran on the WordPress site: an entry was a product in the shop, participants typed their results into the shop customer account, and the rankings sat next to it as separate pages per competition. That is enough to sell an entry. It is not enough to score a series. Every time is compared against the world record of the matching Concept2 class, points per block come out of that, and a team classification with its own rules runs alongside.

What we built

• A dedicated application at app.ruderei.de, built with Next.js. Account, competition entry, payment, result entry, ranking and archive sit together in it.
• The application works out the rules itself: the percentage deviation from the world record of your own class, which follows from sex, weight class and one of seventeen age classes. The records freeze at the start of the season, so a new record does not shift a series already running.
• Points per block, the team classification with its conditions and the tiebreakers on equal points are rules inside the application, not a spreadsheet beside it. A team needs at least five people, more than half of them club members, and the best five results per block count.
• The results archive moved across, back to 2021, filterable by competition, season, discipline and name.
• Plus the in-browser calculators for deviation and 500 metre split, the shop for video courses, coaching and merchandise, and the club access offering.

Result

Entry, payment, results, scoring and archive now sit in one application, instead of spread across a shop product, a customer account and separate pages. The archive holds 10,317 results, and the application works out the scoring across the five blocks of a season itself.