My daughter played in a national volleyball tournament this past weekend (don’t ask how her team did). Since it was a large event, spectators had to download and print tickets to attend. It was free — just had to have the ticket to keep away those who don’t belong, provide data to hosting city to encourage hosting again, direct people to the right courts (over 60 courts) and help plan for emergency services.
The last reason came true. On Friday night, the Dallas/Fort Worth area experienced severe thunderstorms and saw three tornadoes (last I hard). The building staff evacuated everyone in the building to the parking garage.
The Web site where you printed tickets could stand usability improvements. But that’s not the point of this post. It also contained a feature where you could pick four teams to track through SMS and e-mail. The service sent team schedules and results of their matches.
It wasn’t a perfect service since we didn’t receive some notices. The speed of notifications were unpredictable… sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Also, if you wanted to change up the four teams, you couldn’t. Every team played in two different pools in this tournament. Paul tracked all the teams in my daughter’s pool on day one. Then learned he couldn’t change them for day two.
Despite the imperfections, it was exciting to discover the feature. When volleyball was in session in the schools, we also had a resource for checking standings and win/loss records for all the schools. Only problem was the lack of updates. If I remember right, my daughter’s coach said it depended on the coach to keep it updated.
Report card day was always an exciting or nerve-wracking experience since we didn’t always know exactly what our grades were. That’s not the case today. It’s just another report our kids’ bring home for our signatures (yes, we still have to sign) since they’re grades are accessible online throughout the school year.
Love this kind of progress!
