The Tournament Engine for Youth Sports

When LeagueApps underwent a company-wide reduction in force, I inherited leadership of two major product squads: Payments and Program Registration. My focus quickly shifted to the tournaments initiative — the highest-priority opportunity to capture share in the competitive youth sports market.

At the time, the platform only supported completing one team registration at a time and lacked mobile optimization. We needed to reimagine the system from the ground up: a scalable, mobile-first experience supporting bulk team registration, complex pricing logic, and seamless payments.

The LeagueApps ecosystem serves a diverse set of users, each navigating different workflows, responsibilities, and levels of technical comfort.

Internally, I worked across two product squads and multiple stakeholder groups — customer success, sales, and engineering. These cross-functional collaborations were essential to translating business priorities into a coherent user experience.

Tournament organizers and registrants alike struggled with a fragmented and inefficient registration process. The pain points fell into five categories:

From a business standpoint, these shortcomings limited LeagueApps' ability to compete in the tournament software market — a space dominated by mobile-optimized, streamlined platforms.

Research began by analyzing feedback from recorded customer success and sales calls in Gong, then synthesizing insights in Dovetail. I facilitated assumption-mapping workshops and prioritization exercises to validate what we believed we knew about our users.

We interviewed over 20 tournament organizers plus a handful of parents and coaches. One surprising insight: organizers frequently registered returning teams on their behalf — a clear signal that the registration flow was too time-consuming for busy coaches and staff.

With these insights, I restructured the experience around scalability and reuse — not just patching existing flows, but rearchitecting the registration model.

I led design reviews across both squads, presenting work twice monthly to leadership and weekly to engineering. During handoff, we used boxing exercises — structured working sessions mapping each UI element to its backend endpoint — to catch mismatches early and keep velocity high.

Feedback loops were tight: constant iteration between Figma prototypes, Jira tickets, and in-progress demos kept all parties aligned without heavy documentation overhead.

I moderated prototype walkthroughs at key decision points. The most significant early win came from a single microcopy change.

These iterative test-and-learn cycles transformed stakeholder understanding of user testing's value — leading to broader adoption of unmoderated usability testing company-wide.

The previous solution could take a single organizer over 8 hours to register the same number of teams. The redesigned experience compressed that to 30 minutes — a 16× improvement in throughput for high-volume events.

Beyond registration, the tournaments initiative created a roadmap for future extensibility into memberships, e-commerce, and add-ons — establishing a scalable architecture that future teams can build on.

This project reinforced the importance of balancing deep collaboration with design autonomy. While constant communication across squads was time-consuming, it built the trust needed to move fast during a critical product transition.

I also learned firsthand that mobile-first thinking is non-negotiable in youth sports. Nearly every critical action — from roster checks to payments — happens on the field, on the go, under pressure.