The Fencing Competition App - Background

I've been running some fencing competitions in the past few years.

There are a couple of issues that are starting to need to be addressed.

1) We've been running them by hand until now - using small cardboard seeding cards, and totting up the scores from the poolsheets by hand.


The competition has moved from just over a dozen entrants, to over 40 entrants.  So the time taken to process the sheets and determine the winners has moved from 5 minutes to about 25 minutes.  Each round.

Time to automate the process.

The problems remain:  with automation, you simply exchange the time spent totting-up scores for time spent re-typing scores, and (unless you have a printer on-site) you still have to write out the pool sheets.  Plus typing scores from pool-sheet to computer is an error-prone business.  And when the errors so back out on the next round's poolsheet, it becomes a bigger problem...

So what's needed is a system that fills out the poolsheet automatically, and captures the results automatically.

2) For the first 10 fights or so, the pools are mixed ability, so we can stream the fencers together into groups of similar ability for the final round of 5 fights.

So the youngest and the least-skilled spend more than half their time in fights with better or much-better fencers.

What I want is a higher proportion of fights with fencers of your own ability level, as well as results that reflect who fences the best.