Technologies: ASP.Net 2.0, MS SQL Server 2005, HTML/DHTML, CSS
Client
Tennis Canada operates under the auspices of Sport Canada, and is a member of the Canadian Olympic Association. The organizational membership is made up of 10 provincial associations, Participation Development partners in ‘Play Tennis,’ a community-based national initiative designed to promote participation at all levels of the sport.
Tennis Canada’s event management team is directly responsible for all national and international competitions in Canada, including junior, senior and wheelchair championships. The team also organizes the Rogers Cup tournaments, an ATP Masters Series event and a Sony Ericsson WTA Tier I competition.
Assignment
For the Provinces
Provinces such as the Ontario Tennis Association recognized the need of live membership/event registration, tennis event creation/scheduling, rankings, website content management, and news releases for a suite of Web-based applications to meet a variety of current players and clubs challenges. Furthermore, all of these applications needed to be seamlessly integrated with a membership database. The goal was to design and develop an application that met the following criteria:
Enabled players both juniors and adults to have a web based ranking system liked directly into the Internal system.
Enabled the current and historic events (Tournament draws) to stimulate the matches and results – draws to be made dynamically by the engine. Phase 2 of this deployment called for the ability for event managers to schedule and coordinate events in the web environment.
Provided functionality to have current and historic “head to head” results for thousands of players, spanning over hundreds of tournaments.
Provide a fully integrated and elaborate club registration and management module as well as member e-broadcasting, event calendars, online event registration and a fully integrated ranking module.
Challenges
The internal business challenge for the provinces was to draw data from the legacy system and have regular scheduled –or manual data integrations - into the web database. The decision to do so was made along the following lines:
The SQL database to contain weekly or daily ranking of all 50,000+ players in each province.
The application would provide a dynamic ‘draw construction” from the raw dates extracted form internal legacy system on a frequent basis.
The application would utilize an "open" technology platform, which would be completely Web-based.
The application would be simple and intuitive.
The application would be built in a timely fashion.
Solution
Computan development staff utilized a rapid iterative methodology to design and build an .NET/SQL based retail application for the province. The application makes extensive use of the data query within the legacy system data reports- quickly and efficiently store, manipulate and retrieve data to and from the container – and move it to the web engine for head to head results, rankings, draw constructions etc.
For Tennis Canada
Tennis Canada, the governing national body, saw the system’s potential and underwent a discovery process to see how they could involve themselves. Tennis Canada devised a plan to integrate each provinces independent system and draw out the first web-based national ranking for Canada. A national ranking system for all players is viewed as a major step in Tennis Canada’s mandate to produce future tennis Wimbledon and Olympic champions. This required us to devise a new unified system tiered for each province to access their own private information etc as well as incorporating a brand new ranking system focused on head-to-head match results instead of a player’s progress in tournaments.
Result
Provinces have a complete web application suite comprised of Content Management, Ranking updates, Draws and player result history, head to head scores, and newsletter broadcasting. The provinces are extremely pleased with the results and have successfully implemented the system in their own environment. Now thousands of visitors & layers from all over the world interactively use these provincial sites and sees the Tennis Canada national ranking. As a result of the system, each match played in the nation of Canada – be they professional events or community events – count in some regard towards a national ranking. This is viewed as an industry-best practice globally in leading tennis nations and gives Tennis Canada more leverage to develop future champions.
