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Case study
300 People. Four Houses. Twenty Pages Of Paper.
A games day for a large publicly listed company, August 2026. Three hundred participants, four houses, eleven separate contests across a single day, and two more decided before anyone arrived.
What it was
Not A Sports Day
Worth being clear about what this event is, because the scoring problem follows from it.
There is a 100m, an 800m and a 4x100m relay. There is also archery tag, captain's ball, pickleball, tug of war and four telematch games. It is not a track meet with some extras bolted on. It is a mixed competition where a bean-bag game and an 800m both have to count, in proportions somebody decided on purpose.
Sports software assumes a sport. This event is eleven contests in one day, and no two of them are scored the same way.
The day, in numbers
The scoring structure
Seven Points Scales
Three different position depths. Five different gaps between places. Every one of them a deliberate decision about what the client wanted their people to care about.
| Contest | Places | Top score | The scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telematch, four games | 8 | 50 | 50 down to 15, five a place |
| 100m | 8 | 40 | 40 down to 5, five a place |
| 800m | 8 | 55 | 55 down to 6, seven a place |
| 4x100m relay | 8 | 65 | 65 down to 9, eight a place |
| Archery tag | 4 | 100 | 100 down to 40, in twenties |
| Captain's ball | 4 | 100 | 100 down to 40, in twenties |
| Pickleball | 4 | 50 | 50 down to 20, in tens |
| Tug of war | 4 | 100 | 100 down to 40, in twenties |
Why The Scales Differ
The relay pays 65 because it is a team event and it closes the track. Pickleball pays half what archery tag pays because it ran with half the field. The telematch games pay 50 each, but there are four of them, so consistency across the morning is worth more than one big result.
Bonus points sat on top where the run sheet called for them.
The point
A generic tool asks you to choose one scoring method for the event.
This event needed seven, and the client was right to want seven. The alternative is a games day where the 800m and a bean-bag toss are worth the same.
And then
Raw Points Were Not The Answer. They Were The Input To It.
Telematch maxes at 200 points across its four games. The sports challenge maxes at 250. But the client wanted telematch to be a fifth of the day and the sports to be nearly a third. Add the raw numbers and you get neither.
| Category | Contests | Weight | When it was decided |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sports challenge breakout | 3 sports | 30% | On the day |
| Telematch | 4 games | 20% | On the day |
| Track and field | 3 events | 20% | On the day |
| Tug of war | 1 | 10% | On the day |
| Step challenge | 1 | 10% | Weeks before |
| Futsal | 1 | 10% | Weeks before |
Each category has to be measured against its own maximum before its weight can mean anything. That is the arithmetic underneath a weighted result, and it is the part that has to be right, because it is also the part nobody in the room can check by eye.
Two of those six categories were finished weeks before the event. A fifth of the result was already decided when people arrived, and the standings had to reflect that from the first game of the morning.
Before
The Twenty Pages.This Is The Part Worth Sitting With.
Three hundred people. Eleven contests. Seven conversion scales. Six weighted categories. All of it captured on paper, carried back, and typed up.
Twenty pages is not a filing problem. It is twenty opportunities for a page to be missed, a number to be misread, or a conversion to be applied to the wrong column, with no way to check any of it except by doing the whole thing again.
Somebody keys it in. Somebody else checks. The checking is not optional at this complexity, which means two people are on arithmetic instead of running the event. And the standings are only ever as current as the last time someone finished a page.
The client's own summary of how it used to go was short: human error, and too many sheets. Not a dramatic failure. The ordinary kind, where a number is misread on page eleven and nobody finds out because finding out means doing all twenty again.
What twenty pages costs
Five steps between a result happening and a result being visible. Four of them can go wrong quietly.
After
What Changed
No paper.
Facilitators entered results from their phones, at the station, as each contest finished. Nothing was written down and carried back. Nothing was typed up afterwards.
The standings went to a screen the client's people were watching, rather than to a laptop somebody was hunched over.
The result was ready as the last score was submitted, rather than after somebody finished the last page.
And it came with the breakdown. When a result is the product of six weighted categories, a total on its own is a number nobody in the room can check.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Someone always asks how their house ended up third, and "the system says so" is not an answer at a prize-giving. Showing where each house gained and lost, category by category, is what makes a weighted result feel earned instead of decided.
The honest part
The Event Was Already Good.That Was Not Our Doing.
Whoever specified those scales did the hard thinking. A scoring system does not make a games day worth attending, and we would rather not imply otherwise.
What changed is that seven scales, six weighted categories and two pre-event competitions survived a live afternoon with no paper in the middle of them, and produced a result the room could see the working for.
Is this you?
If your events run on one scoring method and eight teams, you do not need any of this. Genuinely. A spreadsheet will do it, and we wrote out how.
If they look like the table further up this page, you already know why the paper is a problem.
Bring your scoring structure, however complicated. That is the interesting part of the conversation.