What's Up at the PDGA?
What's Up at the PDGA?
Meet the Technology Team
This is the fifth article in a series that goes behind-the-scenes to highlight the structure and the people of the PDGA. Six department teams, each led by a director, make up the PDGA organizational structure: Operations, Event Support, Technology, Marketing & Media, Membership & Growth, and Competition. All report to the executive director.
Technology Team Overview
When “technology” is referenced in the context of disc golf, most people immediately think of the science of flight and the computer-aided design required to design discs and targets. In truth, this is only a small example of technology’s role in disc golf.
In the case of the PDGA, technological systems and tools serve a variety of roles in communication (both internal and external), content creation and delivery, member services, and data collection and curation. Through these systems, the Technology team pursues the goals of improving the competitive experience and adding value to a PDGA membership through simple, easy-to-use tools and readily accessible, stats-based products – examples include PDGA US Tour and Euro Tour Rankings, Player/Rookie of the Year standings, individual player pages and statistics for all members, etc.
The Technology team accomplishes this by building and maintaining:
- Tools for organizing events
- Tournament Manager
- Tournament Central
- Disc Golf Scene
- Tools for scoring/participation
- Digital Scorecard
- Player profiles
- Disc Golf Scene
- The PDGA Ratings System
The Team
- Peter Crist, Technology Director
- Ben Botto, Senior Software Engineer
- Drew Acheson, Software Engineer
- Matt Lopreste, UI/UX Designer
Technology – Current and Future Projects
The PDGA Technology team is always in various stages of planning, development and execution of projects, sometimes with a year or more lead time before implementation. The team has added several additional members in recent months, leading to a pipeline with increased capacity and decreased delivery time.
Specific initiatives for the balance of 2022 include the maintenance and continued improvement of the PDGA digital scorecard. More than 80% of sanctioned PDGA events use the PDGA digital scoring platform, which was updated early in the year. Reviews from tournament directors and players have been consistently positive, with the new feature allowing for multiple scorekeepers on a single card getting a great deal of praise. Additional updates to the platform are in the works, including improvements to features for event planners and tournament directors (e.g. the Tournament Manager / Tournament Central tools).
Related to these projects, the Technology team is developing updates to the PDGA Live Scoring product for both player and fan use in following along with events.