The challenge
Pickleball is one of the fastest-growing sports in the country, and the organizers running its clubs and tournaments are mostly doing it with spreadsheets, group chats, and a stack of disconnected tools. Registration lives in one place, the bracket in another, scores on paper, payments somewhere else — and on event day, it all has to come together in real time across a finite number of courts.
Paddle Play set out to put the entire operation — from sign-up to the final score — into one system.
What we built
GMK Group built Paddle Play end to end: design, engineering, and the AI layer. Organizers get one platform that handles the full lifecycle of an event or a season:
- Registration & payments — players sign up and pay in one flow.
- AI-assisted seeding & matchmaking — fairer, faster draws and balanced matches.
- Live court allocation — assign and reassign matches across courts in real time.
- Brackets & live scoring — results update as they happen, for organizers and spectators alike.
- Player ratings — performance tracked across events over time.
- Leagues & open play — not just tournaments, but the recurring formats clubs run week to week.
How we engineered it
The hard part of a tournament platform is that it has to work live. On event day, scores, court availability, and the bracket all change minute to minute, and everyone — organizers, players, spectators — needs to see the same truth at once. We built Paddle Play around real-time state so the bracket, scores, and court board stay in sync as play unfolds.
The AI layer is applied where it removes real friction for organizers: seeding draws and balancing matchups that would otherwise take hours of manual work, and helping allocate matches efficiently across the courts available. As with everything GMK builds, the goal was a dependable production system — not a flashy demo — because an event can't pause for a bug.
The outcome
Paddle Play is live and in use with pickleball clubs in the U.S. Organizers who used to stitch an event together across half a dozen tools now run registration, seeding, courts, scoring, ratings, and payments from a single platform — so they can spend less time on logistics and more time running great events.
Visit the live platform → paddleplay.app
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