Website

The EDJBA has been fortunate that Jim Kafkalakis and David Bacon have volunteered and continue to volunteer their services free of charge to ensure our website is up to date and full of relevant information.  The committee was very keen to change to Sporting Pulse for a number of reasons.

Jim and David along with committee people such as Megan Rouse and Jenni James were part of the planning process that ensured we would have the most efficient service available at the lowest cost.  We are pleased to say that the Sporting Pulse website comes free of charge to the EDJBA.

Both Jim and David have worked to implement a system that suits the EDJBA and it is pleasing that Sporting Pulse has been more than helpful in the transition process.

The speed of accessing information is dependent on the speed of the host systems which we do not control.  The core page information is usually displayed in less than five seconds with additional time taken to download the advertising.  Without advertising we would have to pay for a host system. 

However, having said that, myself and others on the committee have tested  the time needed to access the site and found, including the loading of the advertising, it took less than five seconds to be fully displayed.

Here are some of what we have been able to achieve in the short time we have been operating with Sporting Pulse.

The fixtures for rounds four to six were created on Wednesday 2^nd November and all games were loaded onto the system by the following Sunday.  After a few clashes were resolved Round Four was published by 9 pm the same Sunday.  To make each consecutive round available we just need to make any changes required (time to complete this will depend on the number of changes) and to publish them will take no more than half an hour.

We can now produce pre-populated scoresheets for every game but admit we still have some teething problems with this.  Enhancements currently being worked on are to change the scoresheet to include information that was available on the old scoresheet and to remove some information that is not relevant to the EDJBA.

Jim has started to work on the member database information so we can start to provide relevant information to the Association registrars, Joyce Hickling and Bill Rewell.  Some initial instructions and a sample report have been provided to Joyce and Bill but a great deal of work needs to be done.

Most clubs have entered their players into teams which will allow us to centrally manage and report on members including eligibility for finals, games played and other information pertinent to the running of the competitions.

Our focus has been on getting the competition information out in a timely manner. I believe that we have achieved this by making the information available to the actual players/parents/coaches/team managers faster than the previous method.

Planning is already in place on how we can load and publish the fixtures during fixtures day. This is expected to represent an improvement of days compared to the old system.

In October the website registered 80,888 page requests and on one day alone in November we had 7884.  We confidently predict that we will have in excess of 100,000 page requests for November.  This means it is a very busy website.

Sporting Pulse also has an iPhone app.  The My FIBA allows you to tag competitions and create a page that displays the details (games and ladders) of the teams you follow as well as sending this information to the iPhone.  

We have gone from a manual paper based system to something that is only available to the most advanced competitions.

There is more to come but to quote Jim we have been working on quick wins and to our mind it is paying off.

After grading is complete, other enhancements will be looked at.

Entries

We are still receiving entries for teams.  A one thousand team association is slowly creeping closer with the number of registered players now exceeding 9600.

It is a very exciting time at the EDJBA with more news on changes to come in the next few months to ensure the biggest junior domestic association in Australia keeps up to date with operating principles and systems that will ensure the competition is run efficiently and to the benefit of all members.

Happy Hoops,

Ron Carlton

President.