We built this to run our own league. Now it's a platform.
ScoreLM started as internal tooling for our basketball league. After talking to other organizers and realizing everyone was solving the same problems with spreadsheets and group chats, we decided to open it up.
How it started
Like most community sports leagues, the Muslim Champions League started in a group chat. Someone had a gym reserved on Saturday nights. A few guys said they'd play. Someone else volunteered to keep score on their phone. Within a couple months, we had 60 players, 8 teams, and absolutely no infrastructure.
We tried the usual tools. Google Sheets for stats. iMessage for schedules. Instagram for highlights. A free website builder for standings. Every tool did one thing okay and nothing well. Updating stats after a game night meant opening four different apps and copy-pasting numbers between them. It was exhausting.
So we built our own platform. Not because we wanted to start a software company -- because we wanted to stop spending Sunday mornings updating spreadsheets.
The tournament weekend
The real test came during our tournament weekend. Sixteen teams. Thirty-nine games over two days. Live streams on YouTube. Scorebugs on every broadcast. Real-time stats updating as games happened. A public website where fans could check scores, standings, and brackets from their phones.
Here are the numbers from that weekend:
Nearly 24,000 page views in one weekend, for a community basketball league. People checked scores on their phones during games. Players shared their stat lines on social media. Parents looked up their kids' stats.
The 34 deployments? That was us shipping bug fixes and new features between games. When a scorebug needed a tweak, we shipped it at halftime. When a coach asked for something, we built it that afternoon. That's what happens when the developers are also running the tournament.
Everyone's solving the same problems
After the tournament, we started hearing from other league organizers. A women's league in DC that was tracking stats in a notebook. A rec league in the Bay Area using a WordPress site they hadn't updated in two years. A youth league coordinator who spent five hours every week entering results into a spreadsheet.
The same problems came up everywhere:
- Stats are scattered across spreadsheets, notebooks, and text messages
- There's no public-facing website -- or there's one that's always out of date
- Streaming looks amateur because there's no scorebug overlay
- Schedule changes require blasting five different group chats
- One person does all the work and burns out by season three
These aren't hard technical problems. They're organizational headaches that good software can take off your plate.
What's in the platform
One admin dashboard, one public website, everything connected. Here's what's included:
- A public league website that updates automatically with schedules, standings, team pages, player profiles, and game recaps
- Live scorebugs that drop into any streaming software as browser sources and update in real time via WebSocket -- controlled from your phone
- Full stat tracking with per-game box scores that roll up into season leaderboards, team stats, and player profiles
- Tournament management with round robin pools, single elimination brackets, and hybrid formats
- Streaming integration with YouTube live embeds that automatically convert to VOD replays
- Sponsor management with tiered levels and automated pop-ups during broadcasts
- A media gallery for game photos tagged by season, team, and tournament
Everything is built mobile-first because league organizers are running things from the gym, not a desk. The admin panel works on your phone. The scorebug control panel works on your phone. Stats entry works on your phone.
Who this is for
We're not building this for professional sports organizations with six-figure software budgets. We're building it for the person who books the gym, sends the schedule text, keeps score on a clipboard, and somehow still finds time to play.
The Starter plan is free -- one league, four teams, basic scheduling, a public website. No credit card, no time limit. If you outgrow it and need scorebugs, streaming, full stats, and custom branding, the Pro plan is $49/month flat. No per-player charges.
What we're working on next
Here's the roadmap:
- Multi-sport support -- soccer, volleyball, and flag football stat tracking
- Player accounts -- let players claim their profiles and see their career stats
- Team captain portals -- give captains access to manage their own rosters
- Advanced analytics -- shooting charts, plus/minus, and efficiency ratings
- Mobile app -- native iOS and Android apps for fans and organizers
The most important part of the roadmap is hearing from organizers. Every feature so far was built because someone actually needed it during a real season. If you're running a league and something is missing, tell us.
Why we're building this
There are thousands of community sports leagues across the country -- basketball, soccer, volleyball, flag football, softball -- playing every weekend in gyms, rec centers, and public parks.
Most of them are run with group chats and spreadsheets. The same setup people were using in 2015. The people running these leagues put in a lot of hours and they shouldn't have to spend Sunday mornings copy-pasting stats between apps.
That's what ScoreLM is for. Handle the operational stuff so organizers can spend more time on the actual games.
We built this for ourselves first. If you're running a league, we think it'll help you too.
Get started for free, or read the setup guide to see how it works.