Club ground grading inspection app for affiliation renewal
Problem
Ground grading site visits happen once a season, usually run off a paper form or a generic spreadsheet the competition administrator inherited from a predecessor. The inspector notes floodlight coverage, changing room condition, spectator provision and safety certificate status by hand, then takes photographs on a personal phone and emails them separately when they remember. Nothing links a photograph to the line item it was meant to prove. When affiliation comes up for renewal, the compliance officer has to reconstruct what was actually checked from a form, a scatter of emails and whatever the inspector recalls. If last year's deficiencies were never followed up, nobody notices until a club turns up to a fixture with the same floodlights still unfixed.
Product idea
A mobile checklist built around the club's grading criteria: floodlights, changing rooms, spectator provision, disabled access, safety certificate on file, and whatever else the federation grades against. Each item takes a photograph attached to that specific line, not the visit as a whole. An inspector can flag a deficiency with a due date, add a note, and sign off the visit with name and timestamp. The compliance officer sees a single exportable report per club per visit, and a history of what was flagged last time and whether it was fixed. It does not calculate a grade or decide affiliation. It produces the evidence a person uses to make that decision.
Who it is for
Competition administrators and compliance officers who run grading visits and decide on affiliation, and the league operations manager who sets and updates the grading criteria.
Possible first version
A mobile web app with a configurable checklist per grading level, offline capture with a photo attached to each item, a deficiency list with due dates and status, inspector sign-off with timestamp, and PDF export per visit. Out of scope for version one: any integration with the registration or membership database, and any automatic grade calculation. The affiliation decision itself stays with the compliance officer; the app supplies the record they decide from.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Competition administrator, Compliance officer, League operations manager
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Women's league, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Document and rulebook repositories, Registration and membership databases, Email and shared drives
- Product framing
- Verify or inspect
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have in place before an inspector can start using this?
Mainly the grading criteria itself, written down as a checklist rather than living in one person's head: what counts as adequate floodlighting, what changing room provision is required, what the safety certificate status needs to be. If that list already exists as a PDF or spreadsheet, it loads in directly. If it does not, writing it down is worth doing anyway, because right now different inspectors are effectively grading against different unwritten standards.
Does this replace our affiliation and registration database?
No. The registration database stays the system of record for who is affiliated and on what terms. This sits upstream of it, capturing the visit that the affiliation decision is based on. Version one does not write back into the registration database at all; the compliance officer takes the exported report and updates affiliation status manually, the same as today, just from a record that actually shows what was checked.
Our inspectors already fill in a spreadsheet on site. Why change that?
A spreadsheet on a laptop does not travel well to a changing room or a floodlight pylon, which is why the photos end up on a phone and the notes end up separate from the item they describe. The test is whether this is faster to fill in standing in front of the thing being graded than the spreadsheet is. If an inspector still finds the spreadsheet quicker, the tool has failed, and that is worth finding out early rather than after a rollout.
Grounds inspections happen at all kinds of venues with patchy signal. Does that break it?
No. Entries and photographs are captured on the device and sync once it reconnects, which is the normal case at a lot of grounds rather than an exception. The inspector can see what has synced and what is still waiting on the phone, so a visit is never left in doubt because a connection dropped halfway through.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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