Tournament Director

Petanque is played outdoors and rain, wind or extreme heat regularly forces last-minute changes. When a director postpones a round, hundreds of players, dozens of officials and the venue partner all need to know within minutes — otherwise teams arrive at empty courts, referees lose their day and the federation receives complaint emails.

Manual phone trees fail at scale. The director needs a single confirm-and-broadcast action that fans out across every channel each recipient prefers, with delivery receipts so they know who has actually been reached.

The schedule control screen exposes a reschedule action that updates the event timeline, regenerates court assignments and triggers a multichannel notification job — push to the app, SMS via the registered carrier, email with the new agenda attached. Delivery status is tracked per recipient and unreached contacts are surfaced for manual follow-up.

No-shows are a daily reality — illness, traffic, late license payments. In a 128-team draw a single missing team breaks the bracket symmetry and cascades into byes, rest imbalances and court timing problems.

Rebuilding by hand at 08:55 for a 09:00 start is the moment errors creep in and trust collapses. The director needs an engine that knows the format rules, applies the federation's no-show policy and produces a corrected draw and court plan that the control table can publish immediately.

The draw engine supports incremental rebalancing — mark teams as withdrawn, choose the policy (bye, replacement, forfeit) and the bracket recomputes with court reassignments in a single transaction. A diff view highlights every changed match so the control table and referees can validate before publishing, and the previous version is retained in the audit log for rollback if the rebalance is rejected.

Disputes — over a measure, a foul throw, a missing license, an alleged dress-code breach — happen on the boulodrome and are decided in minutes, but the consequences travel for months through federation appeals and player commission reviews. Without a structured record the director ends up reconstructing what happened from memory, WhatsApp screenshots and contradictory captain accounts weeks after the event.

A defensible trail protects the director, the referee and the federation, and dramatically shortens post-event review when sanctions or refunds are on the table.

Every incident opens a case with court, match, involved teams, attached photos, referee notes and final ruling. Each state change is timestamped and signed by the responsible official, with the rule reference recorded against the decision.

The case bundle exports as a PDF for the federation jury and is linked from the event report and the player's discipline history.