Tournio is intended to be a low-cost, low-effort way for IGBO tournament directors to offer their bowlers online registration and purchase of optional events and products, as well as to prepare for their tournaments by consolidating and correcting data, monitoring the receipt of payments, and offering the export of registration data in spreadsheet format (comma-separated value, or CSV) as well as a format suitable for import into the IGBO-TS software.
When bowlers pay their registration fees and purchase optional events, the transactions are made directly with the tournament via Stripe; no funds pass through this system. Thus, Tournio charges no transaction fees.
I am proud to say the number of tournaments using Tournio continues to grow. Past and present tournaments include:
- Alamo City Tournament (ACT)
- The Albuquerque Roadrunner Tournament (TART)
- Big D Classic
- Dallas Area Masters Invitational Tournament (DAMIT)
- Denver International Gay and Lesbian Invitational Tournament (DIGLIT)
- Houston Invitational Tournament (HIT)
- IGBO Annual 2024 (Reno, NV)
- Las Vegas Showgirl
- Missouri and Kansas Invitational Tournament (MAKIT)
- OKClassic
- San Francisco Golden Gate Classic
- Show Me St. Louis Classic
- Texas Roll-off Tournament (TROT)
- Texas Super Slam
While I do charge a fee for the use of this system, the fee is intended to cover the costs I incur in operating it, not to turn a profit. If the day should arrive when there are enough participating tournaments to turn a profit, then all proceeds beyond operating costs will be donated to AIDS/LifeCycle or another organization doing important work for the LGBTQIA+ community.
- For registration only, the fee for using Tournio is equivalent to one tournament entry fee. Of course, this varies from tournament to tournament, but it effectively makes the fee equivalent to the cost of a free entry.
- I run the informational sites for a few tournaments; for them, my fee is $150/year for the domain, hosting, website and Tournio bundle.
In a nutshell, here are the main features/actions the director interface lets you do:
- Export registration information, in both spreadsheet (CSV) and IGBO-TS formats. (The IGBO-TS format is suitable for import into the IGBO-TS program, for tournaments that still use it.)
- Fix errors in bowler and team information.
- Move a bowler to a different team. This allows you to consolidate partial team registrations.
- Remove duplicate registrations. (Try as I might to prevent it, it happens.)
- Create free entry codes, and link free entry codes with registered bowlers.
- Control configuration details, including choosing which optional events to make available for purchase.
- Mark bowlers as paid via a mechanism outside of the regular flow, e.g., direct payment to the tournament via cash, check, or PayPal.
- Run registration in Test Mode before opening it to the public. In Test Mode, you can:
- Exercise the registration flow to ensure the optimal bowler experience. Includes full and partial team registrations, and registering as a solo bowler.
- Simulate registrations happening during the early, regular, and late registration periods (when applicable), to verify the proper discount/fee gets applied.
- Receive emails that would otherwise go to bowlers, e.g., registration confirmations and payment receipts.
- Clear out all test data, which is what you should do just before you're ready to open registration to the public.
- Close registration with a single button press when you're ready, or when you've reached capacity.
- Display how close each tournament shift is to its full capacity.
- Enable or disable different registration modes as needed, e.g., limit registrations to individual bowlers, or to new teams only.
Interested in using the system for your tournament? Drop me a line!
My name is Scott Stebleton. I began bowling in IGBO leagues and tournaments in 2004, and have been a participant on some level ever since. (I even threw my first—and, to date, only—perfect game at IGBO Annual in Atlanta in 2008.) So the IGBO community has been an important part of my life for two decades now!
When I learned in 2015 that the operator of the excellent TournReg.net, the system used by most IGBO tournaments for their online registration, planned to retire the system, I saw an opportunity to use my skills to give back to the community. My profession is developing software, particularly web-based software, so I saw this as a chance to both give back and deepen my own skills. Later, as my career saw me branching off into people management, maintaining this system would also serve as a way of keeping my technical skills up to snuff.
So, in the summer of 2015 while in between jobs, igbo-reg.com was born. Like so many software projects, the first version was overly complicated, difficult to maintain, and not very easy to use, for either me or for tournament directors. I quickly replaced it with a version designed to solve the most common use cases first, and it found success with a small number of tournaments.
The lull in tournaments created by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021 presented an opportunity to incorporate feedback I'd received about the system over the years and completely rebuild it from the ground up. In doing so, I completely rebuilt both the registration and administration experiences, in order to allow bowlers an easier, more seamless and thorough registration experience, and to provide tournament directors with greater control and flexibility in how they run their tournaments.
These days, working on Tournio is a way to hold on to my sanity and give myself something constructive to do while I work to live with cardiac amyloidosis, when time and mental bandwidth allow. As part of an effort to build a more robust payments integration—and give the site a more distinctive personality—I rebranded it, and so igbo-reg.com became tourn.io in 2022.
Tournio has no official affiliation with IGBO. I've simply built it specifically for use by IGBO tournaments.
This website is designed to work with all modern browsers, regardless of device. On desktops, though, I recommend using Mozilla Firefox.
All the code in my repositories (outside of the Ruby and JavaScript libraries and frameworks) has been written by me. I have used no artificial intelligence or other generative tools of any kind. (While I do think there's a place for AI in our future, I firmly believe it should never come at the cost of humans' livelihoods or well-being.)
Interested in the source code? It's in two parts, available on Github: