Every day we’re a bit closer to the long-expected ‘D’ day when Sportmeets will finally go live. We have come a long way over the last year trying shape the initial idea to its current form – from a student hobby project to a full-time dedicated work. We have engaged many people to help make Sportmeets reality, in places as far apart as Glasgow, Prague and Athens, and we have already known it under 3 different names, too! Whether Usporter, Crawdout or Sportmeets, we’ve got to like them all a lot.

There’s one thing, though, that has been pretty much the same ever since we started working on this – and that’s the concept behind Sportmeets.  Well, I guess it is about time to tell the story that lies behind Sportmeets to make it clearer why we are here, and why we ever thought of creating an application that will make life easier for anyone involved in recreational sports. I will divide it in several parts, each describing one interesting experience of Sportmeets’ founders. The first one is about how Miro met Joe.

The story starts in the lovely city of Glasgow, Scotland. Having just moved here from Los Angeles, CA, to continue his studies, Miro (the then Sportmeets-chief-to-be) discovered an unpleasant fact. Are you not sure what can be unpleasant about a West-coast Scottish city at a latitude equivalent to that of Moscow? Well, put simply, if one of your interests back in California was to play beach volleyball every now and then, you might as well forget it here in Glasgow. The weather is for the most of the year generally unsupportive of any outdoor activities that involve even partial nudity. For Miro there was not much choice but to find some other sport that would more reflect the reality of his new surroundings, i.e. it had to be played indoors! Football was one option.

There used to be these weekly football games organized by Joe, a Glasgow Uni student, in which a bunch of guys from all over the university would participate. Joe has always been a nice guy – he had to be, in order to keep this football thing running. He would wake up early on a Wednesday morning to get down to the sports centre to book the activity hall for next Wednesday as this had to be done in person and if you came a bit late, the slot would already have been taken. After paying for the booking, Joe would send out an email with the time of the game, asking people to sign up to which they would respond if they wanted to play. Joe would then send another email to confirm who was coming to the game and they would all have a nice game of football the next week. So far so good. But sometimes the things turned out to be more complicated than this. If you ever tried to get a bunch of people to one place to do an activity, you will know what is involved. In addition to the weekly morning trip to the sports hall, Joe would have to go through all the RSVPs and write down who’s coming. After the game he would collect the money: with 60p per person it would usually amount to a pile of change or worse, nobody would have anything smaller than a tenner. Due to some strange Murphy Law, there would therefore usually be either too much change or not enough. Now, that already was quite some work to do just to have a game of football. Imagine then that somebody would sent an email that they cannot make it just a day before the game – another email had to be sent out again. Sometimes people did not turn up at all and there would not be enough players. Another time somebody would forget to pay their 60p before going home. It was Joe that had to deal with all these inconveniences and carry around all the loose change and he did so bravely.

Well, Miro was a part of this football group, too. And he thought that there must be many ‘Joes’ around, organizing all kinds of activities and sports, but perhaps some of them are not willing to spend so much time to do it. Can something be done about this to help the guy in charge enjoy the game as much as the others do?  That’s where the idea to make sports organization as smooth as possible came from and it now lies at the core of Sportmeets. And now we also know that the answer is yes – it can!

Is this all about making the life of  the organizer easier then? Nope. We know well enough that there’s more to doing sport than that.  But I’ll tell you more in the next part of the Sportmeets story.