Pickel

Have you ever been interested in getting into Pickleball but don't know where to start? Our application is the perfect way to introduce yourself to the game!

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Inspiration

Partners: Evan <3 and Ryan :3 We are avid pickleball players and wanted to see some real infrastructure for beginners to get into the sport. In addition, we have noticed that at UCSB's pickleball club, the rapid expansion of new members makes it difficult to track games and get everyone on the courts as efficiently as possible. That is why we want to resolve this issue by making a web app that can more effectively organize the people already playing and add any more who want to join.

What it does

It is a multi-use, beginner-friendly pickleball web app. It has features such as a court organizer, a nearby courts search, a handy rulebook, an easy-to-access link to professional gameplay, and UCSB Pickleball Club's event calendar.

How we built it

We are basing our pickleball web app on Python's Django library and all of its capabilities. There is extensive usage of HTML for the frontend portion of the project.

Challenges we ran into

A couple of the many challenges included organizing courts and being able to add names to a waitlist, which could then be moved onto the courts. We also encountered challenges in using Google MAPS API in order to find the nearest pickleball courts, but with enough time and debugging, we were able to make it past these issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our pickleball court organizer, which solved the problem we came into this hackathon with. Being able to easily organize who is playing where when it comes to pickleball, and adding many customizable features, was not an easy task, but one that will have a real impact on our lives in making our club meetings more enjoyable.

Also, being able to search for nearby pickleball courts was a great feature that we thought of after finishing the court organizer, and one which proved difficult to implement. While there is definitely room to add more features and more importantly clean up the features that we created, we are proud of the fact that we were able to get so much done in such a short amount of time as just two people.

What we learned

HTML kinda sucks.

What's next for Pickel

We want to expand and work on this project far beyond the end of this hackathon. This would be an ongoing project that accrues all of the features we think would enhance the overall Pickleball experience, and as pickleball enthusiasts ourselves, we can come up with ideas the more we play the sport! We would ideally like to add a feature where you receive a text when it is your turn to play pickleball. We were also considering adding a ranking system based on who you have played against and won/lost to.

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