Gabe Zeller

Have you ever wanted to settle, once and for all, who’s the best at a sport, drinking game, or any friendly competition? That’s exactly what CourtRank was built for.

CourtRank lets users create and manage leagues for any game they choose. Competitors can join public or private leagues, log matches, and track real-time stats and ELO-based rankings, so there’s never any debate about who sits at the top.

The project began as a simple league tracker for a favorite college game of mine, but after sharing the idea with my friend Anand (AJ) Tekkey, it grew into a full, general-purpose platform. Now, any group of friends or colleagues can track their competitions in one place.

AJ implemented the app’s foundational structure and initial UI. I stepped in to stabilize key features and elevate the user experience. I resolved a range of bugs, like with user registration, made several important tweaks, and improved error handling to ensure clean, consistent data within our NoSQL database. I also built a useGoogleAuth hook, enabling seamless Google sign-in, which now powers the majority of user registrations. My largest contribution was a full redesign of the UI, transforming the app into a modern, intuitive experience complete with a custom logo.

CourtRank is currently in beta as a web app with 80+ users. My current focus is preparing it to scale. I’m developing a custom hook to read match data from Cloud Firestore more cost-effectively with pagination, caching, and smarter logic. This will reduce database reads by over 80% while keeping the experience fast and up to date.

Stay tuned for more improvements!