Emirates Dubai 7s Youth Sport Festival 2023

The Emirates Dubai 7s Youth Sport Festival is an annual multi-sports tournament held over two days at the world famous Sevens Stadium in Dubai.

From the outset the tournament was created to give young players of rugby, netball, and cricket, boys and girls, the opportunity to have a ‘big tournament’ experience. Almost 800 children take part every year.

After two days of competition were completed, 204 children went on to play in finals at the main Emirates Dubai 7s event on December 1st 2023.

The tournament website at https://youthsportfestival.com served several, very important, purposes:

1. To promote the tournament and its primary sponsors, Nakheel and Dulsco, to website visitors
2. To manage the registration of teams (68) and players (924)
3. To provide easily accessible ‘live’ fixtures and results to visitors
4. To be the central, and single, hub for all tournament information and data
5. To eliminate unnecessary ‘noise’ from tournament organisers, staff, and volunteers.

It’s very common, at large events, that the event organisers’ area can be swamped with enquiries and questions about what time something may be happening, and at a large venue like The Sevens Stadium, where?

Each participating team had its own page on the https://youthsportfestival.com website. The team’s page would show their fixtures, timings, and what pitch, oval, or court they would be playing on. The link to a team’s page was shared with the teams prior to the start of the tournament.

To help drive routine enquiries to the website, QR codes for each and every team were displayed at every pitch, oval, and court to make it easy for parents and spectators to keep up-to-date with the results and fixtures of the team(s) they were following and also the other teams taking part.

Putting all of the relevant information on one, easily accessible, online space resulted in a significant amount of ‘noise’ being removed from the event organiser’s areas.

With all of the tournament data, including fixtures, contained in the tournament’s website it was a simple process to create scorecards for each of the sports being played and to pre-populate the cards with the fixture data:

1. Competition – Rugby / Netball / Cricket age-group
2. Event ID – Unique identifier for each game
3. Venue – Which pitch, oval, or court a game is being played on
4. Time – Game start time
5. Team 1 / 2 – Name of Team 1 and name of Team 2
6. Ref – The official appointed to oversee a game.

The data for the scorecards was exported from the tournament website and imported into the software which created the scorecard document. A single pdf, containing each and every scorecard, was then sent to print.

Player passes for rugby, netball, and cricket were created using the same method with data captured during the player registration process.

The two days of the tournament needed to be captured, shared, then archived. We did that too.