This is an interview-format account from the director of Game Fish SJDS, conducted shortly after the 2026 event wrapped. The director's name is held per their request until ongoing verification completes; attribution is the tournament. The questions were standard switching-experience prompts. The answers are minimally edited for length.
Spreadsheets. Three of them, one per category, plus a separate sheet for registrations. Walkie-talkies for catch reporting. Paper forms at each judge station. A whiteboard at the dock for the public leaderboard, which we'd photograph every couple of hours and post to social.
The 2025 event. We had a captain dispute a catch on Saturday afternoon. The judge who logged it had gone home. The form had a smudge on the time field. We argued about it for two hours, never reached a clean answer, and ended up doing what we always did — splitting the prize. The captain we split with was unhappy. The captain we split from was unhappy. And neither of those captains entered the 2026 event.
That was a $4,000 problem in lost entry fees from those two boats alone. Plus whatever it did to our reputation that I'll never know.
About four hours of working with their setup team to nail down the species multipliers, the tie-break rules, and the registration form fields. After that, the configuration is a file I can clone for next year.
Mixed at first. Two of them were skeptical about logging on phones — they'd been doing paper for ten years. After the dry-run we did two weeks before lines-in, they were on board. The 5-tap entry is genuinely faster than writing on a form, and the auto-generated radio code made the radio reporting tighter.
The audit trail. Going into it, I thought the audit trail was a nice-to-have feature. After the event, I think it's the single most important feature DockScore has. We had one challenge during the event. We resolved it in 12 minutes because the entire chain of evidence — submission timestamp, judge name, photo, GPS metadata, radio call timing — was right there in the record. There was nothing to argue about.
We had 12,847 spectator views during the event. Most of them came from spectator-to-spectator sharing — captains' families, sponsors' staff, fishing forums. The leaderboard URL was the most-shared piece of content from our event. Going forward, that public leaderboard is part of how I price next year's sponsorships.
Monday morning, before lunch, I had: official results published, IMPESCA report exported and submitted, sponsor delivery reports emailed to every sponsor, captain thank-you with the link to the permanent results archive. In the spreadsheet days, that was a week of work spread across the next two weeks.
Do it before your next event, not after. The migration is free. The setup is one afternoon. The first event you run on it pays back the cost in time savings alone. The dispute it prevents pays back the rest.
Enable the Auto Story Publisher. We did the social posts manually this year because we wanted to be deliberate about voice. Now that we know the system, I'd let it auto-publish the leaderboard updates at scheduled intervals and only intervene for the special moments. Free up another two hours of my event day.
If you're running a tournament on paper or spreadsheets right now, the migration is free, the setup is one afternoon, and the first event pays it back. The hardest part is making the decision.
Get DockScore for My Tournament →Read the structured Game Fish SJDS case study for the numbers in one place. The director's POV post covers the same event from a longer-form first-person angle.