Straight answers, including the awkward ones
Several answers below are simply “no”. An FAQ that glosses is worse than no FAQ at all — it is the page people open precisely because they suspect the rest of the site is being generous with itself.
The basics
What is BallOBall?
One platform for running organised sport: create a league, build the fixtures, score games live, and publish standings, statistics and a public fan page. It covers 23 sports, each with its own scoring model rather than a shared generic one.
Which sports are supported?
23 of them, across field and court sports, racquet sports, and precision sports — basketball, soccer, volleyball, cricket, rugby, hockey, baseball, softball, handball, American football, flag football, lacrosse, tennis, table tennis, badminton, pickleball, squash, racquetball, pool, darts, bowling, archery and curling. Each one has its own events, period structure and standings columns.
Can one organisation run several sports and several leagues?
Yes. An organisation holds as many leagues as it needs across any of the supported sports, with shared people, teams and settings underneath. It is one login, not one account per sport.
How long does setup take?
Creating an organisation is self-serve, and a league needs a sport, some teams and rosters before the fixture generator can run. We deliberately do not publish a "set up in N minutes" figure, because it depends entirely on how many teams and players you are entering.
Scoring, standings and statistics
Does scoring update the standings automatically?
Yes. Standings are derived from finalised results using that sport’s own tiebreak chain — goal difference, win percentage, set difference, whatever is correct for the sport — so there is nothing to recalculate by hand.
What happens if the venue Wi-Fi drops during a game?
Scoring keeps working. Events are written to a durable on-device queue that survives closing the tab, and they send in order once the connection returns. Each event carries a unique key, so one re-sent after a dropped connection is matched to the record that already exists rather than counted twice.
Can a mistake be corrected after it is recorded?
Yes, in two ways: any event can be undone from the play-by-play log — the server removes it and reverses its score effects in the same transaction — or it can be retyped or reassigned to a different player in place. Once a scorekeeper ends the game the match locks, and the server refuses further scoring events.
Do we get player statistics and leaderboards?
Box scores are produced for every match in that sport’s own format, and standings ship with every plan. Player leaderboards, the stat explorer, side-by-side compare and public player stat lines are part of the Leaderboards module, which a league turns on; deeper advanced metrics are a separate Advanced Stats module, and basketball has the richest layer of those.
Fans and the public side
Can fans watch without an account?
Yes. A public league page — schedule, standings, live scores, team and player pages — reads with no account and no app download. Signing in is only for the people running or playing in the league.
Is there a mobile app to download?
No, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. BallOBall is a web app that installs to a phone or tablet home screen and runs full-screen, which is how the scorekeeper console is normally used. There is no iOS or Android app in the App Store or Play Store.
Can fans get the schedule in their own calendar?
Yes. Schedules publish a calendar subscription, so fixtures land in whatever calendar app someone already uses and update when the schedule changes.
Tournaments, registration and ticketing
Does it handle tournaments?
Yes, through the Tournaments module: pools with their own standings, seeding from the table, single and double elimination brackets, automatic advancement when a match is finalised, and a public bracket page fans can open without an account. Note there is no third-place match, no automatic byes for a field that is not a power of two, and no bracket export today.
Can we take registrations and payments?
Registration itself works today: a form builder with custom fields and conditional logic, a public sign-up page needing no account, waivers with a typed signature, promo codes, scholarships, a waitlist, and automatic roster enrolment when a registration is confirmed. Card payment is built but inactive until a payment provider is connected — so today you can collect the sign-up and handle the money yourself.
Can we sell and scan tickets?
Yes. Ticket types with prices and capacity, QR tickets on the buyer’s device, gate scanning by camera or manual code with duplicate and wrong-event protection, a will-call queue, a live gate dashboard, and printed cash tickets whose QR is signed so it can be verified at the door. Tickets are not emailed or texted automatically — the buyer gets them on screen or through a link you share.
Does it support streaming?
It produces broadcast graphics, not video. Overlays load as a single browser source in OBS or vMix and are driven directly by the scorekeeper over a WebSocket, alongside a full-screen scoreboard and a vertical layout for phone streams. BallOBall does not encode, record, restream or archive video.
Plans, data and what we do not do
How does pricing work?
The core of running a league is included, and specific capabilities are sold as modules an organisation adds to its plan. Every capability on this site is badged with which of those applies. Pricing is quote-based rather than self-serve checkout — tell us about your season and we will price it.
How is our data separated from other organisations?
By row-level security in the database. Tenant-scoped queries are filtered against the current organisation at the Postgres layer, so a missing filter in application code cannot expose another organisation’s rows.
Can we use our own branding and domain?
Yes. Logo, colours, fonts and header imagery on league and organisation pages are a Pro-and-above entitlement, and a custom domain is available on the top tier. Setting the domain live involves our team completing the certificate and CDN step — it is not instant self-serve.
Do you have SSO, an API, or a compliance certification?
No to all three, and we would rather you knew now. There is no SAML or OIDC federation and no directory sync; there is no public API and no outbound webhooks; and BallOBall holds no SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS or HIPAA attestation and no certification under any privacy regime. The security page sets out what does exist.
Can we get our data out?
Yes. Standings and statistics screens export to CSV, and organisation-level data export plus account deletion and erasure are supported. Export and purge at organisation scale are run by our team rather than self-serve from your settings.
Still not answered?
Ask before you commit. If the answer is no, we will say no — the security page is a fair sample of how bluntly.