Ligues.ca is a sports league management tool built by Dominic Martineau. It’s a side project; Dominic’s day job is as a programmer at Nurun in Chicoutimi. He’s been with Nurun since 2005, but dabbles quite a bit on the side.
Aside from Ligues.ca (@liguesca), Dominic works on his PHP5 MVC framework named Lity. He’s had a variety of other side projects in the past, including Wibe7.tv, which garnered significant attention, including write ups from ReadWriteWeb and Lifehacker. Wibe7.tv is a visual search engine for YouTube. These days, most of his free time is spent on Ligues.ca.
Dominic started Ligues.ca because of his own participation in a baseball league and a hockey league. “Both were using Microsoft Excel to manage teams and player statistics,” said Dominic. “As a programmer, I thought I could offer a better solution.”
And it seems Dominic is very much focused on the statistics, making it easy to update through game summaries. “The best feedback I got was that it’s really easy and fast to update statistics. Instead of updating teams’ and players’ statistics one by one, you only have to enter the game summary and the stats are updated automatically,” said Dominic.
The competition in the league management space is extensive. A quick Google search reveals several competitors including League Toolbox, Redzone Leagues, Teamopolis and Active Network Sports. Active Network Sports claims to have over 10,000 customers.
Although Dominic is not focused exclusively on the Quebec market, that’s where he’s starting. He has been beta testing with 4 leagues, and hopes to move to a paying subscription model, charging between $50 and $100 per league per season. Currently Ligues.ca works in English and French; and Dominic may add support for Spanish when he adds soccer as an available sport.
For the moment he’s focused on baseball leagues and hopes to launch support for them in 2 weeks. After that he’s got a long feature list including mass email functionality, video support, user profile improvements and an iPhone application. Although only a side project, Dominic aims to release new functionality on a consistent basis, every 2 weeks.
