Let Participants Report Their Own Match Results
If you organise a tournament, you know the post-match drill: half the captains text you their score on the night, half don't. The rest you chase by Sunday morning, sifting screenshots and trying to remember who actually won the third set. Match by match, your job becomes data entry.
You can stop doing that. Score7 now lets your participants report their own results — and when both sides agree, Score7 records the result for you automatically. You only step in when there's a disagreement.
How it works in one paragraph
You turn on participant result confirmation in your tournament settings. Each participant gets a personal link. They open it, see their matches, tap "Report Result", and submit their score. When their opponent does the same and the two reports match, Score7 confirms it and updates the standings immediately. When they don't match, the match is flagged for you to resolve — with both versions side by side. You stay in control; you just stop being the manual data-entry step in the middle.
Turning it on
The toggle lives in your tournament's advanced settings, under "Allow participant result confirmation". When you flip it on, two related settings appear.
The first is the confirmation timeout — how long Score7 waits for the second participant before it gives up. You can choose 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, or a full week. The default of 48 hours is a sensible starting point for most weekend leagues.
The second is the timeout behaviour — what should happen if the second participant never reports:
- Auto-confirm — accept the lone submission as the official result. Use this for low-stakes leagues where one captain consistently reports and the other doesn't bother.
- Auto-escalate — flag the match for you to review and resolve. Use this for higher-stakes events where you want eyes on every unmatched result.
There's no premium tier here. The whole flow is free for every tournament.
What your participants see
Each participant has their own link to a page that lists their matches. The page is mobile-friendly — most captains will open it from their phone — and it groups matches by what the participant needs to do:
- Needs your report — no result yet, no submission from either side
- Awaiting opponent — they've reported, the opponent hasn't
- Confirmed — both sides agreed, the result is official
- Disputed — both sides reported different results, organiser is reviewing
To report a result, they tap "Report Result" on a match card. They get a small dialog: enter the score (set by set if your tournament uses set-based scoring), pick Home or Away as the winner, and submit. That's it.
After they submit, three things can happen:
- The opponent hasn't reported yet. The match moves to "Awaiting opponent". Nothing else changes. They get a "we're waiting on the other side" message.
- The opponent already reported the same result. The match auto-confirms on the spot. The standings update. Bracket advancement happens. Done.
- The opponent reported something different. The match is flagged disputed. Both reports are kept. You're notified.
Participants don't need a Score7 account. The link is enough — it identifies them, lets them report, and locks them out of editing once a result is confirmed. They can't enter walkovers or void matches; those stay your call.
What you (the organiser) see
A new sidebar tab in your tournament called Pending Confirmations is the canonical place to triage. It lists every match that needs your attention: pending submissions waiting on the second side, disputed matches, and matches the timeout escalated to you. Each row shows the match, both submissions side-by-side, and a Resolve button.
Hit Resolve and you get a dialog with both reports laid out next to each other. From there you have a few options:
- Accept one side's submission with one click — handy when one report is obviously right.
- Edit the score directly and submit a different result — useful when both sides got it wrong.
- Set a walkover (one side wins without play) or void the match entirely — same options you have in the regular Update Result dialog.
Across the rest of your tournament, every match card now shows a small confirmation status icon next to the score. Pending, confirmed, disputed, or resolved — at a glance you know which matches are still in motion. The icon only appears when result confirmation is enabled, and it stays hidden for matches you entered yourself (those bypass the confirmation flow entirely).
You always have the override
Turning on participant confirmation doesn't take any control away from you. Every existing action still works.
If you enter a result the regular way — through the Update Result action on a match — Score7 records your entry as the official result. Any pending participant submissions are dismissed. The match leaves the Pending Confirmations queue. You don't have to "approve" anything; the act of entering a result IS the override.
If you delete a confirmed result, the match reopens for fresh participant submissions. Useful when something went genuinely wrong and you want to start the report cycle over.
In knockout tournaments, this matters more than it sounds. Score7 only advances participants on confirmed results — never on unconfirmed submissions. A participant clicking "Report Result" can never accidentally cascade them through your bracket.
What happens after a result is confirmed
Once a match is confirmed (by agreement, by timeout, or by your resolution), participants can no longer edit it. The only action they have left is Flag as Disputed — a button under a confirmed match card that says, in effect, "the recorded result is wrong and I want the organiser to look at this again."
Flagging a confirmed result as disputed sends you a heads-up. It does NOT undo the result. It does NOT change standings. It does NOT reverse bracket advancement. The participant is asking for a review; you decide whether to act. To actually change the result you delete it and re-enter it (or re-open it for fresh submissions).
The full audit trail — who submitted what, when timeouts fired, who resolved disputes — is preserved on every match.
Picking the right timeout setting
A few rules of thumb that work for most tournaments:
- Casual weekend league with 48-hour rounds → Auto-confirm, 24 hours. One captain usually reports promptly; the other usually forgets. Auto-confirming the lone report keeps the standings live without you having to chase.
- Higher-stakes weekly league → Auto-escalate, 48 hours. You want to glance at unmatched results yourself rather than rubber-stamp them.
- Tournament running over a single weekend → Auto-escalate, 12 or 24 hours. Disputes need to surface fast — by Sunday afternoon you want the bracket clean.
- Long-form league with weekly matches → Auto-confirm, 1 week. Captains have a full week to disagree; if they don't, the lone report is almost certainly correct.
You can change the timeout and behaviour at any point. The change applies to matches still in the pending state.
Edge cases worth knowing
A few things participants and organisers occasionally hit:
- Sharing the link. Participants who registered through Score7's registration form already have their link — it arrived with their registration confirmation and is the same link they use to manage their entry. For participants you added manually, an admin opens the kebab menu on the participants page and chooses Copy Result Link. The option only appears once result confirmation is enabled and a link has been issued.
- Regenerating the schedule issues fresh links. Older links stop working — share the new ones from the participants page.
- No notifications yet. Participants need to open their link to check status. We're working on emails and push notifications for "your match is ready to report" and "your opponent has reported"; for now, the link is the source of truth.
- One setting per tournament. The toggle, timeout, and timeout behaviour apply across the whole tournament — there's no per-stage or per-round override.
Why this matters
You probably became a tournament organiser because you wanted to run a tournament — not because you wanted to be the human bottleneck for every score in it. Letting participants report their own results, with Score7 doing the matching, gives you back the parts of the weekend you actually wanted: watching the matches, talking to people, fixing the things only you can fix.
Turn it on for your next matchday. Check your Pending Confirmations tab on Sunday evening. Notice how short the list is.
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