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Let Your Referees Enter Tournament Results From Their Phone

· 6 min read
Score7 Team
Score7 Team

You're running a Sunday league. You have three referees on three courts. They finish their matches, walk over to you with a scrap of paper or a text message, and you type the score into the tournament. By the time you've caught up, the next round is already starting.

Score7 lets your referees enter results themselves — from their phones, with no login, no app to install. You give each referee a personal link, share it through whatever channel you already use, and they submit scores as matches end. Standings update live, and the referee's call beats anything a participant tried to report.

Turn the feature on first​

Referee result entry sits next to participant result reporting under the tournament's Access tab, where you also grant admin / editor access to other people. Both are Premium.

  1. Open your tournament and go to Access.
  2. Find the Self-service result entry section.
  3. Click the edit icon next to Allow referees to enter results and switch it on.

That's the master switch. Until it's on, no referee links can be generated, and the referee list itself stays hidden.

How a referee appears in the list​

Once the toggle is on, the Access tab shows a list of every referee assigned to at least one match. A name shows up there as soon as you've put it on a match in one of two places:

  • In the Scheduler, the referee names you enter get distributed across matches when you run the scheduler.
  • On the match details dialog (the pencil icon on any match), you can type a referee name directly on a specific game.

Either way, the Access list is reading from those per-match assignments — there's no separate "referee roster" you have to maintain in two places. If no match has a referee yet, the Access tab shows a hint pointing you back to the Scheduler.

On every referee's row in the Access tab, you get four small icons:

  • Generate and copy — for a referee with no link yet. Mints the link and copies it to your clipboard.
  • Copy — copies the existing link without changing it.
  • Regenerate — invalidates the old link and mints a fresh one for the same referee in one step. Use this if the link leaks or you've changed your mind about who's officiating.
  • Revoke — disables the link. The next time the referee opens it, they see "this link is no longer valid". Any results they already submitted stay.

The link looks like score7.com/r/<long-token>. It's opaque — nobody can guess it or reverse-engineer your tournament URL from it. Paste it into WhatsApp, SMS, email — whatever channel you use to talk to that referee. Score7 doesn't send the link for you.

What the referee sees​

The referee opens the link. That's it — no login screen, no app to download, no menu to navigate.

The page they land on looks like the By Referee view your organizers use inside the tournament: a green title bar at the top with the referee's name on it, and below that, a grid of every match they've been assigned to. Each match card shows the date, the location, the two teams stacked with a divider between them, and a single Edit pencil on the right.

When they tap the pencil, they get the same result-entry dialog your captains and your organizers see: enter the score (set by set if your tournament uses sets), pick Home / Draw / Away as the winner, save. The dialog is set up exactly the same as the participant one. The only options missing are Walkover and Void match, which stay organizer-only.

The result is live the moment they save it — standings, bracket advancement, public page, everything.

The authority hierarchy: organizer > referee > participant​

A referee's submission supersedes anything the participants may have reported. The whole point is that you brought in a neutral observer, so their call wins. Score7 enforces this end-to-end:

  • A participant trying to report a result on a match the referee already entered gets a clear message that the referee got there first and is told to ask the referee to amend.
  • A referee trying to enter on a match the organizer has already entered sees a "Locked by organizer" chip in the header bar and the Edit pencil is hidden — they know not to try.
  • The organizer can always override anyone, anytime, from the standard Update Result dialog.

A referee can re-submit and amend their own previous entry as many times as they want. The lock only kicks in when someone higher wrote last.

Live-update rules to know​

A few small behaviors worth understanding so you don't get surprised:

  • Reassigning a match to a different referee. The match drops out of the original referee's list right away on their next page load. Anything they already submitted stays.
  • Renaming the referee on a match. The match drops out of the link's list (the name on the match no longer matches the name on the link). Rename it back to bring the match back, or use Regenerate link to mint a fresh link under the new name.
  • Two referees with the same name. They'll see the same match list, because the link joins on name. Add a small disambiguator on the match referee field (e.g. "John S." and "John P.") and generate a link per name.

What happens when the tournament ends or your plan changes​

Score7 revokes every active referee link automatically when:

  • A tournament is marked completed or deleted/archived.
  • Your subscription drops to Free — every link on a Free-tier tournament is revoked and the toggle is switched off.

You don't have to clean anything up. If you upgrade back, you can re-enable the toggle and re-mint links.

Premium gating​

Referee result entry is Premium, so is the Allow participants to report results toggle sitting right next to it.

  • Generating and regenerating referee links is Premium.
  • Copying and revoking existing links works on any plan. If you downgrade after generating some, you can still copy them to share again, or revoke them to shut things down — you just can't mint new ones until you upgrade.

If you already had Allow participants to report results turned on before this change, that setting stays on regardless of plan — you're grandfathered. The new Premium gate only applies to fresh turn-ons.

A small set of intentional limits​

A few things this feature doesn't do today, on purpose:

  • One referee per match. A head referee plus assistants aren't separately addressable yet.
  • No cross-tournament view. A referee uses a specific link for each tournament. There's no "all my matches everywhere" view.
  • Sharing is on you. Score7 generates the link; you decide which channel to share it through.

If any of these become friction in real life, let us know — they're all on the roadmap.