Brooklyn College Athletics Systems

The Problem

The athletics department ran 50+ events per year with a check-in process built entirely on manual spreadsheet lookups. At peak events with 1,000+ attendees, staff spent over 3 minutes per person searching, matching, and recording names — creating lines that stretched out the door before the first game.

At the same time, the athletics website experienced intermittent outages with no monitoring in place. When the site went down, nobody knew until a user reported it, sometimes hours later.

Context & Constraints

The solution needed to fit around existing infrastructure:

• No dedicated IT staff on-site during events. The system had to be staff-operated with minimal training.
• Hardware was fixed. We had existing tablets and laptops — no budget for dedicated scanners.
• The website ran WordPress on shared hosting. Major platform changes were out of scope.
• Documentation was nearly nonexistent. Anything built had to come with a runbook.

What Was Built

• QR-based check-in system replacing the manual spreadsheet. Python script pre-processed attendee rosters and generated individual QR codes per person, sent via automated email before each event.
• Tablet-based scanning workflow using existing devices and a lightweight web form for fallback manual entry when QR was unavailable.
• Google Workspace automation for pre-event communication: automated roster emails, confirmation messages, and post-event attendance exports.
• WordPress uptime monitoring with 5-minute check intervals and email/SMS alerting.
• Staff runbook documenting every step of event day setup, QR scanning procedure, fallback processes, and post-event data export.

Process

Phase 1 — Audit

Mapped the existing check-in flow end to end. Identified three major bottlenecks:

1. Roster lookup was alphabetical-only with no search — staff scanned the list manually
2. No pre-validation: duplicate registrations weren't caught until event day
3. Post-event reconciliation took 2+ hours of manual data entry

Phase 2 — Redesign

Moved all pre-validation work before event day. The Python script now deduplicates the roster, flags anomalies, generates unique QR codes, and sends personalized confirmation emails with codes attached.

Phase 3 — Testing

Ran 3 pilot events before full rollout. Each surfaced one improvement — email deliverability filtering, tablet camera lag on older devices, and post-event CSV schema mismatch. All resolved before full launch.

Phase 4 — Rollout + documentation

Full rollout at the start of the following semester with a 12-page staff runbook covering every scenario, including fallback procedures.

Results

• 99.9% website uptime maintained across the full academic year — zero unplanned outages after monitoring was in place
• 40% reduction in per-person check-in time (from ~3 min to ~1.8 min average at peak events)
• 1,000+ users processed smoothly at the two largest events of the year
• Staff operated the system independently within 2 events of handoff — no support calls
• Post-event reconciliation dropped from 2+ hours to under 20 minutes due to automated exports