EP Creates Web-Based Software for NCAA Division I Wrestling Events

If you’re a fan of Albany-area high school wrestling, you’ve doubtless heard of Frank Popolizio, founder of Journeymen Wrestling.  Armed with a dream for connecting local wrestlers to wrestling’s greatest stage – the NCAA – Frank has helped New York’s Albany area, historically a wrestling backwater, achieve notariety as a hub of wrestling talent.   A tireless promoter of training and competitive events, Frank’s efforts to connect local high school wrestlers with the most successful collegiate wrestling programs in the country have paid off in a big way: Both for the colleges, who have found a fresh talent pool for recruiting purposes, and for the wrestlers, who have been inspired and coached toward personal excellence.

One of the biggest annual events sponsored by Journeymen is the Northeast Collegiate Duals. Held each year during the Thanksgiving weekend, this event brings nearly twenty of the nation’s best Division I collegiate wrestling teams, including a large collection of the top-ranked individual wrestlers, together for a full day of the most eye-popping action imaginable to a local wrestling fan.

So how does Frank Popolizio lure this caliber of wrestling to New York’s Capital Region?  He provides the coaches with a smorgasbord of non-conference matchups that allow them to measure the strength of their program early in the season at a single venue that enables them to consolidate their travel schedule.  But Frank has found putting together a day-long schedule of appropriate matchups between teams of varying talent levels that satisfies all seventeen coaches at once is a task of Herculean proportions.  “I nearly broke down in tears,” said Popolizio, an accomplished former wrestler in his own right who is not easily defeated.  “It took me seven days, morning till night,” says Frank, to produce a satisfactory schedule for the Northeast Duals that met all the coaches’ requirements.  With similar collegiate events being staged in the Binghamton area, and numerous similar high school tournaments, something had to be done to make the scheduling process easier.

This is when Journeymen Wrestling turned to Efficiency Partners for help.  Sam Hazleton, EP’s CEO, has a son who wrestles with the Journeymen Club.  After a couple of brief phone conversations in which Frank outlined the scheduling rules, priorities and critical variables, Efficiency Partners was off and running to produce a web-accessible database system and scheduling engine that uses the power of the computer to instantaneously generate a variety of scheduling options for each event that fulfill each coach’s objectives.  “You’ve made my April,” said Frank Popolizio as he sampled the new program from his iphone, a few short weeks after his initial conversations with Sam Hazleton.  “No one in the country has anything like this.”

Web-based development has been a significant source of Efficiency Partners’ recent customer projects.  Few solutions outside of EP’s Crescendo software offer the ability to directly link a backend database system to the web for direct and efficient access.  Do you have a specialized scheduling environment that could benefit from a well-designed, browser-based computer application?  Contact Efficiency Partners.  The solution may be more readily achieved than you think.