Play Pickup: Basketball Community & Game Management Platform
TECHNOLOGIES
ABOUT
A mobile basketball community and event platform for discovering, joining, hosting, and managing local runs, combining location-based game discovery, clubs, social features, and paid event hosting.
CLIENT
Play Pickup (consumer basketball community & event platform, nationwide local runs)
MY ROLE
Lead Mobile & Platform Engineer, delivering game discovery, clubs, and payments. Collaborating with Community Growth and Product Design.
DURATION
March – June 2025 (3 months)
TOOLS
0%
OVERVIEW
Play Pickup is a cross-platform basketball community and event platform for discovering, joining, hosting, and growing local runs. It combines nearby game discovery, clubs, social engagement, player profiles, rankings, notifications, and event hosting in one experience, with support for both free and paid games.
THE PROBLEM
Pickup basketball often relies on group chats, word of mouth, and separate payment tools. Players lack reliable visibility into nearby games, open spots, cost, and competition level, while hosts repeatedly coordinate schedules, locations, rosters, and payments.
Communities also lacked a persistent space between runs, players had no clear way to stay connected to clubs, follow other hoopers, or track participation once a game ended.
Legacy state diagnostic & bottleneck mapping for Play Pickup.
FIG 01 // DIAGNOSTIC
HOW WE FRAMED THE IDEA
The concept centered on one journey: discover a relevant run, understand the details, claim a spot, and stay connected to that basketball community without leaving the app.
Four product pillars shaped the experience: discover the right run, organize the full event, build the community, and support paid participation through native subscriptions and Stripe-powered paid-event flows.
ARCHITECTURAL THESIS
“Reducing coordination friction wasn't about a better group chat, it came from framing every run as a structured, joinable event inside one connected basketball community.”
THINK & BUILD
The platform uses Flutter on the client, a Node.js backend, and AWS infrastructure. AppsFlyer supports deep links into games and clubs, routing shared invitations directly into the correct in-app journey.
Native App Store and Google Play purchases handle subscriptions, while Stripe supports paid-event transactions, giving hosts a complete workflow to create, share, and manage free or paid games without separate tools.
System architecture and telemetry execution for Play Pickup.
FIG 02 // BUILD SPEC
THE SOLUTION
Play Pickup combines game discovery, event hosting, clubs, social interaction, player profiles, rankings, notifications, and payments in one mobile experience, moving discovery, hosting, joining, and sharing into a single structured platform while strengthening community retention through clubs, follows, and rankings.
Play Pickup: Shipped production interface and live telemetry.
FIG 03 // PRODUCTION
NEXT CASE STUDY (4/9)