The Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler is free software that allows Sports Leagues, like Soccer Leagues, to match up referees and games.
For the Mid-Ohio Select Soccer League, the process of scheduling referees was incredibly time consuming. Team coordinators would spend hours on the phone and writing emails to schedule referees for games. Referees themselves would have to meet in a central location for the initial sign-up. Many could not make it, or had to drive long distances, only to compete for sign-up sheets. The Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler was developed to solve this problem by allowing referees to search for and schedule games online at their convenience.
The Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler is totally free: you are free to use, modify and redistribute the program for any purpose. This is what is meant by open-source software. Neither the league, administrators, nor referees pay anything to use the software: The Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler was not developed for profit. It does not generate revenue from advertisments or otherwise. Instead, it runs on a your league's web server on your terms: you have total control.
The software is ready-to-use, out of the box. However, if your
league wishes to make changes to the software, or
customize it for its own purposes, it may do so freely. The
software was designed from the ground up to be customizable and
extensible: it is extensively documented in this regard. It
should be relatively easy for a hobbyist programmer or a
professional software developer associated with your league to
customize the software for your needs with minimum effort.
This process is detailed in
Extending and Developing the Scheduler.
The Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler currently provides minimal but complete, out-of-the-box functionality for scheduling and managing referees. It is production-level software, but at the present time, is meant to complement your current process rather than completely replace it.