UMPY: the marketplace tackling the officiating shortage.
Every weekend across Australia, community fixtures kick off short of officials. UMPY is the marketplace we built to close that gap — connecting leagues with qualified umpires and referees where the local network has thinned out.
- Product: Digital marketplace connecting community sport with qualified officials
- Built for: Local leagues, associations, clubs, and the umpires and referees who serve them
- Sister product: WhistleIQ — the feedback platform for officials already in the system
- Problem solved: The match that happens (or doesn't happen) because no official could be found in time
The supply-side of the officiating crisis
If you've read our case study of WhistleIQ, you'll know about the officiating crisis in community sport. Officials are aging out faster than new ones are coming in. Coordinators are stretched. Retention is hard.
WhistleIQ tackles the retention side — keeping the officials we already have in the system, giving them better feedback and development. UMPY tackles the supply side — making sure the right officials get onto the right fixtures in the first place.
Because here's what happens at the grassroots level every weekend: a league has 14 fixtures. They have qualified officials for 11 of them. The other 3 either play without proper officiating, get a parent in a high-vis vest, or get cancelled. None of those outcomes are good. All of them lose players from the game over time.
Why a marketplace is the right shape
The historical model is local: each league or association manages their own panel of officials, who they pay (or volunteer) directly. This works when the local pool is healthy. When it isn't — and increasingly, it isn't — there's no easy way to find an available official from the next league over.
A marketplace fixes that. Officials list themselves once, with their qualifications, availability, and the codes/grades they can officiate. Leagues post their fixtures. The matching is automatic where it can be, assisted where it can't.
Critically, the officials still own their relationship with the leagues they prefer to work with. UMPY isn't replacing local panels — it's filling the gaps when local panels can't.
What UMPY does
- Official profiles — qualifications, certifications, codes/grades, availability, travel radius, preferred sports
- Fixture listings — leagues post what they need, when, where, at what level
- Smart matching — connecting available, qualified officials with fixtures, respecting cooldowns, travel, and rules
- Booking + confirmation — single-tap acceptance, rolling reminders, no-show tracking
- Payment + records — clean ledger of who officiated what, when, paid how much
- Coordinator tools — for the people running official panels at scale, the workflow they actually need
The design constraints
- Mobile-first. Officials are using this between games, in parking lots, at training. The desktop experience is secondary.
- Low-friction onboarding. Officials sign up between Tuesday training and Saturday fixtures. They can't spend 45 minutes filling forms.
- Sport-aware. Different sports have different qualification structures, different fixture cadences, different terminology. UMPY models all of that.
- Coordinator-friendly. Local coordinators are usually volunteers. The tool has to make their lives easier, not add to them.
- Trust signals everywhere. Ratings, completed-match counts, time-in-system. Both sides need to know who they're booking.
Who it serves
- Officials — finding fixtures that fit their availability, qualifications, and preferences
- Local leagues and associations — filling fixtures their own panels can't cover
- Coordinators — managing official allocation across many fixtures, with a tool that respects how they actually work
- Governing bodies — getting cross-association visibility into officiating supply, identifying where the gaps are
The pair that goes together
UMPY and WhistleIQ are designed to work together. UMPY gets officials onto fixtures. WhistleIQ gives them the feedback that keeps them in the system. Together they cover both sides of the officiating-retention equation.
For governing bodies thinking strategically about the supply pipeline, the two together provide something neither tool does alone: a real picture of who's officiating, where, with what feedback, with what development pathway, with what likelihood of staying.
What this tells you about how Stacksy works
UMPY is part of a multi-product approach to a hard sector problem. We didn't set out to build "the officiating product" — we built UMPY, then WhistleIQ, and the combination tackles the problem more completely than either could alone.
If you're thinking about a sector challenge that's really a multi-system problem, that's the kind of work we're built for. Sometimes it's one product. Sometimes it's two that talk to each other.