SportMap

SportMap is a map-first directory of sports facilities. It answers one question — where can I play this sport near here, and is the place free right now — and it answers it from a venue index rather than from a booking queue. Booking itself belongs to MineCourt. SportMap is the discovery layer in front of it.

What does SportMap index?

A venue record holds the facility's location, the sports it supports, its amenities, its photos, and reviews left by players who have been there. Records are filtered by sport type, by distance from where the visitor is standing, by amenities and by price range, and each one carries distance and routing, so the answer to "where is it" is a direction rather than a pin on a map. Venues that are not in the index yet can be submitted by the community, which is how a directory that spans more than one city stays current without a field team walking into every gym.

How does it connect to MineCourt?

Where a venue runs on MineCourt, SportMap reads its live availability, so a search result is not only a place that exists but a slot that is open. The two systems keep separate jobs. MineCourt owns the booking grid, the pricing engine, the roles and the venue's day-to-day operations. SportMap owns discovery and the public profile. A venue owner can be listed on SportMap without adopting MineCourt, and adopting MineCourt later turns that listing from an address into a bookable slot without moving the listing anywhere.

What does SportMap deliberately not do?

It does not take payment, hold a reservation, or manage a venue's staff, pricing or tournaments. Those are MineCourt's job. Duplicating them inside a discovery product is how directories turn into a second, worse booking system that venue owners then have to keep in sync by hand. SportMap keeps one source of truth for availability and points at it.

What is it built on?

Drupal 11 on PHP 8.3 and MySQL holds the venue records, the moderation workflow behind community submissions, and the review content — the same entity model, permission system and editorial workflow as every other platform in this ecosystem, which is why a venue record can gain fields without a migration. The map is Leaflet.js drawing OpenStreetMap tiles rather than a commercial mapping SDK, so the map layer carries no per-load licence fee and the tile source can be pointed at infrastructure you control. The interface is Bootstrap 5 and is built for a phone first, because venue discovery usually happens when someone is already out of the house.

Who is it for?

Three groups use the same index differently. Players search it to find somewhere to play tonight, filtered by the sport they actually play and by how far they are willing to travel. Venue owners claim a profile to be found by people who do not already know their name, which is the part a booking system alone cannot do for them. Anyone running a city or regional sports programme can use the index as a public facility directory instead of maintaining a spreadsheet that goes stale between updates.

Can it be adapted to another market?

SportMap is a Drupal application, not a closed hosted service. Fitting it to another country, another language or a different set of sports is product work on top of the existing platform rather than a rebuild from zero, and the code that results from that work belongs to whoever paid for it — see why you own the source code. Deployment, containerised environments and hosting are covered by DevOps and hosting.

Want to see what was actually built and shipped? Read the build: SportMap case study.