Honcho Pickleball had a model that worked. What they didn’t have was a platform that could keep up with it.
The challenge.
Founder & CEO Aaron Sunstrum and COO Max Berg were running a fast-growing national operation — pickleball leagues across dozens of venues, multiple formats, thousands of players. But they were stitching it together across two tools they had outgrown: Swish and LeagueApps. Swish, in particular, had become a bottleneck.
“There is no dev support there really… everything basically manually handled to get all data into their platform.”— Max Berg, COO, Honcho Pickleball
And the platforms were only part of the picture. To make any of it work, Honcho had glued their operation together with a patchwork of other tools — Airtable, dozens of Excel and Google spreadsheets, and Zapier automations — just to move data from one place to the next. Each season added more leagues, more spreadsheets, more zaps, more handoffs between systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
For an operation Honcho’s size, that doesn’t scale. Every season meant more leagues, more registrations, more schedules, more score-chasing, more weekly communications — and every one of those steps, spread across a half-dozen disconnected tools, was a place for the wheels to come off.
Honcho didn’t need a slightly better tool. They needed a platform purpose-built around how they actually run leagues, and a partner who could build it with them.
How it started.
We first met Aaron and Max in December. After a few weeks of conversations about what Honcho needed and what was holding them back, both sides decided to move forward — and the build began in earnest early in the new year.
The target was non-negotiable and tight: a complete, white-labeled, automated platform live in time for Honcho’s Late-Spring ’26 season. That meant everything — registration, league setup, scheduling, scoring, communications, the website itself — ready and tested before the first player signed up.
What we built.
The brief was simple to say, hard to execute: one platform, fully automated, fully white-labeled, in time for a live season carrying 150+ leagues. Here’s what shipped.
A platform that’s unmistakably Honcho’s.
Players never see Fluid. We white-labeled the entire experience: the website design and skin, a custom subdomain (app.honchopickleball.com), the favicon, the brand fonts, and every transactional email — all sending from Honcho’s own domain.
We worked directly from Honcho’s Figma designs to skin the app page by page, and built out an extensive library of email templates covering every step of the league lifecycle. From a player’s first click to their weekly schedule notification, the experience is pure Honcho.
Three league formats — one more than the brief.
The original scope covered two formats: a Rotating-Partner Ladder League (Scramble) and a Same-Partner Ladder League. As we worked through Honcho’s real-world needs, it became clear they also needed a third — a Same-Partner Round Robin (team-based) league. We built it.
- Rotating-Partner Ladder (Scramble) — partners rotate, ladder shifts week to week.
- Same-Partner Ladder — fixed partners, ladder progression.
- Same-Partner Round Robin — team-based, added in flight.
By launch, Honcho had all three running side by side, each with its own rules for scheduling, standings, check-ins, and playoffs.
“Glad we met deadline for all three league types.”— Max Berg, COO, Honcho Pickleball
A league that genuinely runs itself.
This is the heart of the build. For each league, a Honcho admin clicks a single button to send the first round of RSVP emails — and from that point on, the league runs on its own.
The platform handles the entire weekly cycle automatically:
- Collecting RSVPs and check-ins.
- Sending score-submission reminders on a timed cadence.
- Finalizing scores and re-seeding players for the following week.
- Generating and publishing next week’s schedule.
- Notifying every player by email and text along the way.
The whole sequence is choreographed down to the hour — score reminders, finalization, schedule publication — so a league operator can run dozens of leagues a week without manually touching any of them.
Every league runs the same five-step loop — untouched.
- Send RSVP request — admin clicks once; emails and texts go out.
- Collect scores — timed reminders nudge players to submit.
- Finalize results — platform locks scores at a set hour.
- Re-seed ladder — standings update; matchups recalculate.
- Publish next week — schedule lands in every inbox automatically.
A registration pipeline that just works.
Honcho runs registration on their own storefront. We built a custom, authenticated webhook so that as registrations come in, players are automatically created and placed into the correct league, season, and division — no manual uploads, no spreadsheet wrangling.
We went a step further and advised Honcho’s team on how to structure their same-partner (team) registration flow, so two independent sign-ups could be reliably linked into a single team and reconciled inside the platform using a shared team ID.
For everything outside the live feed, we built bulk league upload and export — letting Honcho configure or adjust hundreds of leagues at once and reconcile their data with confidence. At launch, that meant standing up 150+ leagues in a single pass.
Rules enforced the way Honcho actually runs them.
Real leagues have real edge cases. We built two custom workflows around Honcho’s specific business rules:
- No-Show Ban workflow — tracks offenses against Honcho’s threshold and automatically removes (and auto-forfeits future matches for) players or teams who cross it, while notifying their opponents.
- Substitute workflow — built to Honcho’s rules for swapping players in and out of matches.
Communication built into the league.
We added an in-app messaging system inside every league — announcement channels for Honcho’s team to broadcast to players, general channels for players to talk to each other, and direct messages, all with email and in-app notifications wired to match how Honcho wanted each channel to behave.
A real-time view of what needs attention.
Running 150+ leagues at once, the hardest question is “which ones are at risk?” So we built a Code Red / Code Yellow risk dashboard that flags leagues in real time when RSVPs or team participation fall below Honcho’s defined thresholds — turning a fleet of leagues into a single, scannable view of where a human needs to step in.
How we worked.
Over roughly three months, this was a true partnership, not a hand-off. Honcho ran a shared ticket tracker; we worked it daily. There were weekly walkthroughs, quick huddles whenever something needed a live look, and a constant back-and-forth of testing against real data.
Features shipped through staging before production, often the same day they were requested. When Honcho surfaced a bug or a new edge case, the fix was usually deployed within hours.
That pace is the point. A platform like this isn’t “delivered” — it’s tuned, in tight loops, alongside the people who’ll live in it every day.
The outcome.
Honcho Pickleball went into its Late-Spring ’26 season on a single platform that they own end to end.
Registration flowed in automatically. 150+ leagues across 30+ venues were configured and live. Roughly 2,500 players got access under Honcho’s own brand. And when the season’s first RSVP and schedule emails started going out, the automation engine carried them: emails sent, texts sent, RSVPs and schedules flowing — no red flags.
The two platforms Honcho had outgrown are gone — and so is the patchwork of Airtable, spreadsheets, and Zapier zaps that propped them up. In their place is one system that does the manual work for them, enforces their rules, speaks in their voice, and scales with them.
“What Fluid built will save us hundreds of hours every season. The work that used to live in spreadsheets and manual follow-up just runs itself now.”— Max Berg, COO, Honcho Pickleball
FAQ
What was Honcho running on before Fluid?
Two platforms they had outgrown — Swish for league operations and LeagueApps alongside it — propped up by a patchwork of Airtable, dozens of Excel and Google spreadsheets, and Zapier automations to move data between them. Fluid replaced all of it with one white-labeled system.
How long did the build take?
Roughly three months from kickoff in early January to a live Late-Spring ’26 season carrying 150+ leagues across 30+ venues — including three league formats, full white-label, automation, registration pipeline, in-app messaging, and the risk dashboard.
Do players see Fluid anywhere?
No. The site, the app, the emails, the texts — everything carries Honcho branding on Honcho’s own domain. Players sign up, RSVP, get their schedule, and message each other inside an experience that’s purely Honcho.
What does “fully automated” actually mean?
For each league, an admin sends the first RSVP email with one click. From there, Fluid handles RSVPs and check-ins, paces score-submission reminders, finalizes scores, re-seeds the ladder, publishes the next week’s schedule, and notifies every player by email and text — automatically, on a timed cadence, across hundreds of leagues at once.
What’s the Code Red / Code Yellow dashboard?
A real-time risk view across all leagues. When RSVPs or team participation drop below Honcho’s defined thresholds, the league flags Yellow or Red so an operator can step in. With 150+ leagues running, it turns operational triage into a single scannable view.
Ready to see what a platform built around your operation looks like?
If you’re running leagues on a platform you’ve outgrown — drowning in manual entry, chasing scores, rebuilding schedules by hand — Honcho’s story is the proof point. Let’s talk.