Simplifying competition entries for Surf Life Saving Australia
The problem
Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) runs competitions across the country, from local carnivals to national championships. Historically, registrations were handled through SEMS, a separate system to Liveheats, with data manually exported and imported between platforms for live event functionality like scoring.
This resulted in manual work for clubs, eligibility confusion for athletes, and frequent errors during peak entry periods.
Bringing entries onto Liveheats also represented a large business opportunity, increasing our revenue, reducing operational overhead for SLSA and their branches, and positioning us as the preferred events tool nationwide.
Discovery
I interviewed stakeholders across SLSA, including club admins, team managers, and branch, state and national event organisers. I also reviewed SEMS functionality to understand current constraints.
Key insights included:
- Key workflows like event duplication and batch entry were manual and repetitive, making scale during large events almost impossible.
- There was often confusion for clubs when athletes failed eligibility criteria, causing repeated follow ups between different levels of the organisation.
- Clubs handle athlete payments in different ways, with some clubs having athletes pay for their own entries and others paying for everything at the club level.
- SEMS system performance was poor, especially around peak registration periods, e.g. national championships.
From this, I developed high-level and detailed journey maps for both the current and future state. These visualised user pain points, dependencies, and where automation or improved flows could make the biggest difference.
Design strategy
The complexity of SLSA's operations and event rules meant this was a complicated challenge to solve. While Liveheats already had a basic entry system, it required significant uplift to support their needs. I focussed the work around three main areas:
Event and eligibility configuration
I redesigned the flow for setting up events and divisions, including age, gender, membership, and award criteria. This included understanding all the complex and niche rules around SLSA events, for both team and individual divisions.
Although potentially complicated, these needed to be used by both small clubs and the national body, so it was important to keep the UI streamlined, clear, and easy to understand. While this solution was built for SLSA, eligibility rules apply across many sports, so I designed it to scale to any custom criteria an organisation may need.
Payments
From research, we knew that there were a number of payment arrangements within SLSA clubs. A lot of thinking went into understanding this, mapping out ideal solutions, and paring this solution back into something that was viable in our timeframes. Ultimately, we stuck with the idea that entries needed to be immediately paid for, rather than allowing invoices to be sent to clubs for later payment, as this was more aligned with the future desired by SLSA, and better supported our business revenue goals for the project (by processing payments through Liveheats).
However, we did make some improvements to payments as part of this project. Team entries were previously only able to be paid as a whole team charge (e.g. $100 for the team), however, many surf life saving events charge a single fee for entering the competition, and the athlete can enter as many events as they like, including team divisions. I designed a simple switch where users can choose whether to pay per division entered or per athlete entered, meaning that different fee structures could be supported. Again, this was something that not only improved the experience for SLSA, but could be used by any organiser on Liveheats.
Athlete entries
Lastly, I made improvements to the actual entries flow for athletes. Often, these entries are being done by club volunteers, who could be unfamiliar with the Liveheats system and may not know the individual athlete circumstances that allow them to be in an event or not. Therefore, I designed a simple workflow for these club admins to enter their athletes and quickly understand why they might not be able to enter someone in a division. This significantly reduced back-and-forth between clubs and event organisers during peak entry periods.
We also added a feature where athletes can be part of clubs on Liveheats, allowing club admins to do these entries. As part of this, we ensured that personal data was kept safe, and could only be accessed by the admin of the club you are a part of.
Stakeholder collaboration
A large part of this project was the stakeholder collaboration with SLSA. We spoke with a representative committee every week, including reviewing work in progress and getting feedback on flows and designs before they went into build. This was combined with dedicated prototype testing with club admins and team managers.
I also stepped in to manage stakeholder communication and support across several periods where other team members were unavailable, ensuring alignment and trust throughout the process.
Outcomes
The Liveheats system is now fully supporting SLSA event registrations in the majority of Australian states. The Aussie championship event opened for entries in December 2025, and entry volumes have been successfully handled. We've had a positive response from both stakeholders and users for usability, clarity and efficiency, especially compared to the previous system.
From a business point of view, in January we had already generated over $100k additional revenue from SLSA transaction fees. This makes them one of our most important customers.
Once again, this project demonstrated the importance of designing operational systems, not just interfaces, particularly in these high stakes, customer facing environments.