January last year I was asking round my friends if someone would be interested in having a few games of Tennis so I could get back into playing, but alas not one was interested! So I hunted around and found the only way I was going to find someone local would be to join a club which a) I just didn't have the time to go all the time on a certain day and b) would cost me quite a bit of money. 

So I had the idea of building a site where I could find a Tennis partner, I then saw the bigger picture and started mapping out a site that you could find another player for any sport or activity!  Well soon after I fired up Visual Studio and jumped straight in...  Shit... After about a week I realised how much work would be involved to make it work, as the search had to be good, site easy to use and most important needed to be a mini social network to make people want to come back!

Now at the time I looked round and no one was really doing it how I envisioned it, I just thought I have to do this..  So I bought my URL, mapped out the site in a bit more detail and rewrote what I had originally started.  It took me a heck of A LOT longer than anticipated as I work for myself I had to do paid work and in between keep building and tweaking, but last week I finally finished version 1 of the site!  I give you PlayerFind

The site is built in ASP.NET C# 3.5 and runs of a SQL 2005 database, it has been a fantastic learning curve building it as I learnt so much ASP.NET along the way and also found the ASP.NET Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library which I didn't know about.

If you register on PlayerFind you can create new clubs which other people on PlayerFind can become a member of, also you can add Events which you can TAG the club with and people can register as attending the event.  Obviously what's a social network without the ability to upload photos, so you can upload photos into photo albums which people can comment on and you can TAG the photos with clubs AND events so your images show on the club or events main PlayerFind page (These are just a few things).

The site is ONLY targeted at UK people as I just wasn't interested in trying to create a worldwide version, and I wanted to try and keep it fairly small - To try and cater the site to everyone in the UK I also researched as many disabled sports as I could find and added those, as some if the sports (Like wheelchair basketball) are becoming very popular over here.

Anyway... To be honest, I'm just glad for once in my life I actually completed the first version of one of my ideas!  Usually they just sit on paper or get the DB designed and then get left.