Title: PickPool
Description (The What): PickPool is a web application that lets friend groups run a weekly sports prediction pool — picking winners in football, soccer, F1, and more — without relying on a spreadsheets and keeping track of them on ones head. Members submit picks before a lockout time each week, and PickPool automatically scores results, updates a standings leaderboard, and tracks streaks and head-to-head bragging rights.
The name reflects exactly what it is: a pick-based prediction pool. It's built to be the fun, social layer on top of watching sports with friends; not a full fantasy league, just a low-effort way to settle "who actually knows what they're talking about."
PickPool will provide the following features:
- Users can create or join a pool tied to a specific league or season (e.g., Premier League, NFL, F1)
- Users can submit weekly picks before a lockout time
- After lockout, all picks in the pool become visible to everyone
- Users can view a live, auto-updating leaderboard once results are entered
- Includes total points, current win/loss streaks, and rank
- Users can view their pick history and head-to-head records against specific friends in the pool
- Users receive reminder notifications shortly before each week's pick deadline
- Pool admins (the creator of a pool) can manage the pool's schedule and manually enter results
- A live sports results API can be layered in later as a stretch goal
Plenty of friend groups already run an informal prediction pool, but it usually lives in a shared spreadsheet or gets tracked by whoever's willing to tally scores in a group chat. That works for a week or two, then someone forgets to update it, a scoring dispute breaks out, and by midseason nobody trusts the "official" standings anymore. Or, even worse, bets real money on gambling prediction platforms as 'broke college students'.
This manual overhead turns something that's supposed to be a fun, casual competition into an actual chore for one person to maintain and commit to. The friction quietly kills participation over time and people stop submitting picks because it feels like extra effort for something that used to be effortless. PickPool removes that friction entirely: picks, scoring, and standings all happen automatically, so the group can focus on the fun part — arguing about who actually knows their stuff.
Students at NYU and friend groups who currently run or use different platforms as an informal prediction pool for different sports using a shared spreadsheet or are spread out across different platforms.
We'll also validate the idea with NYU Club Organizations and Discord communities who run similar informal pools, to confirm the problem holds beyond just our own circle.
The project can be broken down into the following components:
- UI design — pool creation/join flow, pick submission screen, leaderboard, pick history, notification settings, login/signup
- Features could be revised/removed depending on team bandwidth
- Backend — CRUD operations for pools, picks, and results; authentication; scoring logic; database design
- Live sports data could wrap a public sports API for simplicity, with manual result entry as a fallback
- Frontend — Fetching and displaying leaderboard/pick data, real-time-ish updates after results are entered
There are enough tasks here for 4–6 programmers to split amongst each other.
The core loop (create pool → submit picks → score → leaderboard) is straightforward CRUD and computation work, which keeps risk low, while optional stretch goals (live API integration, badges, playoff brackets) give the team room to go further if time allows.
- UI Interface
- A clean weekly "pick card" view — one screen to make all of that week's picks at once
- Visual streak indicators (e.g., a flame icon for an active win streak)
- A head-to-head comparison view between any two friends in a pool
- Support for multiple concurrent pools per user (e.g., one for the Premier League, one for F1)
- A simple invite-link system so pool creators can add friends without manual account lookup
- An archive/history view for past completed seasons within a pool