Behind the brackets: building the 2026 Junior Olympics experience.

The Junior Olympics are enormous. Thousands of games. Hundreds of clubs. Dozens of divisions across multiple sessions and venues. It’s the kind of event where the scoreboard moves faster than any one person can follow — so we built it a home of its own: jo.eggbeater.app.

By Eggbeater Water Polo · July 24, 2026 · 5 min read

A live hub, session by session

Every session gets a full live tree — hub to division to team to game — updating in real time as results come in. Schedules, pool standings, brackets, and scores refresh while you watch, and every single team and every single game has its own page you can bookmark, text to a grandparent, or find on Google.

Rosters, live

We pulled in the official USA Water Polo rosters, so every team page lists its players — and our new player search lets you jump straight to any athlete by name across the entire tournament.

Brackets that finally make sense

As divisions rebracket out of pool play, we collapse the day-one seeding pools and re-group everything by flight — Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze — so the medal picture is legible at a glance instead of buried in a wall of seed codes.

Every game, a final — even the ones we didn’t score

Not every game is scored live in the app. So we fold in the official desk results automatically, which means the standings and brackets stay honest and complete instead of stranding half a division on “pending.”

And when a session ends, it doesn’t disappear

This is the part we’re proudest of. When Session I wrapped, we turned it into a permanent data-story archive — every game final, every champion, every shootout, preserved for good. The numbers alone tell a story: 1,788 games, 11 divisions, 445 teams, 88 shootouts.

On top of the raw record we built “Untold Stories” — the Cinderella run of an 11-seed that beat the 3, the 2, the 1, and the 4 on its way to a title; the finals that were rematches of pool-play losses; the “upset economy” of how often lower seeds actually won; and the single afternoon that decided seven championships on one pool deck.

Explore the Session I archive at jo.eggbeater.app/2026/session-1/archive, or follow Session II live at jo.eggbeater.app/2026/session-2.

Because a tournament this good deserves to be more than a spreadsheet.