Da Office Pool Champion Blog
How Did Office Pool Champion Start?
Once upon a time, in 2002, I was talking to a few friends, Suncor colleagues, and family members about the upcoming 2002 World Cup in South Korea - Japan.
As most self-confessed soccer nuts would attest, the FIFA World Cup is everything, and our anticipation was quite high - as usual before, and since.
About a month before the start of the tournament, we were exploring the idea of joining or creating a pool. Although online fantasy pools are super popular and exist for every sport known to man nowadays, our options at the time were limited to a paper, email, or Excel-based solution. Quite frankly did not seem to be an attractive proposition to most of us.
"But you're a programmer, couldn't you build something!?" exclaimed my good friend Cy, a soccer brother from another mother.
Yes, I was a web programmer at the time and I thought to myself - why not? It can't be that difficult...
And it wasn't!
The first incarnation of the platform was built in about a week. Kept it simple, made it functional with a database to save the data in, and hosted it from my home on a dial-up internet connection. But - we had an online pool in 2002.
What Happened Next?
Well, the pool was quite successful and was extremely well-received. In the next couple of years, the platform was cleaned up, secured, improved, and extended to have the ability to host other pools.
Over the next several years, the platform was used to host pools for
- ⚽ - The 2004 UEFA European Championships
- 🏒 - NHL Hockey Playoffs
- 🏈 - NFL Football Regular Seasons
- 🏈 - NFL Playoffs
- ⚽ - The 2006 FIFA World Cup
- 🏹 - Survivor (the Reality TV show), on a custom version of the platform
Then, life happened and the platform was abandoned after the conclusion of the 2006 World Cup for several years. The platform became dormant, only coming alive to host European Soccer Championships and Soccer World Cups.
Fantasy League Champion - The Rebirth
Back in the spring of 2013, when mobile development was all the rage, the idea to build an iPhone app for the next English Premier League Season (2013-2014) was explored with the help of Cary, another good friend.
That result was an iPhone app called Perfect Score. It was downloaded by about 1000 people, but it was abandoned after the season due to a variety of technical, life, and financial reasons.
The next idea was to use the lessons learned to build an app for the 2014 FIFA World Cup that was just around the corner. However, life happened again, so the project was abandoned yet again.
The one thing that survived all this was The Brand.
Fantasy League Champion - IN BETA
Having hosted very successful pools for the 2014 and 2018 FIFA World Cups, and the 2016 and 2020 European Championships on the original code, the idea to consolidate all tournaments, for all sports, under one home, under the Fantasy League Champion Brand - was born.
As a proof of concept, two pools were created for two relatively different tournaments, both running the same code.
The English Premier League Predictor Pool 2021-2022
This pool was started by invitation only and is available at https://fantasyleaguechamp.com
The Uefa Champions League Predictor Pool 2021-2022
This pool is the first truly open pool online and is available at https://fantasyleaguechamp.com/
Fantasy League Office Pool Champion - The Rebrand
The platform underwent a complete re-design and rebranding exercise given that "office pools" is closer in spirit to our offerings than a "fantasy league".
As such, the new site was launched in early November 2022 and includes new features, fresh ideas, updated tech, and an ever-improving user interface.
In order to minimize any disruptions, all previous links point to the new site: https://officepoolchampion.com.
Introducing Office Pool Champion
This blog exists to document the process, introduce all the cool things that are coming, and promise you the best online office pool experience. Period.
Stay tuned...
