UKCA

What wasn't working.

The UK Cheerleading Association runs an entire sport - community clubs and school programmes, coaches and cheerleaders, competitions, coaching qualifications and certifications. All of it lived in spreadsheets, email threads and paper forms that didn't talk to each other.

Clubs registered by hand. Competition entries were reconciled manually. Coaching certificates were issued and verified on trust. Payments arrived through a patchwork of methods - and sensitive records for under-18 school cheerleaders needed real protection, not a shared folder.

How we built it.

We built UKCA a single platform from the ground up - a custom headless CMS on Node 20 with a clean, domain-driven architecture, so every area of the sport has its own home and the business rules live in one place.

• Club management for community and school clubs - coaches, cheerleaders, helpers and teams - with built-in validation for age, divisions, masters and crossover rules.
• Two competition entry flows: card-paid registrations for community clubs via Stripe, and branded invoicing for schools.
• A full course and qualification system - coaching courses, applications, attendees, online quizzes and exams, plus refresher courses.
• Automatic certificate generation - PDF certificates with scannable QR codes, produced on a background worker so the app stays fast.
• Role-based access control via custom policies, and encryption at rest for sensitive school-cheerleader records.

What changed after launch.

UKCA now runs the sport from one platform. Clubs register themselves and enter competitions without back-and-forth. Coaches earn qualifications and walk away with a verifiable, QR-checkable certificate. Schools are invoiced cleanly; community clubs pay by card.

Behind the scenes, a background worker handles certificate PDFs and emails, realtime updates keep dashboards live, and sensitive records are encrypted at rest - so the association can keep growing without the spreadsheets creeping back.