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Old hands, new code: inside revolutioniseSPORT's rebuild

View all · 07 Oct 2026 · Nic Watkins
Nicholas Watkins Nicholas Watkins

revolutioniseSPORT has been running Australian sport behind the scenes for 14 years. Last year, it rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up. We asked two of the people behind it how you swap the engine on a moving car — and what comes next.

SYDNEY, 1 October 2026 — Replatforming is one of the riskiest things a software company can do. Harvard Business Review puts the failure rate at 91%. revolutioniseSPORT's rebuild ran as a planned, staged rollout over just over two years, moved 22,000 customers across 140 sports, and didn't need a single minute of downtime.

Meet the team

  • Teresa Simonetti, Co-Founder & Chief Engineer — decades of experience in grassroots sports administration and in building a dedicated sports management platform

  • Jack Cornford, Chief Technology Officer — a software engineering career spanning finance and large SaaS companies, with a specialty in growing startups into scale-ups

From big finance to grassroots sport

Jack, you've spent decades in software engineering, most of it in finance and big SaaS. What drew you to revolutioniseSPORT?

Jack: It started with an introduction from a mutual friend and former colleague to our CPO, Nate. When Nate walked me through what revolutioniseSPORT does, I found it a compelling story. After years in finance and large SaaS companies, working somewhere with a clear mission was really attractive. Everyone here shares a strong sense of serving our customers and making sport easier and more accessible.

The other draw was timing. Helping startups grow into scale-ups has become a bit of a specialty of mine, and that journey is always exciting. Australian software companies consistently punch above their weight on product quality and efficiency. And with the replatforming done, we're in a great position to innovate and grow. Investing in the long-term health and agility of your software is one of the strongest signs of how fast you'll move in future.

Why rebuild at all?

Teresa, let's talk about that replatforming. Why do it?

Teresa: The old platform served sport well, but it wasn't flexible enough for where we wanted to go. Rebuilding was the harder choice, and not one we made lightly. We weighed the pros and cons carefully and landed on the option we believed would deliver the best outcome for our customers.

The new platform runs on a well-established framework with a strong developer community. That makes it easier to bring engineers on board and attract new talent. It also means we can build, test and ship new features much faster.

Beating the odds

Most replatforming projects fail. How did you make sure this one didn't?

Teresa: We staged the rollout over a two-year period. We started with our smallest, lowest-volume features — the governance suite — and worked our way up the list. Every feature followed the same three steps:

  1. Opt in. Once a feature was live on the new platform, customers could choose to try it. The old version stayed the default.

  2. Opt out. Next, the new version became the default, with the option to switch back.

  3. Switch off. Finally, we retired that feature from the old platform entirely.

We never needed downtime. We also steered clear of major changes during busy periods like registrations and competition season, to keep disruption to a minimum. Dedicated support and engineering teams ran the project and fast-tracked any issues so they were fixed quickly.

In the end, we migrated 22,000 customers across 140 sports. That included around 14 years of sport-specific data: business rules, registrations, competitions, events, financial data, federated structures — just to name a few.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Customers told us they enjoyed the new experience and said they were looking forward to the remaining features landing as the rollout progressed.

By the numbers

  • Customers migrated: 22,000
  • Sports: 140
  • Years of data moved: ~14
  • Rollout: 2 years
  • Downtime: None
 

Shipping faster, breaking less

Jack, what does the new platform change for the engineering team?

Jack: The core goal of any good CTO is to speed up your ability to innovate, sustainably and reliably. You want to ship more features — quickly, securely and cost-effectively. Better platforms and tools make all of that possible.

We've automated most of our deployment process, so we can release on demand and often ship multiple features in a week. Changes now go out in smaller chunks, with automated testing and better control over what we ship.

The result is better reliability. We're comfortably within our service level objectives, even while shipping more features and innovating faster.

The AI question

Everyone wants to know about AI. What's revolutioniseSPORT doing?

Jack: The pace of change in AI tools over the last two years has been amazing. If you're slow to adapt or resistant to change, that's a huge challenge. If you're keen to learn and grow, it's a massive opportunity. One of the great things about being a small, young team is that we can learn and adapt faster than bigger, more established rivals. I've been really proud of how well the team has taken to the best of AI dev tooling.

The biggest shift has been using AI to enhance how we build software. We've actively invested in making AI tools an integral part of our engineers' workflow. That's given us a huge productivity boost — automating a lot of routine work and freeing the team to be more creative and deliver more for our customers.

The 14-year head start

Teresa, what does 14 years in sport give revolutioniseSPORT that others can't match?

Teresa: First, deep knowledge of how clubs, associations and governing bodies actually operate. Second, long relationships across 140 sports and 22,000 organisations, which have earned us real trust across the industry. Third, genuine insight into — and empathy for — the challenges our customers face day to day. That means we can work closely with them and deliver timely, high-quality support.

Put sport-specific experience on a modern platform, and you get a combination neither a legacy system nor a newcomer can offer.

What's next

The rebuild's done. So what comes next?

Teresa: With the replatforming behind us, our sights are set on some exciting things. We're in the early planning stages of a new member-facing app, and we're exploring further international expansion. [not sure if we want to mention Handover as well?]

Jack: Lots of fantastic innovation, at pace. We're in a great position to hear what our customers want and need — and to deliver it quickly, to a high standard.

About revolutioniseSPORT

revolutioniseSPORT is Australia’s most trusted sports management platform, supporting over 300 governing bodies and 22,000 grassroots clubs. Designed for community sport, it simplifies administration, strengthens governance, and empowers organisations to increase participation and operate efficiently.