Forty tournaments a season, zero Excel files

A tournament, a meeting

January 2025. In a sports hall in the canton, the ACVF is running one of its many indoor tournaments of the winter season. That’s where — on the pitch, quite literally — they first meet Optifit. At the time, the association manages its entire junior competition calendar with whatever tools are at hand: Excel files, loose sheets of paper, team lists copied out by hand. Around forty tournaments a season, several thousand matches, and just as many potential points of failure — a score entered wrong, a schedule changed at the last minute, a team registered twice.

What Graines de Foot represents

Behind the name lies the most important event in Vaud junior football: a major cantonal tournament that brings together every age group each year, from the youngest Juniors G all the way up to Juniors D. Hundreds of teams, dozens of clubs, a single weekend to make it all happen. On a cantonal scale, it’s the equivalent of organising a junior mini World Cup every year.

Five months to rebuild everything

Between the January meeting and the big day in June, five months pass — not of waiting, but of working together. It isn’t the ACVF learning how to use Optifit: it’s Optifit Arena learning how to become the ACVF’s tool. Every friction point identified by the Junior Committee gets raised, discussed, then built into the product. Automatic tournament programme generation, online team registration, fine-grained configuration of competition formats (groups, knock-outs, match duration by age group): the software is literally shaped around the real needs of a cantonal federation — not the other way around.

Match day, twice over

On 14 June 2025, the qualifying tournaments are played across several municipalities in the canton. A week later, on 21 June, comes the grand final: over 10,000 juniors gathered on one site, over 30,000 matches played in a single day — the culmination of an entire season of Vaud junior football. Everything — registrations, groups, schedules, live results — runs on Arena.

A year on: full independence

The switch is complete. The ACVF no longer needs any hand-holding to create or set up its tournaments — it does it all on its own, from the January indoor events to the elite nine-a-side D championships that mark the rest of the year. The figures from the first season speak for themselves: around forty tournaments organised, over 1,000 teams entered on the platform.

Why it matters

The ACVF’s mission is to develop youth football across the canton — not to manage spreadsheets. Every hour saved on admin is an hour given back to what truly matters: the children, the coaches, the pitches.