Graines de Foot. Hundreds of teams, one weekend.

A chance encounter

January 2025. In a Vaud sports hall, a club is running a junior tournament. Members of the ACVF are on site — and that’s where, by chance, they first cross paths with Optifit. A conversation starts: the cantonal association is looking for a better way to run Graines de Foot. Not a complete overhaul of how they work — just a solution for this one tournament, the most important one of the year.

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.

Ready for the next editions

The transition is complete. The ACVF can now set up and run Graines de Foot without any hand-holding — registrations, groups, schedules, live results, all from the same interface. The tool was shaped around this one moment: a single weekend, hundreds of teams, and no room for approximations.

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.