Naga and Shooto, two companies with very long traditions are now hosting their events on Smoothcomp.com and thereby joining hundreds of organisers world wide that make up the Smoothcomp community to be the largest online platform for martial arts tournaments today.

The North American Grappling Association (NAGA) hosts America’s oldest and largest Submission grappling and BJJ tournaments. They’ve opted to make some changes along the way in hopes of running a smooth job. In order to accomplish this they tapped Smoothcomp to help them up their organizational level.

If you haven’t heard about Smoothcomp  it is a software platform for combat sports. The software has changed somewhat through the years. Initially it was dedicated to  providing an efficient, time saving solution for organizers, coaches and athletes (online payments, brackets, scheduling, weigh-in, scoreboard).

However in time it has morphed into somewhat of a social network for active competitors. This was accomplished with the feature called the event finder. This is a page that will enable you to find events happening sorted by either date or distance from your location. And this is where NAGA participation comes in handy.  NAGA hosts a huge amount of competitions per year – that will now all be searchable by time and location in a joint system with other organizations using the platform.

Organizations such as  ADCC, Grappling industries and the UAEJJF all have their events listed.

This is just one of the ways which can fundamentally change the life of a competitive grappler.   Smoothcomp   & NAGA collaboration will enable a change on a larger scale which can hopefully lead to a unified grappling system where the calendar of events will be easily accessible and planned out for the best competitive experience possible.

Just as we were writing this article, Smoothcomp added one more big competition circuit: Shooto, the oldest MMA event in the world (even before the UFC).

From January 1st 2019 on all official Shooto events will be organized and on Smoothcomp.

Upon learning of this development we contacted Smoothcomp for comment:

We talked to Smootcomp Co-Founder Martin Jansson, a BJJ black cbelt from Sweden.

Martin, please tell us about the expansion and future of smoothcomp:

Yes we are very happy to see the growth and reach of smoothcomp during the last 12 months or so. We have seen a real boost in site visits and the event calander is growing by numbers both in events and in visitors all the time. I believe the eventfinder togheter with the popularity of the system it self is what drives new organisers our way. Since many players get their user profile stacked with results from various tournaments which makes them motivated to attend more events within the platform.

In the last month we have had competitions that compete in forms and kata (Wushu and Karate) where competitors are judged on indivdual performance instead of one on one matches. Scoring is similar to that of figure skating or diving with points awarded within a specific interval and then calculated to a total or average. We are very happy with the outcome of these first two events and see that smoothcomp will fill a hole in the market with this new adaptation.

How about Smoothcomp expanding to Brazil?

Yes, although the UAEJJF have had quite a few events using our system in Brazil already, we are yet to conquer the birthplace of our sport on Smoothcomp. I am convinced that with reliable internet access it will be a instant success. I have seen it work perfect in Rio myself so we would be very exited helping the first local Brazilian organiser get going!

What are your upcoming functions?

What are your upcoming functions?
At the start of 2019 we will launch digital competition licences for martial arts with strikes towards the head. This is a Swedish license regulated by law and we will provide the digital solution within smoothcomp to make applying/monitoring and cancelling licenses effective and safe for both players and organisers as well as the federation. After we launch it we hope to expand the license product to more federations with similar needs.

Also, at Swedish Open last weekend we did a beta launch of our Smoothstreamer, an iOS app that allows event streaming from iPhone or iPad and automatically adds the scoreboard and other graphics. This is something we know many organisers are looking for a convenient solution to distribute their content in a convenient way. (See our beta broadcast here 🙂 )

What do you think about the software IBJJF uses?

From what I understand it runs on local network that syncs up online on an interval. I have personally seen it in the europeans and it was ok, But it is a lot more complicated to set up a local network then to go online and login to our system
If IBJJF software was easy to use, they would not hesitate to run it on every event they ever go to , but I still see them running pen and paper on quite a few events which is telling that the setup might be complicated and expensive.