One Day Shootouts Turned Smarter Operations Into a Basketball Tournament Empire

Built on Hustle, Ready for Something Smarter

One Day Shootouts has spent years building one of the most active basketball tournament operations in the country. Running 52 weekends a year across eight venues in Illinois and Wisconsin, the organization hosts thousands of teams. They’re competing on customer service, competitive divisions, and a reputation for well-run events that keep teams coming back.

Frank Mershon has been at the center of it all, handling scheduling, customer service, marketing, sales and operations, often all at once. For an organization of four people running at that pace, every hour matters and every inefficiency costs.

"Running 52 weekends a year, time is very precious. The less time we have to worry about getting teams registered and figuring out divisions, the more time we can allocate toward reaching out to customers and asking important questions."

That mindset drove One Day Shootouts to Fastbreak AI and kept them there for years.

From 6,000 to 18,000 Teams

When One Day Shootouts first partnered with Fastbreak AI, the organization was managing roughly 6,000 teams a year. Today, that number stands at 18,000, a 3x increase built not on adding staff but on smarter operations.

The shift started with scheduling. Before Fastbreak AI, Mershon would spend an entire Wednesday manually grinding out the week's schedule: a 10-hour process that forced early registration cutoffs and left late-registering teams on the outside looking in.

"Before, I would sit down for 10 hours and grind out a schedule manually. Now that takes less time, so I can actually push back my Wednesday, start my schedule later, and we get 30, 40, 50 more teams Wednesday morning that we would have had to turn away before."

With AI-powered scheduling handling the heavy lifting, that same process now takes half the time. Plus, capturing 30 to 50 additional teams per event that would have previously missed the cutoff means more revenue without adding a single staff member.

Competitive Divisions That Keep Teams Coming Back

For basketball tournament operators, filling brackets is only half the job. Keeping teams engaged and coming back depends on one thing: competitive balance.

Fastbreak AI gives One Day Shootouts the data to get that right. Point differentials, win-loss records, division history, and team performance are tracked across every event, giving Mershon a clear picture of where each team belongs before the next tournament begins.

"If you have a fifth-grade team that played two fifth-grade C-level teams and went 0-and-4 minus 20, I can see that when they register next time and bump them down so they get a competitive game. Other platforms, you're shooting blind."

The result is a tournament experience where teams feel the difference. Win or lose, games are close, competitive and worth coming back for. And the data backs it up: teams play with One Day Shootouts an average of three or more times per year.

Data That Drives Decisions

Beyond scheduling, Fastbreak AI gives One Day Shootouts a level of customer intelligence that most tournament operators don't have access to. Registration history, team frequency, geographic data, and financial reporting all live in one place. And Mershon uses all of it.

"I can look at my financial report, see how many teams a program has, and how many times on average they play with us. If a program has 11 teams and they're only playing three tournaments with us, I can go to them and say, ‘What's going on?’"

That proactive outreach, driven by real data, has become one of the organization's most powerful retention tools. Problems get identified and fixed before teams quietly drift to a competitor.

The SMS messaging capability within Fastbreak AI adds another layer. When a last-minute opening appears in a division, Mershon can sort by grade level, gender and competitive level and send a targeted message to 500 customers in under two minutes.

"My favorite thing is the text messaging service. I can sort and send out a message to 500 customers: ‘Hey, can you help me fill this opening?’ The amount of data stored inside the platform and at your fingertips is just incredible."

Expanding Without Adding Headcount

One Day Shootouts is now expanding beyond its core Southwest region into new markets, including Franklin, Wisconsin, with more on the horizon. What makes that expansion possible isn't a bigger team. It's a smarter one.

Because Fastbreak AI centralizes scheduling, communications and customer data in one platform, Mershon can build schedules and manage registrations for expansion markets remotely. Local partners handle on-site operations. The operational backbone stays in one place.

"A lot of people don't expand because they're spending so much time creating divisions and building schedules that they can't. With us, we can do more with less. That's what Fastbreak has done."

The Impact at a Glance

• 3x growth from 6,000 to 18,000 teams 
• Runs 52 weekends annually across 8 venues with a team of four
• Tournament scheduling time cut in half, from 10 hours to 5 hours
• Captures 30-50 additional team registrations per event by extending registration windows, directly adding to the bottom line
• Teams play an average of three or more tournaments per year
• Expanded from Illinois into Wisconsin without adding headcount
• Targeting 2,000 teams in Wisconsin this spring

One Platform. No Looking Back.

After several years and a 3x growth in team volume, Mershon’s view on Fastbreak AI is straightforward. He's used other platforms. He knows what the alternatives look like.

"I don't know why people are still messing around with other platforms. One is archaic, and Fastbreak is leaps and bounds ahead. It's a one-stop shop: financials, growth trajectory, customer communication, knowing your customers. I just don't know why people wouldn't switch."

For One Day Shootouts, the decision to stay is as simple as the results. More teams. More markets. More time to focus on what matters. All from a team of four running 52 weekends a year.

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