ThePiste

thepiste.org is a personalized season planner for competitive USA Fencing families.

Every fencing season starts with the same scramble: 50+ tournaments on the calendar, and a parent trying to work out which ones matter for their kid. Which events can she actually enter? Which are worth a flight, which are a Saturday drive, which collide on the same weekend? Which ones move her toward a B rating, and which are just expensive mileage?

ThePiste answers those questions automatically. Enter a fencer's profile (weapon, age category, rating, home ZIP, home club) and set their goals, and the entire tournament catalog is scored into a prioritized, personalized calendar: what to anchor, what to add for value, what to skip without guilt, and why.

How it works

The personalization engine

The tournament catalog is objective (names, dates, places, contested categories). Everything subjective is computed per fencer at request time by app/Services/TierService.php:

• Eligibility. Weapon + age category + rating determine which contested categories a fencer can enter (config/fencing.php). Events with no eligible categories disappear.
• Distance. Haversine from home ZIP to each venue decides drive vs fly against the family's drive radius.
• Tier. Rules assign every event a tier: nac (national, non-negotiable), home (your club's event), priority (in-region, multi-category), drive, fly, or skip. Club-level events never outrank official circuit events.
• Conflicts. Same-weekend events are detected; the higher tier wins, the loser is flagged with the trade-off.
• Notes. Every event gets a generated plain-language note (distance, region points, categories). Marquee events carry curated notes instead.

Tier is computed, never stored. Change the profile and the whole calendar re-sorts.

Goals drive the recommendations

Goals are structured records, not labels (app/Services/GoalScorer.php):

• Rating ("Earn a B in foil") lights up events where a letter is credibly earnable: NACs, ROCs, strong D1A/DV2 fields. Club opens never qualify.
• Qualify ("Qualify for Junior Olympics") is path-aware: it labels RJCC circuit events, named qualifiers, and the championship itself. It never claims you have qualified; qualification rules shift season to season.
• Standing ("Build JNR regional standing") boosts in-region circuit events in that category.
• Develop ("Fence 8 events this season") favors low-pressure, driveable mileage.

Events that advance a goal are marked across the calendar and builder with the reason, and goal contribution breaks same-weekend ties within a tier.

The loop

1. Build a profile for each fencer (multiple per account).
2. Set goals in the season builder; anchors are pre-selected, value events are suggested.
3. Build the plan: toggle events, watch drives, flights, clashes, and estimated budget tally live.
4. Share it: read-only link for coach or co-parent, .ics download, calendar subscription, print view.
5. Log results after each event. Earned ratings update the profile automatically and per-goal progress meters fill in.

Self-maintaining catalog

Tournament data syncs from AskFRED daily, with a full audit three times a week (app/Console/Commands/SyncAskFred.php). Upserts reconcile by external id and slug so date changes update in place, curated notes survive syncs, and look-alike events are adopted rather than duplicated. Admins can also import CSVs through the Filament panel at /admin.

Claude connector (MCP)

A remote MCP server (app/Mcp/ThePisteServer.php, Streamable HTTP at /mcp, Sanctum bearer auth) lets Claude manage a season conversationally: list fencers, set goals, get the scored outlook, build and edit the plan, log results, and check progress.

Stack

• Laravel 12, Livewire 3, Alpine, Tailwind v4, Vite
• Filament v3 admin panel
• MySQL 8 in production, SQLite for local dev, Redis for cache
• Resend for transactional mail
• PHPUnit feature tests, Pint formatting

Local development

git clone git@github.com:ianswope/ThePiste.org.git thepiste
cd thepiste
composer install && npm install
cp .env.example .env && php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate:fresh --seed   # full Region 2 2026-27 season + demo fencer
php artisan serve                  # plus `npm run dev` in a second terminal

The seed includes a demo fencer, so /demo shows a fully personalized calendar immediately. Default admin login is created by the seeder; change the password before exposing anything.

php artisan test        # run the suite
./vendor/bin/pint       # format

Repo map

Path	What
app/Services/TierService.php	The engine: eligibility, distance, tiers, conflicts
app/Services/GoalScorer.php	Goal-aware event scoring
app/Services/TournamentImporter.php	Single ingestion path (CSV + AskFRED sync)
app/Services/AskFredScraper.php	AskFRED listing parser
app/Livewire/SeasonBuilder.php	Guided plan builder + goals manager
app/Livewire/ResultsTracker.php	Results logging + goal progress
app/Mcp/	Claude connector (server + tools)
app/Filament/	Admin resources
config/fencing.php	Eligibility matrix, tier ranks, goal/qualification config
design/	Design direction mockups (the live app follows mockup-c-scoreboard)

Deploy

Push to main, then run ./deploy.sh on the server: pull, install, build, pre-migrate database dump, migrate, cache, reload. Nightly database backups and a static maintenance page are set up in ops/.

Status

Live at thepiste.org with the full Region 2 2026-27 season. Other regions arrive via the same sync; the engine already handles any region.