Nowadays, people frequently use online maps to locate their favorite coffee houses in the vicinity, rather than just wasting time to roam around their neighborhoods to find one. Besides searching for coffee houses, a German developer has came up with a brilliant idea and created a website called Courts of the World (COTW). COTW is a a directory of streetball courts whereby it enables users to find basketball courts worldwide and connect with others by posting their courts along with related videos and photos.
Most people create web applications because of an idea coming from a personal experience and the main developer of COTW is not an exception too. According to his true story, “Back in the summer of 2006, my brother (known around here as CG) found himself somewhere in Shanghai, looking for a court where he could check out the local competition. As you can imagine, my brother spent a lot of time in the streets of Shanghai looking for courts, and very little time playing. Back home, he got thinking: Why wasn‘t there a website that told you where to find Streetball courts anywhere in the world? How good the players were? How to get in touch with them?”
The main objective of COTW is to allow users of their favorite game (Basketball) to interact with each other and share their personal experiences about the sport on the web. By signing up for an account, users can create their own personal profile pages, add their courts and locate them on a map for others. What’s more is that it also functions like basketball social networking site whereby players are able to comment on a court, post pictures or even embed YouTube videos of their courts.
If you simply just want to look for basketball courts, you can do so by making a visual search on a Google Map. However, the downside with this search is that there are not many courts shown on the map (only 81 worldwide) due to the small community. Therefore, only popular basketball courts added by members will be revealed. Currently, the best rated courts includes Rucker Park, LTU Arena, The Cage, Sporthochschule and Venice Beach.
I feel that COTW is indeed an unique invention as it really helps you to relieve your frustration of finding basketball courts or even players when there is a shortage of busy friends to play with.