About CSE Hit The Grounds
CSE Hit The Grounds is an annual cricket tournament organized by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa. Unlike any typical university cricket tournament, this event is not for undergraduates. Hit The Grounds is organized by us undergraduates for industry companies.
Different tech companies from all around Sri Lanka register for the event and compete in friendly cricket matches against their rival companies.
My part in Hit the Grounds
In Hit the Grounds 2025, I worked as the Lead Web Developer. As you know, I take my job seriously. So, unlike previous years — where the website was just a promotional “nice-to-have” feature and registrations happened through Google Forms and manual card filling — this year I took a different approach. I wanted to make this website the main gateway to the tournament.
But not everyone prefers registering through a website. Most people still find filling out a Google Form more convenient. So I challenged myself to create a design so simple that registering would be a no-brainer.
The genius design
First of all, I completely eliminated the need for passwords. (Because people don’t like creating new passwords or remembering them.)
Login is simple: you just enter your email, receive an OTP, enter the OTP, and you’re in. No hassle, no security compromises, and no worries about password storage — a true win-win situation.
Not only that, I put great effort into making the team registration interface as intuitive and simple as possible.
My first priority was save everything. Every time a user makes a change, we save it on the server. So users can close the window at any time knowing their progress is safely stored.
The second priority was flexibility. When filling a Google Form, especially for something like this, you need to collect all team members’ details beforehand and fill everything at once before submitting.
The main advantage of my design is that users can register at any point they want — and they’re officially in. At the time of registration, they don’t need to worry about the team name or who the players are.
After that, they can even close the window and come back later when they have a team name in mind.
Adding team members is also straightforward. The tournament enforces specific rules for team composition (for example, a team must have at least 2 female players).
The result
By adopting this system, we were able to significantly speed up the registration process and minimize errors. For example, if a team needs to swap a player, they can easily do it themselves at any time through the website. Otherwise, they would have to contact us to make the change.
This also greatly improved the team management experience for the organizing committee. They could quickly export team cards and manage everything much more efficiently.