Picks, tokens, and a sports desk vibe — without the stake.
Your Sports Hub is a recreational sports hub: a betting-style dashboard for making picks, earning and spending play tokens, climbing leaderboards, and following your podcast — with admin tools and an audit mindset so the community can see the house runs clean.
This is entertainment. Tokens have no cash value unless you explicitly say otherwise on your live site and your counsel agrees. You can still build a polished “book” interface — the difference is what happens at settlement time and in your rules.
Sports we are building around
You can grow over time, but the roadmap you described centers football, college football, combat, and later the full field. Each sport feeds the same pick pipeline so you are not maintaining ten different apps.
Pro & college football
Weekly slates, clear lock times, and settlement you control. College football needs filters so the board stays readable.
Boxing & MMA
Smaller cards, main-event focus at first, and workflows for changes — combat schedules move more often than a NFL Sunday.
More later
Pro/college basketball (men’s and women’s), baseball, and additional markets can slot in as the same event → pick → settle model matures.
How it works (player experience)
Plain language beats jargon. This is the story your front page should tell in sixty seconds.
1) Create an account
Players sign up for a recreational account. You can add age gating and geo rules on your live deployment as your counsel recommends.
2) Get play tokens
Daily grants, streak bonuses, achievements, or sponsor-supported boosts — whatever you codify. Tokens drive the game loop, not cash.
3) Make picks on the board
The UI feels like a sportsbook dashboard: markets, bet slip, confirmations — but settlements follow your published rules.
4) Win, lose, or push — then keep playing
Outcomes update after results are entered. Token balances and history reflect what happened, with no hidden magic.
Above board: admin, audit, and “recreational only”
If you want trust at a glance, say what you do, then do it in the product: separate staff permissions, visible rules, and an append-only audit trail for sensitive changes.
- Board leads monitor slates, anomalies, and settlement readiness for their sport.
- Maintenance handles backups, PHP/SQLite health on Plesk, and releases.
- Security enforces MFA for admins, reviews access, and responds to abuse signals.
- Onboarding tracks new player education (rules acknowledgment) and staff access provisioning.
- Finance (CPA) belongs to real money your business earns or spends — sponsors, hosting, taxes — not day-to-day token math.
“No professional gamblers” is best enforced as prohibited behavior (bots, syndicates, multi-account abuse) in your Terms, not as an identity badge people self-report.
Podcast, sponsors, and the main site — together
The show belongs in the main navigation: it drives weekly habit, gives you authentic sponsor reads, and explains picks in human language.
On-site podcast hub
Episode list, embed player (Spotify/YouTube), RSS link, and show notes. Start manual, add RSS caching when you are ready.
Sponsor surfaces
Sponsored weeks, branded leaderboards, and tasteful placements — aligned with your “no dark patterns” stance.
Rules, tech, and where this lives
PHP + SQLite (Plesk)
A straightforward deploy story: PHP handles pages and admin; SQLite stores users, picks, token ledger rows, and audit events.
Hardcoded slates, centralized truth
You can still hand-build schedules — keep them in data files or tables — so the site does not sprawl across dozens of copied pages.
Read the house rules
Link a dedicated rules doc for pushes, voids, deadlines, and eligibility. Your front page should always point to it.