With more and more schools building multi-use fields, scoreboards have had to evolve to handle being able to keep score for multiple sports. To solve this problem, a few companies have started to introduce a multi sport scoreboard that is capable of satisfying the needs of a few different sports throughout the year. Even though this seems like the perfect answer, there are both good points and bad points that need to be considered to make sure this type of scoreboard is right for your school.

At first glance, creating a multi sport scoreboard seems like an easy thing to do. Upon further examination you soon realize that the differences between sports can create an interesting challenge if you are trying to display constantly changing game data on a single style of scoreboard. For instance, not all sports are based on the same time scales. Both football and soccer can be played on the same field, but football has four quarters with 15 minutes each and soccer only has two halves with 45 minutes each. Any scoreboard used for both needs to have the ability to switch between displaying these varying periods and timeframes. Also, soccer matches can have time added for penalties or time-outs and the scoreboard needs to be flexible enough to allow the referee to add time if needed and show the adjusted time on the scoreboard. Also, these scoreboards need to be flexible in the way they label the various digits they are displaying as well. In football you need to keep track of score, current quarter, what yard line the ball is on and how many yards are needed for a first down. In soccer it’s a more simple matter of keeping track of the current score, time left and what period the game is in currently. Whatever scoreboard design you use needs to clearly be able to display these statistics as well as labels so the fans know how to interpret them.

The good news is that a modern multi sport scoreboard will usually include several different types of LED displays. They will include the larger style of display that will keep track of the numbers needed for a game such as time and score. They will also include another smaller panel just above these digits that will display text that can be changed to reflect what these numbers represent. So if a football game is being played, the panel above one of the digit cells would read “quarter” to show the current progress of the game. It would then change to “half” during the soccer match to update the fans on their game.

This type of scoreboard can be the perfect solutions for schools that have multi-purpose fields and need to keep score for a few different sports. They are easy to use and do a great job of keeping fans informed about the progress of the game. The only concern with these scoreboards is that since they use more sophisticated displays for the text, they tend to be a little more expensive than a single-sport scoreboard. This is a small consideration for many schools that have saved some serious budget by building a field that many different sports can enjoy.