How Coaching Special Olympics Athletes Led Me to Build a Better Timer

Most software gets built in an office. TimerHubs got built at the side of a track, in the sun, with a clipboard under one arm and a dying phone in my hand. I coach Special Olympics athletes — children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities — and timing is not a nice-to-have in that world. It is the whole event. It is how an athlete finds out they got faster.

The problem nobody warns you about

On a normal meet day you might have six heats, four volunteers, and one stopwatch that actually works. Somebody's phone timer app wants a login. Somebody else's app throws a full-screen ad the second a swimmer touches the wall. A third volunteer has never used the app before and freezes. Meanwhile an athlete is standing there, out of breath, asking the only question that matters: "What was my time?"

That moment — a kid waiting to hear their number while an adult fumbles with a phone — is why this site exists. Not because timing is hard. Because the tools were making it hard.

What adaptive sports coaching taught me about timing

Coaching athletes with a wide range of abilities teaches you to strip everything down to what actually helps. A few things became obvious fast:

• Big numbers win. If a time can't be read at a glance from a few feet away, it's useless in a noisy gym or a bright outdoor track.
• One button beats ten features. Any volunteer, of any age, should be able to start it without a tutorial.
• Personal bests matter more than rankings. Athletes aren't chasing the person next to them. They're chasing last week's version of themselves. That means you have to record every time, not just first place.
• Nothing should require an account. Volunteers rotate constantly. You cannot onboard people onto software on meet day.
• It has to work on whatever device is in someone's pocket. Old Android, cracked iPhone, a borrowed tablet — all of it.

So I built the timer we needed

TimerHubs started as a universal timer for me and my coworkers — the volunteers, the aides, the parents who got handed a stopwatch five minutes before the first heat. Open a browser, and it's running. No download, no signup, no paywall.

The main stopwatch has an athlete roster built right in: ten name slots where you can log a name, an event, the time, and a goal — and stamp the live stopwatch time straight into a row. At the end of the day you copy it or export a CSV and you have your results without transcribing a soggy clipboard.

When you're running heats side by side, the multi stopwatch lets several volunteers each own a lane on one screen. For drills and rest periods, the countdown timer handles the "two minutes and we rotate" part of practice. And because meet paperwork and schedules still run on a 24-hour clock, there's a military time reference too.

Why the personal best is the real scoreboard

If you've never been to a Special Olympics event, here's what surprises people: the loudest cheer of the day is rarely for the winner. It's for the athlete who finishes last and finishes anyway. But a cheer fades. A recorded time doesn't. When an athlete can see that they swam a 50 free three seconds faster than in April, that's evidence. That's something they own.

Recording times consistently is the single highest-leverage thing a volunteer coach can do. It turns practice into progress. That's the same reason timed practice works for kids racing each other on math drills and for interval training — the number is honest feedback, and honest feedback is motivating.

If you coach adaptive sports, here's my setup

1. Pull up the stopwatch on a tablet and prop it where athletes can see the display.
2. Fill the roster with names and events before warmups — not during heats.
3. Stamp each finish into a row as it happens. Don't trust memory.
4. Set a goal time next to each name so athletes know what they're chasing.
5. Export the CSV at the end and email it to families that night. It takes two minutes and it means everything to them.

See more real-world setups on our use cases page, or read the story behind TimerHubs.