Case Study: Faces Advendurance achieves contactless, real-time race registration and timing with AppSheet

Event coordinator helps track mountain bike racers during COVID-19 with AppSheet

Faces Advendurance, a South African endurance-event organizer, faced mounting registration and timing challenges for its Nissan Trailseeker series when COVID-19 restrictions forced smaller start batches, stricter screening, and dispersed volunteer teams. Information Systems Manager Hennie Scheepers had been running registrations on Google Sheets but needed a simpler, mobile-friendly way to pull pre-registered data, assign numbers, track start/checkpoint/finish times, and cope with limited connectivity and error-prone manual processes.

Scheepers built a no-code AppSheet app that imports Google Sheets entries, runs on 20 race phones (with offline and dual‑SIM support), and integrates RFID timing with a QR-code backup. The result was faster, more accurate, and neater registration (no laptops or generators), real-time result publishing to WordPress, easier volunteer training, improved COVID screening, and positive feedback from participants and staff — a scalable system now being adapted for other large events.

Faces Advendurance

Hennie Scheepers

Information Systems Manager