In sports, a team gets to be great by a combination of the talent and skills of the team members, but also by lots of repetition. At weplay, we're a couple of months away from the first birthday of our public launch, and we've been putting repetition to work for us.

I'm deploying some new features to the site right now (three cheers for event reminders!), and I find myself thinking about how many times I've done this in the past year. How many features have we defined, planned and built? How many bugs have we found and squashed? How many mini afternoon goals have we set and met?

The answer to all is "a lot," and it's showing in how well we're able to execute as a team and keep building a great web app for coaches, parents & kids who want to make the most of this season, and the next one, and the next one....

I'm so stoked for our two USA Gold Medals in Beach Volleyball. I watched Phil and Todd take on Brazil tonight and it was great to see Phil take over the net in the third set. It was only 6 years ago or so that Phil was playing in the same East End Volleyball tournaments that I've played in. What a meteoric rise!

We're working hard to put weplay on a strong path to success, too. That's why I only heard over the phone from my wife about the progress in Kerri and Misty's match against China last night. The weplay engineering team was burning the midnight oil working on improving our calendar features. We know how tough it can be to keep schedules straight, especially when you or your kids play more than one sport!

Congratulations to the gold medalists and all the phenomenal athletes who competed in Olympic beach volleyball. The sport was invented in Southern California, and it's great to see that the USA is fielding the top teams in the world!

I enjoyed watching the early rounds of Olympic beach volleyball this weekend. The teams competed through pouring rain during much of the weekend. I think it's a safe bet that in the years these athletes spent training and qualifying, their vision of their Olympic experience didn't include sheets of water pelting them as they competed!

Peter Provost, an agile developer at Microsoft, just posted an interesting entry on his blog: Software Development Teams and Sports. It's a fun read, especially if you're into both software and sports.

If I were to compare the weplay development team to a sports teams, I would probably say we're like a rugby team, pushing the ball forward steadily and as a team. We do a lot of pair programming, and I'd characterize a given pair as a beach volleyball team. Taking turns playing the ball (or keyboard), but both fully engaged in every play, communicating constantly, and discussing strategy between points.

If you're a developer reading this, tell me about your team.

I've been having a conversation with myself over in the group I created for this weekend's beach volleyball tournament in Brooklyn. I've uploaded some cool shots of the weekends action, too. Wish I had a better camera for sports photography!

I played in my first beach volleyball tournament this past Saturday. It didn't go so well. My partner Dan and I went 2-4 and didn't make it out of pool. And it was bitter cold. Still, it was nice to be back on the beach.

My tournament participation this summer will be much less than last year, since my wife and I are expecting our second child next month.

Hopefully, I'll squeeze in more more tourney before our lives change have more joy, less sleep and less volleyball time.

My return to the sand volleyball court went pretty well this morning. Despite not having played in a week, I managed to win all the games I played this morning. In the last game (my seventh), I had to explain to my partner Dan that I new he was tired but I needed his help to keep my record for the day perfect! He pulled through for me.

Sitting at home at my desk at eleven o'clock feels great after the tough two-week push to launch the site. The dev team and I worked very long hours and weekends to get the site ready, and I'm feeling a little drained. Getting covered in the Times and on ABC helps to restore the energy though, and I'm looking forward to tackling our ambitious feature roadmap in the weeks and months to come.

That, and getting back to the volleyball court, which I visited too infrequently during those crazy weeks.