CourtsOfTheWorld – Find Basketball No Matter Where You Are

If you’re a b-ball freak and think of your basketball as carryon luggage, then CourtsOftheWorld is for you. This website focuses entirely on basketball courts: finding them, rating them, and setting up meets for pickup games.

The site was built by M4K1, a German design and tech firm, specializing in hybrid virtual-to-real-world connections. Like CourtsOfTheWorld.

CourtsOfTheWorld itself is a user-driven site that features a lot of the social networking things you’d expect as well as Google Mapping of the court locations on file. Users can submit their own favorite courts and many include cell phone or digital photographs and even video of players hustling their game.

Registration is free and setting up a profile can be as simple as a username-password combination (along with a generic avatar) or you can build a complete player profile for yourself. You can also list yourself as a sideliner-only (one who likes to watch, but doesn’t play) and give information on your play style, handicaps, and so forth.

Most of the courts listed are in the United States and Germany, of course, but a growing list of courts from around the globe are appearing. I found two in Prague, for instance, and a few in Australia as well. So the site is growing.

CourtsOfTheWorld is totally basketball-centric, but with their somewhat generic name, I won’t be surprised if they don’t expand into other court-based games like tennis and racquetball. Doing so would definitely expand their appeal.

I can see this site getting popular fast and, so far, it seems to be doing just that. At the very least, it’s a social platform for players to interact and talk game, but for those who travel and want to get some pickups instead of the usual boredom at the gym, this might be the answer.

Tags: basketball courts courts of the world courtsoftheworld.com