Case Study: CEBL Fantasy League

Overview

The Canadian Elite Basketball League (CEBL) is Canada's professional summer basketball league. Fans follow real teams and players, but no dedicated, modern fantasy product existed for the ecosystem. CEBL Fantasy League fills that gap — a full-stack web application where managers create private leagues, draft CEBL players, set lineups, trade, and compete on weekly results tied to live league data.

The product is operated independently (not affiliated with the CEBL) and targets serious fantasy players alongside casual fans who want a polished, mobile-friendly experience.

---

What I Built

A complete fantasy sports platform covering the full product surface:

Fantasy Gameplay

• League lifecycle — creation, invites, rosters, waivers, trades, and commissioner tools
• Draft rooms — live draft experiences with scheduled reminders and draft clocks
• Scoring and standings — driven by real-time ingestion from the CEBL data pipeline and scheduled sync/scoring jobs

Monetization

• Optional Premium tier via Stripe — subscriptions, coupon codes, and webhook handling for payment lifecycle events

Community

• Built-in forum — threaded discussions, moderation, rich-text editing with safe HTML sanitization, and email subscriptions
• Discord integration — bridging the in-app and wider community
• Chat widgets and in-app notifications

Trust & Operations

• Authentication (NextAuth), role-based admin dashboard
• Privacy, terms, and cookie consent for analytics compliance
• Streak rewards and achievement badges to drive engagement
• Idempotent HTTP cron endpoints for sync and scoring jobs — no separate worker process required

---

Stack

| Layer | Technology | |---|---| | Framework | Next.js (App Router) | | Database | PostgreSQL via Prisma | | Auth | NextAuth | | Payments | Stripe | | Email | Transactional email provider | | Deployment | PaaS-friendly with HTTP cron (e.g. Coolify) |

---

Technical Approach

Data model first. Fantasy entities — leagues, teams, players, games, stats — map cleanly to relational tables. Prisma migrations and typed access keep the domain consistent as features are added.

Server-side mutations. Sensitive flows (trades, waivers, payments) run as Next.js server actions or secured API routes. Public cron routes are protected with shared secrets.

Operations without complexity. Sync and scoring jobs are idempotent HTTP tasks scheduled from any cron runner. The core fantasy loop requires no dedicated worker infrastructure.

UX polish at every layer. From streak flame badges to rich-text forum posts, the interface reflects the attention to detail fans expect from a consumer product.

---

Challenges

Correctness under change. Player movement, game reschedules, and evolving scoring rules require careful handling so standings, rosters, and stats remain trustworthy across the season.

Scope control. Balancing fantasy essentials with community features and monetization required disciplined prioritization to avoid bloating the MVP while still shipping a cohesive experience.

Third-party failure modes. Stripe, Discord, and email providers each needed clear failure handling and honest user-facing copy about data storage and privacy boundaries.

---

Outcome

CEBL Fantasy League is a cohesive, production-ready product: a single codebase covering fantasy gameplay, payments, community, and admin workflows. It demonstrates end-to-end product engineering — from database schema design and server-side business logic to consumer UX and DevOps-friendly scheduling — all built around a real, live sports league.