USA TODAY Survivor pool, pick right and stay alive.

USA TODAY Sports needed a modern, scalable contest system to drive subscriber engagement through a simple high-stakes game mechanic: pick correctly, keep moving, and survive longer than the field. The problem was not just building a pick interface. It was building a contest engine that could handle real-time game data, enforce weekly submission deadlines to the second, prevent manipulation in a prize-based competition, and recalculate a live leaderboard after every result.

RTW built the full contest stack: a React frontend wired to a Node.js backend with real-time game data APIs feeding the schedule, results, and elimination logic. The pick submission system validates eligibility against the current week schedule, filters to available games only, and hard-locks submissions at the deadline. A secure, token-based authentication layer prevents duplicate entries and manipulated submissions.

This is a portfolio entry. The platform launched in 2024 and is active through contest cycles. The engineering challenge was fairness at scale: a $10,000 prize demands airtight contest logic, a reliable data pipeline, and peak traffic that does not degrade the experience for participants checking results in real time.