Find Scrims Blog
From That’s Tough Gaming to Find Scrims: building after burnout
How a rough tournament night with my homegirls became That’s Tough Gaming—and why burnout from running orgs and brackets pushed the work into Find Scrims.
The night that started That’s Tough Gaming
I didn’t start Find Scrims for a logo on a launch page. I started because I had a shitty tournament experience with my homegirls—the kind of night where the bracket, the comms, the staffing, and the “we’ll figure it out in Discord” energy all failed at once.
That’s Tough Gaming was my answer. If the scene was going to keep asking women and competitive friends to show up, someone had to build rooms that didn’t treat us like an afterthought. TTG was never content for the algorithm. It was a promise: we will run this better than what burned us.
Then the work caught up with me
Loving the craft and running the machine are different skills. Hosting meant recruiting staff at 11pm, chasing check-ins, rewriting rules mid-bracket because a Discord role broke, and still trying to be a teammate—not only an admin.
That’s how burnout sneaks in. You start protecting the event instead of protecting the people, including yourself. TTG taught me how much invisible ops work sits behind a “simple” community tournament.
So I stopped hero-moding it by hand
The pain wasn’t “we need more Discord bots.” The pain was that teams and orgs were duct-taping recruitment, scrims, invites, attendance, and reputation across fifteen servers.
Find Scrims is what TTG transformed into when I encoded that operating system into a product. The values stayed. The delivery changed from “I will personally hold this together” to “the product should hold this together.”
Below are the gaps that hurt the most—and the parts of Find Scrims that exist because of them. When we publish a deeper guide for each one, a specific CTA shows up so you can go straight there.
What I needed—and what we built
I couldn’t find staff when I needed them
Running That’s Tough Gaming meant begging friends to check players in, manage Discord roles, and fill last-minute gaps. There was no clean place to find coaches, analysts, or ops people who actually wanted the work. So I built staff and role discovery into Find Scrims—so the next host isn’t scrambling at 11pm.
Invites lived in DMs and got lost
Half the roster never saw the invite. The other half joined the wrong Discord. I wanted a real path: send the invite, accept it, put a face on the profile, and know who is actually on the team. That’s why team invites and profile photos are first-class in the product.
See how to onboard your rosterMy friends weren’t always ready to go pro—and that was fine
I still wanted a competitive pod. Waiting on maybe energy killed momentum. Find Scrims lets players mark themselves looking for a team so captains can recruit people who already opted in, without burning friendships.
Find players looking for a teamPractice times died in the group chat
“When is everyone free?” turned into a graveyard of maybe reactions. Availability polls and a simple weekly grid were non-negotiable—so schedules become decisions instead of anxiety with timestamps.
Learn how availability polls workTryouts without ghosting people
Applicants deserve a status, not silence. Structured tryouts—invites, attendance, pass/fail—came from watching good players disappear because nobody closed the loop.
Hosting burned me out
Loving the game and running the machine are different jobs. The blog exists so captains can set boundaries, share the load, and still compete—without becoming the human calendar for everyone else.
Read about competing without burning out