Rugby Ignite has been acquired by MatchPulse
Rugby Ignite is now part of MatchPulse, the live scoring platform for school and club sport.
For the past few seasons, Rugby Ignite has tracked schoolboy rugby results across South Africa and ranked 1st XV sides using an Elo-based system built for the game. That work is not going anywhere. It is moving to a platform built to carry it further.
What happens now
MatchPulse has started porting Rugby Ignite's data across to MatchPulse Rugby. Every school, player, fixture and result in the Rugby Ignite database is being brought over, so nothing from past seasons is lost.
The ranking system is being rebuilt directly into the MatchPulse platform. By the start of the 2027 season, the same rankings you know from Rugby Ignite will run natively on MatchPulse.
What Rugby Ignite did well
Rugby Ignite kept a national record of schoolboy 1st XV results and turned that record into a ranking people trusted. The Elo model rewarded beating strong sides, weighted margins and upsets, and didn't care about reputation. It deliberately left out home advantage, because so much school rugby is played at neutral venues that it would have skewed the numbers.
Around the rankings sat the things a results site should have: school profiles, player profiles and stats. All of that carries across to MatchPulse.
Where Rugby Ignite hit its limits
Rugby Ignite only ranked 1st teams. The way it was built made adding age groups impractical, and it was the question we were asked most often.
Live scoring was built into the platform but never switched on. Results were entered after the match, by hand, and the admin tools were painful to use on a phone from the side of a field. That slowed everything down.
And it was rugby only. Hockey, water polo and netball never had an equivalent.
What MatchPulse brings
Live scoring, actually live. Every match is scored once, as it happens, and seen by everyone. Results are on the record the moment the whistle goes, from a phone, by whoever is scoring.
Match Day creator. A school hosting a rival across a whole weekend can set up the entire day as one Match Day: every age group, every team, times and venues, all in one place. Parents and supporters see the full day on a single page instead of hunting for individual fixtures. This is the feature we're most looking forward to rugby schools using.
Player profiles, built from team sheets. Rugby Ignite had player profiles. On MatchPulse they fill themselves in. Coaches paste a team sheet, the platform creates or matches the players, and caps, points and match history build up from there. Players can claim their own profile and keep it through their school career.
School profiles across every sport. Each school has one profile on MatchPulse with its logo, colours, teams, results and home venue, set up once and used across every sport it plays rather than rebuilt per site.
Rankings with age groups. The Elo ranking system is being built from the ground up with age groups as a core part of the design rather than an afterthought. The 1st XV rankings continue across South Africa as before. Adding a U16 or U15 table becomes a matter of switching it on.
More than rugby. Because the ranking system will live inside MatchPulse rather than a standalone rugby site, the same model extends to hockey, water polo and netball, giving those codes a proper national ranking for the first time.
MatchPulse Home Ground. For schools that want the full picture, Home Ground presents the whole school's sport together in one central, branded home. Rugby, hockey, netball and water polo results in one place, under the school's own identity.
What it means for schools
If your school already uses MatchPulse for live scoring, your rugby results will feed the rankings automatically. There is no separate submission process and no second platform to maintain.
If you followed Rugby Ignite for the rankings, they will be waiting for you on MatchPulse in 2027, with more depth than before.
MatchPulse is free to start. Visit matchpulse.co.za to set up your school.