Launching soonCTSO Central officially launches August 24th! Join our Early Access list and be the first to experience the difference a modern platform makes.
Today is a day I've been waiting eight months to write.
After months of research, thousands of miles traveled, and more conversations with CTSO program administrators than I can count, CTSO Central officially launches on August 24th. This is the moment I've been working toward since I first realized just how badly this space needed a purpose-built solution.
I want to use this letter to tell you why we built this, what we learned along the way, and where we're headed next.
The Impact of CTSOs
I was incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in a CTSO when I was a high school student. My experiences in DECA were the most transformative part of my life. DECA taught me how to lead, how to communicate, how to think critically, and most importantly, how to solve problems in a dynamic world. These skills have been invaluable to me as I've grown into a leader in the technology industry. It's served me whether I've been building software, leading teams, sitting across the table from executives in a boardroom, or even just mentoring younger professionals.
My experience at the 2014 DECA International Career Development Conference in Atlanta, GA (which feels like such a lifetime ago)
They say the best business ideas come from a personal passion, and that if you're fortunate enough, you should create something that serves a bigger purpose. I gained a deep appreciation for the impact CTSOs can have on students' lives, and I knew I wanted to create something that could help them succeed. After my mentor, Jerry DiGiovanni, unexpectedly passed away in 2023, I knew I wanted to carry on his legacy by helping CTSOs succeed. He served as the Pennsylvania DECA State Advisor for over two decades and touched the lives of thousands of students and advisors. His incredible dedication to helping students and advisors succeed is what inspired me to build this platform.
The Problem No One Had Solved Yet
If you run a CTSO program, you already know what I'm about to say.
The tools available to you were not built for you. They were built for corporate event planners, professional associations, or generic membership organizations, then handed to CTSO administrators with a shrug and a wish of good luck. Even supposedly purpose-built platforms weren't built for the unique challenges you face. And once you started using these tools, the gaps showed up immediately. Registration workflows that don't account for competitive events, membership systems that can't distinguish between an advisor and a student officer, and reporting structures that assume your program looks like every other program.
So you had to adapt. You build spreadsheets. You stitch together workarounds. You spend hours every week doing manually what software should be doing automatically, because the software simply doesn't understand how CTSOs actually operate.
That's not a workflow problem. That's a technology gap. And it's been there for a long time.
What We Did Before We Wrote a Single Line of Code
Before we built anything, we listened.
I spent months traveling across the country, sitting down with CTSO members and staff at the local, state, and national level. Members of state, regional, and national organizations. State directors. Program coordinators. Executive staff running organizations with tens of thousands of members. I wanted to understand not just what they needed, but how they worked—because one of the most important things I learned early on is that no two CTSOs operate the same way.
Staff and volunteers from the New Hampshire DECA 2026 State Conference
Alex with state officers from the Washington HOSA 2026 State Conference
Michigan DECA 2026 State Conferene competition floor
Alex with students at the 2026 DECA ICDC in Atlanta
Alex in Seattle, WA at Amazon HQ & The Spheres
Alex with student national officers in Massachusetts, March 2026
New Hampshire DECA doesn't look like Washington HOSA. Missouri SkillsUSA doesn't run like California TSA. The competitive event structures differ. The membership models differ. The conference logistics, the advisor relationships, the reporting requirements—all of it varies. Any platform that assumes otherwise is going to fail the moment it meets reality.
What I kept hearing, in different words from different people, was the same core frustration: we've had to change how we work to fit our software, instead of the software fitting how we work.
That sentence shaped everything we built.
The Technology Gap Is Bigger Than It Looks
Poor user experience is annoying. I saw so many platforms that frankly weren't designed with a user in mind. As a technologist, if your platform looks and behaves like a spreadsheet, it's not doing its job. And if your interface looks like it was built for the Windows XP era, that means it probably doesn't scale very well.
Set the interface aside for a moment. After all, I've seen unpolished tools that still do what they were built to do, and do it well, I might add. What gets hard to justify is a one-size-fits-all system that forces workarounds—in staff time, in errors, and in the mental overhead of managing complexity the platform was supposed to reduce.
The administrators I spoke with weren't asking for more features. They were asking for the right features, built around the actual structure of their programs. They wanted a system that understood the difference between how states run competitive events. One that could handle the challenges of running complex operations and tabulation. But most importantly, they wanted one that didn't make them export data to a spreadsheet every time they needed a report their platform couldn't generate (that last one, I heard a lot).
Modern technology can do all of that. It just hadn't been applied in this space yet.
What CTSO Central Actually Does
CTSO Central is a flexible, customizable platform built specifically for the CTSO community. Every feature was designed around how these programs actually operate on a state-to-state and a program-to-program level—not how a generic event platform or a software company assumes they do.
Built using modern technologies, the platform is reliable, scalable, and designed to handle the volume and complexity that comes with large-scale CTSO operations. Flexibility is built into the core. If your program has a unique membership structure, a non-standard competitive event format, or a conference workflow that doesn't fit any template, CTSO Central is designed to accommodate that, not fight it. It's designed to scale with you, not against you. Regardless of what stage of growth your program is in, CTSO Central is designed to help you succeed now and into the future.
The goal is simple: give administrators back the time they're currently spending on workarounds, and put modern tools in their hands so they can focus on what actually matters—delivering strong programs for students and advisors.
What's Coming Next
This launch is a starting point, not a finish line.
We're operating on a near-weekly release cadence. There's some amazing features lined up on our Product Roadmap built from the conversations I had during our research phase, and we're committed to building in response to real administrator feedback, not assumptions. While this may be the first time you've heard of CTSO Central, you'll be hearing a lot more from us in the coming months.
A few things worth putting on your radar:
We are proud members of the DECA Premier Partner Program, which reflects our commitment to serving CTSOs at the highest level. Founded because of our experiences in DECA, we're honored to serve the greater CTSO community.
I don't want to let this moment pass without saying something directly to the people who helped get us here.
Frank Mellott, our COO—your operational rigor kept this thing moving when it could have easily come apart. I'm grateful to build this with you.
Bianca Spangler, our strategic advisor—your guidance shaped how we think about this market and this mission. The clarity you brought to our early decisions shows up in everything we've built.
Marshall Conley—I'm so thankful we reconnected after our (what seems forever ago) DECA ICDC as members. Understanding your challenges and pain points helped us build CTSO Central more than I can count.
Tim Marotte—your frustrations with current technology shaped our early product decisions. Thank you for sharing your feedback!
Anna Bolger at AWS—your partnership and support made it possible for us to build on infrastructure that can grow with us. Thank you for believing in what we were doing early.
Karn Bansal at Rootly—your team's work as a technology partner has been invaluable. You've treated us like a Fortune 500 company from Day 1. We're better for having you in our corner, and we can't wait to scale with you!
Lorelei Rosser—your early feedback on how to make the platform accessible and accomodating for all helped ensure we were making CTSO experiences equitable to everyone. Thank you for your feedback and insight!
Jerry DiGiovanni—your legacy lives on in everything we've built. I wish you could be here today to see what we've built. You were always my biggest supporter and my most loyal friend. Your passion for CTSOs and your commitment to helping students succeed is what inspired me to build this platform. Thank you for everything you did for me and for the CTSO community. I miss you every day.
The Work Starts Now
CTSO program administrators have been making do with tools that weren't built for them. That changes today.
If you're running a CTSO program at the local, state, or national level, I want to hear from you. Not just to show you the platform, but to understand what's on your list—what's still broken, what still takes too long, what your current tools still can't do.
We built CTSO Central because this work matters. The students in these programs are developing skills, building careers, and learning to lead. The administrators making those programs run deserve technology that's actually up to the task.
Let's get to work.
Alex Mellott
Founder & CEO, CTSO Central
A product of Clearpoint Business Group
