Joomla 1.0 - Just starting

[Hojo]

Hello. I am running a Website for a community Softball League and decided to do away with the collection of hand-coded pages that was our web site last year. This year I installed and configured Joomla 1.0 and got the site content converted over. (I decided to go with 1.0 instead of 1.5 because there is a lot more "stuff" available for 1.0 and I knew I'd need help....)

There was one aspect I could not fully integrate, anything that interacted with our database remained outside of the Joomla install and I did my best to make it appear to be integrated. (online registration forms (HTML pages) submission scripts (PHP) etc.)

I'd like to integrate everything eventually, but registration is over so I'm starting with something much simpler....

Game Scores... we have 10 teams and each team captain has an account on the website, I'd like to "recognize" the captain when they are logged in and know that they are associated with a specific team in my database and therefore I can determine which game scores need to be updated based on the schedule and the current date. I then need to present them with a form that shows the game(s) which need the scores updated and accept that input.

I've been through the "Hello World" module tutorial (http://help.joomla.org/content/view/775/157/) and got that working but that doesn't appear to be what I need.
I tried the "Hello World" component tutorial (http://help.joomla.org/content/view/773/125/) but could not get it to do anything from what I've read about components, I think that's what I need.

I am comfortable in HTML, mySQL and PHP but not an expert. What I don't know I'm happy to read about until I understand.

I'm looking for some guidance/links on the aspects of Joomla that I need to focus on to accomplish the following:

1. Interact with elements related to the current logged in user and make a link from a specific Joomla account to the Softball database* (I was hoping to provide Captains with different content permissions/rights than players but I'm not seeing how this can be easily done.
2. Query the Softball database and in conjunction with Joomla security and permissioning, display data from that database. The query is the easy part, where do I put it so I can get the results output in a page that I can see from the "content manager"?
3. Accept user input from forms, in conjunction with Joomla security and permissioning, and update the Softball database. Forms are easy, PHP scripts to read the posted data, validate it and post it to the database are not that complicated but again, how do I integrate them?

*The Softball database could also be migrated into tables within the Joomla database it does not *need* to be separate.

[Hojo]

Did I post in the wrong place?

Is there a forum with more traffic where I might actually be able to get responses?

Any help appreciated....