What’s new in Playmaker

On Tuesday at training you tell your winger where to run, and to keep going if the defender steps inside. By Thursday night, looking at the play on their phone, all they have left is the arrow. Now the play can tell them again, in your voice.

Record over the play

Open one of your saved plays and press Voice-over (in More on a phone). Press Record, and the play runs from the start while you talk — say what each player does as they move. Press Stop when you are done, or it stops itself at 30 seconds.

Then listen back. Keep it with Save voice-over, or bin it and say it again. Nothing leaves your phone or computer until you press Save. There is one take per play: recording again replaces it, and Delete removes it.

Pick the play's length before you record. The play moves at that speed while you talk, and it plays back exactly the same way, so "now he steps inside" always lands on the moment he does.

The link speaks

Share the play with Copy share link and send it as you always have. When a player opens it and presses play, they hear you over the animation. Dragging the timeline jumps your voice to the same moment, and the Voice button turns it off if they are on the bus.

Add what you said in writing, too — or press Use the play's description for a draft to edit — and it appears beside the play for anyone who cannot listen.

Voice-overs play on links you send. Plays you have published to the play library stay silent for now.

Plenty of grounds have one bar of signal or none. Until now, sideline mode kept working once it was open — but if the phone reloaded the page in your pocket, or you pulled down to refresh, you got the browser's "no internet" page and your plays were gone until you found signal.

Sideline mode survives a reload with no signal

Open a playbook in sideline mode once at home, on wifi, and it is saved on that phone. At the ground, with no signal at all, reload it and it comes straight back: every play, the swipe, and the animation. A small line under the play's name — Offline — showing saved copies — tells you you are looking at the copy from when you last had signal, not a live one.

The same goes for your playbooks list and for the canvas: any of them you have opened on that phone opens again without a connection. A page you have never opened on the phone says so plainly, instead of the browser's error.

Saving while offline

You can still draw and change plays with no signal. Save can't reach your playbook until there is a connection, so it now tells you that, instead of a vague error — and your play stays on the canvas, and in the page's address, even if you reload. Press Save again once you have signal. Saving automatically when the signal comes back is coming next.

Add Playmaker to your home screen

On Android, Chrome now offers Install app; on an iPhone, use Share → Add to Home Screen. Playmaker then opens full screen from its own icon, straight to the canvas, with your playbooks a long-press away on Android.

A play can only live in one playbook, but you don't think about your plays one way. The same out-of-bounds play is a BLOB play, an Under-12s play and a beats-zone play. Now you can tag it as all three.

Tag a play

Open the ⋮ menu on any play in My Plays and choose Tags, or use Add tags on the play's details page. You can also add tags in the save dialog when you save a play. Your existing tags are one tap away, so "Red zone" stays one tag and doesn't become "redzone" on the next play.

Find them again in two taps

Tap a tag above your plays to see only the plays with that tag. Tap a second tag to narrow it further, for example red zone and U12. The same tags appear wherever you pick plays:

• My Plays
• Add plays when you're building a session
• the wristband maker, which also shows your own saved plays now, not only the ready-made formations
• the football call sheet, where "Add my plays" adds just the tagged ones
• Add a play in a team playbook

Building Saturday's game plan is now: tap Red zone, tick the plays, done. No scrolling through forty plays, and no second copy of a play in another playbook to keep up to date.

Tags are free on every plan. Deleting a tag takes it off your plays and leaves the plays exactly as they were.

By the middle of the season you have dozens of plays spread over several playbooks, and a run of practice plans. Finding "Box left" used to mean going back to the dashboard, scrolling down to your plays and typing there — and a playbook or a session could only be found on its own page.

One search box, everywhere

Press / on any page, or Ctrl K (⌘ K on a Mac), or tap the magnifying glass at the top of the screen. Type a few letters and you see your plays, playbooks and practice sessions that match, grouped so you can tell them apart, with the playbook each play lives in.

Use the arrow keys and Enter, or just tap one:

• a play opens on the canvas, ready to edit;
• a playbook opens with its plays;
• a practice session opens with its plan and timings.

Tagged a set of plays "Red zone"? Type "red" and they come up too, with the tag shown so you know why.

Only your own plays, playbooks and sessions are ever searched. What you type isn't saved.

Netball coaches have been drawing plays on basketball courts, and a basketball court is the wrong shape with the wrong lines on it. Pick Netball from the sport list and you get a netball court instead.

The whole court, measured

The full 30.5 m by 15.25 m court, goal line to goal line, with the two transverse lines on the thirds, the 0.9 m centre circle, a 4.9 m goal circle at each end and the post and ring on each goal line. All of it is drawn to World Netball's measurements.

It is the whole court rather than one end because netball is played in thirds. Every position is defined by which thirds it may enter, and the centre pass starts in the middle with players waiting at both ends. Drawing half a court would cut the wing defence and the goal keeper out of the play before it starts.

Seven set plays to start from

Open Formations and there are seven netball set-ups, all fourteen players placed where the rules allow them to stand:

• Centre pass set-up: everyone where they have to be at the whistle.
• Centre pass split lead and centre pass overload right: two ways to set up the attackers for the first pass.
• Centre pass defence: fronting the leads when the other team takes the centre pass.
• Attacking backline throw-in, sideline throw-in in the attacking third and defensive backline throw-in.

Players are numbered 1 to 7 in team-sheet order: 1 is the goal shooter and 7 is the goal keeper. Move anyone you like, draw the leads and passes, and press play. Mark the goal shooter or goal attack as the scorer and the ball drops into the ring at the end.

Send it to the team

A netball play shares as a link like any other play. It opens and plays on any phone, with no app and no account, so the centre pass you sorted out on Tuesday night is in the team chat before Thursday's training. There are also six classic netball patterns in the play library to copy and change, and the court has its own page at /netball-play-designer.

On match day nobody on the bench flips through a booklet. Now you can print the one page you actually want: your out-of-bounds plays under BLOB and SLOB, your after-time-out sets under ATO, your routines under Corners for and Corners against, your lineouts, your penalty corners, your centre passes, each under its own heading.

From a playbook, already sorted

Open a playbook and press Match-day sheet. Every play arrives with its call number, and if you've tagged your plays they're already under the right headings: a play tagged "BLOB" goes under BLOB, one tagged "Penalty corner" goes under the penalty-corner heading. Plays with no matching tag wait under Other plays at the bottom, so nothing goes missing. Move a line, delete one, or type a play you haven't drawn yet, then print.

Team playbooks have the button too, for coaches.

One glance on the sideline

Everything fits on one page, at the biggest type that fits. If it doesn't fit, you're told how many plays are over before you print. The sheet carries a QR code: an assistant or a player scans it and watches the plays move, in your running order, with no app.

No playbook? Type it

The match-day sheet is free and needs no account. Pick your sport and the headings are already there, taken from your sport's own rulebook. Type your plays under them and print.

Coaches talk in positions, not shirt numbers. Until now a play could only say "7 runs a post", and you had to tell the team that 7 meant the X receiver. Now the dot can just say X.

How to label a player

Tap a player and type into the box above them. Digits still give them a jersey number, as before. Type letters instead — QB, PG, GS, X, MLB, up to three characters — and the player wears that label instead. Clear the box to go back to a plain dot.

Don't want to type? Press Pos next to the box and pick from your sport's usual positions: QB, RB, X, Y, Z and the rest for football, PG to C for basketball, GK to ST for soccer, and so on.

Everywhere the play goes

The label shows wherever the number used to: in the editor, on exported images and videos, on printed play cards, wristbands and playbooks, in sideline mode and on the preview when you share a link. Screen readers say "our QB has the ball" rather than "player 1".

Netball bibs, already on

Netball's seven set plays now show every player's bib: GS, GA, WA, C, WD, GD and GK, for both teams. Your players see the court the way they already know it.

Most coaches find Playmaker because another coach showed it to them. Now, when you do that, you both get something for it.

Your invite link

Open your dashboard and you'll find an Invite a coach card with a link that's yours. Copy it and send it to the coach down the corridor, the one who runs the other age group, or your club's group chat.

When they open it, they see that you invited them, by your first name only, and they can sign up there and then, or start drawing first and sign up when they save their first play. Either way, the invite still counts.

What you both get

When they've signed up and confirmed their email, you each get 2 more saved plays on the free plan: room for 5 instead of 3. Invite more coaches and you keep earning, up to 10 extra saved plays. There's nothing to claim. Your saved-play count goes up by itself, and your dashboard tells you who joined.

If you're on Pro you already have unlimited saved plays, so the bonus doesn't change anything for you. The coach you invite still gets their 2 extra.

There's no leaderboard, no reminders, and nobody is emailed on your behalf. The link only goes where you send it.

Most set plays get run to both sides: a left-footed and a right-footed corner, Trips Right and Trips Left, a lineout to either touchline. Until now that meant drawing every player and every run a second time, and getting it slightly wrong.

One tap on the canvas

Press Flip left/right (it's under More on a phone, or press F on a keyboard) and the whole play swaps sides: every player, every run, every pass and the ball. It still aims at the same goal. Changed your mind? Undo puts it straight back, and flipping again does too.

Keep both versions

In My Plays, open a play's menu and choose Duplicate flipped. You get a new play that runs the other way, next to the original, in the same playbook. If the name says which side it goes to, the copy's name says the other side: "Trips Right" comes back as "Trips Left". It counts as a saved play, the same as Duplicate does.

Works for soccer, rugby, field hockey, basketball, American football and netball. Baseball plays can't be flipped: runners only go round the bases one way.

The animation shows where everyone goes. It never said why. That was the team talk, and by Saturday half the team has forgotten it. Now each player's job sits next to their marker.

How to give a player a job

Tap a player. Under their number or label there is a Job box. Type one line, up to 80 characters: "clear out the corner", "read the safety, then hit the dig", "box out 5". Clear the box to take it off.

Where your players see it

• Under the play. Anyone watching the play on a phone opens More and finds Who does what: one line per player, next to the same QB, X or 7 that's on their dot. On a laptop the list sits beside the pitch.
• On the sideline. Sideline mode has a Jobs button. Tap a line and that player is ringed on the pitch, so "which one am I?" gets answered on the diagram.
• On a shared play. A published play shows the list under the animation.
• On paper. The play card and the playbook booklet print every job above your notes. Wristbands stay as they are: there's no room on one to read a sentence mid-game.

Screen readers read each player's job after their run.

Most of a training session is not set plays. It is the rondo, the layup lines, the 1v1s — and until now every one of them was a line you typed by hand, every week, with the time and the coaching point you wanted to remember.

Add a drill

In Sessions, press Add a drill. You get a starter library of twelve drills coaches already run every week — six for soccer, six for basketball — opened on the sport your session's plays are in. Each one shows how long it runs, who it is for and the one coaching cue that matters. Tap it and it lands at the end of Tuesday's plan with its minutes filled in and the cue printed under it on your run sheet. Change the time or the cue like any other line.

Adding a drill does not use up one of your saved plays. It is a line on your plan, not a copy in your playbook.

Every drill has its own page, and it moves

Each drill has a page under Practice drills with the drill playing on the pitch, the setup step by step, the coaching points, and how to make it harder when your players are ready. Show it to an assistant coach before practice, or to the players before they walk out.

From a drill's page, Add to a session puts it straight into whichever session you pick, and Open in Playmaker puts it on the canvas so you can move the players and draw it your way. Save it there and it becomes one of your plays like anything else you draw.

The soccer drills: rondo 4v1, pass and follow triangle, 1v1 to goal, give-and-go to goal, possession 3v3 plus 2, and crossing and finishing. The basketball drills: layup lines, the Mikan drill, the 3-man weave, the 2-on-1 fast break, the closeout drill and shell defence.

A season's work shouldn't be locked inside one website. Now you can take all of it with you.

One download, everything in it

Go to Settings → Your data and press Download everything. A few seconds later you get one ZIP file with every play, playbook, practice session and tag in your account.

Open the index.html page inside it on any computer. It lists your playbooks with their plays in the order you filed them, then your other plays, then your sessions, with each play's picture, notes and tags.

Every play still moves

Press Open in Playmaker next to any play and it opens on the pitch again, animated, exactly as you drew it. The link holds the whole play, so it works on any computer and you don't need to sign in. That's true even for plays you can't currently edit on the free plan.

Keep a copy at the end of each season, or before you hand your team on to the next coach. It's free on every plan, and the download is deleted from our servers after 24 hours.

Three things shipped in the last week without a page here, which is exactly what this page is meant to stop. Here they are, and below them the change that makes sure it does not happen again.

Your links, for coaches without an account

You never needed an account to share a play: draw it, press Copy share link, send it. What you could not do was take one back. A link pasted into the wrong team chat stayed there.

Now every link you share while signed out is remembered by the browser you shared it from, and Your links lists them — the play's name, the day you shared it, and how many times it has been opened. Press Delete and the link stops working for everyone you sent it to. The share dialog points at the page the moment you copy a link.

One honest limit, stated on the page as well as here: the proof that a link is yours lives in that browser. Clear its data, use a private window or switch phone, and the list cannot come back, because we have no way to tell the links were yours. If that happens and a link has to go, contact support with the link.

Links you share while signed in belong to your account, as they always have, and are on your dashboard.

A deleted link says it is gone

Open a link that has been deleted — by its coach, or because nobody had opened it for a long time — and you now get a page that says so plainly, rather than a generic "not found" that leaves you wondering whether you mistyped it. It does not show what the play was. If the link you followed still carries the play itself, the page offers to open it on the canvas.

The dashboard points at the rest of Playmaker

The dashboard was written before playbooks and sessions existed, and mentioned neither. It now opens on three tiles — Plays, Playbooks and Sessions — each with a count, each one tap from what it names. Plays takes you to your grid further down the same page.

A Monday note when your plays were watched

Your shared plays and playbooks have counted their views for a while; now they tell you. On Monday morning you get one short email: how many times other people opened what you shared the week before, and the three that were watched most, each a link.

It only comes when there is something to say — five views or more in the week — and your own opens are not counted. It is on by default because it is about your own plays, and switching it off is one tick under Weekly views in your settings, or one click at the bottom of the email itself.

What's new, everywhere you are

The bell that picks up a dot when something ships used to live on the canvas and in your dashboard's header. It is now also at the top of the public pages — the play library, shared plays, the sport and template pages, the coaching guides — and in the More menu on a phone, where the More button itself picks up the dot.

Signed in, the dashboard also shows a small What's new card when there is something you have not read: a title and a line for each, linking here. Close it, or open the bell, and it goes away until the next update. It never appears on the canvas, and nothing here ever opens on its own over a play you are drawing.

And the reason this page will not fall behind again: every change to what you see in Playmaker now has to arrive with its page here, or it does not get merged.

Every play on the canvas has a written description for people using a screen reader: how many players are on each side, who has the ball, where each one stands and who runs. The last part was broken. For any play drawn by dragging players, it said there were no runs at all, and described each runner as standing where their run finished.

So a coach listening to a play heard the end of it, with nobody going anywhere. That is fixed. The description now says where each run starts and where it goes:

Our number 3, in the middle, on the left, runs to near the goal, on the left.

A decoy run, out and back to where the player began, is described as one, and a short run that stays in the same part of the pitch says so rather than "running to" the spot it started from. A player you placed and never moved is still not counted as a run.

The same description is what a play shared at /p/… offers anyone who cannot see the pitch, so shared plays are fixed too.

A play link works in a team chat. It did not work on the club website, where the best you could do was a screenshot of the pitch or a link that took people somewhere else. Now the play itself can go on the page.

Embed on a website

Press Share on the canvas, as you always have. The dialog now has Embed on a website underneath the link. Open it and you get a short piece of code: copy it, paste it into your website or blog, and the play appears in the page. Visitors press play and watch every run, without leaving your site and without signing up for anything.

A play that has been published to its own page has an Embed on your site button there too, so a club secretary who finds your play in the library can put it on the club's site.

The frame fits the width of whatever it is placed in, from a phone up to a normal blog column, and only loads when someone scrolls to it.

Often, the link is enough

WordPress and many other site builders look for a way to show a link properly when it is pasted on its own line. Playmaker play links now tell them how, so on those sites pasting playmaker.click/p/… turns into the animated play without any code at all.

What your visitors see

A small Made with Playmaker link sits in the corner where the play's name normally goes. It never covers the pitch. Press it and the play opens on Playmaker in a new tab, which is also where Save and Share take people from inside an embed.

Each time someone watches your play on another site, it counts as a view, so the number on your dashboard and in the weekly email includes them. We record which website the view came from (just its name, like clubsite.example) and nothing about who was watching — the privacy policy has the details.

Embedded plays stay out of search results. If you delete a share link, every embed of it shows that the play has been taken down.

Coaching has seasons, and paying for months you are not coaching never made sense. Now you can pause Pro instead of cancelling it.

How to pause

Go to Billing and choose Pause or cancel. Pick how long — anything from one to six months — and you will see the exact date billing starts again before you confirm. That is it: nothing is charged while you are paused.

What happens to your plays

Nothing. Every play you have saved stays in your playbook, and you can still open, share and print all of them. While Pro is paused your account works like a free one: you can edit your first three plays and save up to three. Anything past that shows a Resume Pro button, so getting it all back is one tap.

Coming back

Pro resumes by itself on the date you chose, on your usual plan. We send you a short email a week before, so it is never a surprise. Want it back sooner? Resume Pro now on the Billing page starts it straight away.

If you really are leaving, Cancel in the billing portal is still right there on the same page.

The play library used to list only what coaches had made public, which on a new site is not much to browse. It now opens with 52 famous plays across all six sports, drawn by the Playmaker team and credited to "Playmaker": Carlos Alberto's goal for Brazil in the 1970 World Cup final, Barcelona's six-second press, the Iverson cut, the Spurs' Hammer, the Philly Special, Gareth Edwards' try for the Barbarians, Jeter's flip play and more.

Every one animates. Press the picture to watch it move, read a short paragraph on what happens and why it works, then Remix this play to put it on your own pitch and change it for your team.

Find it under Play library in the sidebar, or at the foot of any page.

Featured plays

The top of the Plays page, and of each sport's page, now has a short row of featured plays.

Upvotes

Every play has an upvote button, on its card and on its page. You need to be signed in to upvote, you get one upvote per play, and pressing it again takes it back. You cannot upvote your own play. There is a new Most upvoted order next to Newest.

Search

There is a search box at the top of the Plays page. It searches play names, the famous plays' descriptions, and sports, so "press", "corner", "Iverson" or "field hockey" all work. Browsing, searching and remixing still need no account.

Until now a play had a link and a playbook did not. You could send somebody one play, or a printout of twelve, but not the twelve as a thing they could open on a phone. That was the gap the last update ended on, and it is closed.

Share playbook

On the Playbooks page, every playbook now has Share playbook. It gives you one link. Whoever opens it — an assistant coach, a parent, a player — sees the playbook's name, how many plays are in it, and a list of them, and each one opens and animates in their browser. No account, no app.

The link is a snapshot, and the page says which day it was taken. Add a play to the playbook tomorrow and the link you sent today still opens what you sent, because a link in a team chat should not change under the people reading it. To send the new version, press Share playbook again and send that link. Pressing it twice on a playbook you have not changed gives you the same link, not a second one.

Shared playbooks are unlisted: they are not in search results and not on any public page. The link is the only way in.

One code on the booklet cover

A printed booklet already had a QR code on every play page. Its cover now has one for the whole playbook, so one scan opens all of it. It is the same tickbox as before — Link back to the animated play — and the same rule applies: the code is a snapshot of the playbook as it is when you print.

The football call sheet and the wristband insert still have no code. They were waiting on a playbook having a link, and now it does, but the sheet still needs a way to say which playbook it came from. That is still on the list.

Quick add in sessions

Building a session no longer means typing "Water break" every Tuesday. Under your session there is a Quick add row: team talk, warm-up, conditioning, water break, small-sided games, scrimmage and cool-down, each with a sensible number of minutes already filled in, and a line of notes on the ones that need it. One tap adds it to the session as an ordinary line — change the minutes, rename it or delete it like anything else you added.

On a phone they are big enough to hit with a thumb, which the old shortcuts were not.

Plays by other coaches

There is a new Plays page, and a page per sport under it, listing plays other coaches have chosen to make public, newest first. Open one and it animates; remix it and it is yours to change.

Nothing appears there unless its coach put it there. A shared link stays private until you switch it to Make public in your list of shared plays, and you can switch it back at any time. Plays you have saved but never shared are never listed.

Until now, a play you drew always animated the same way: each player moved in the order you drew them, one after another. That is right for a set piece you want to walk somebody through. It is wrong for most of what a coach actually draws.

The arithmetic was the problem. The moving part of a play is shared out between however many players you moved, so the more of them there are, the less each one gets. On an eleven-man play that is three tenths of a second of movement and three and a half seconds standing still, each player twitching in turn. That is not a play. It is a queue.

The control

Under the playback controls there is now a choice: together, or in drawn order.

Pick together and everybody sets off on the first frame and arrives at the end, the way they do at a snap, a kick-off, or the moment a press is triggered. Pick drawn order and you get the old behaviour, which is still the better one for a play you are explaining a step at a time — a set piece where the run that matters is the third one.

You can switch back and forth as often as you like. Nothing you drew is lost either way.

Football starts on together

A new football play now starts on together, because at the snap everyone goes at once and a gridiron play animated one man at a time does not look like football. Every other sport starts where it always did, on drawn order.

This is only about new plays. Nothing you have already made has changed. A play you saved last week, a link you sent to a parent, a printed card with a QR code on it — all of them animate exactly as they did before, and will keep doing so unless you open one and change it yourself.

It travels with the play

The choice is part of the play, not a setting on your account. Send somebody the link and they see it the way you set it. The same is true of a play card's QR code, a saved play you reopen on your phone, and anything you export.

Sideline mode gave you the playbook at the ground. This one is about the hour before you get there, and the paper you hand out when you arrive.

A session is a playbook with a clock beside it

There is a new Sessions page. A session is Tuesday night written down in order: some lines run a play you drew, some are just text — "Warm-up", "Water break", "Small-sided games to four goals" — and every line has a number of minutes against it. The minutes add up, and the total is printed at the top, so you find out that your session is seventy-five minutes long while you can still do something about it.

Print it and you get a run sheet: no diagrams, no rendering wait, just the order and the clock. It asks one question — which paper — and guesses the answer from your browser, so the usual case is a look and a click. Up to 40 lines on a sheet.

Deleting a session deletes the session and nothing else. The plays it ran are yours and stay in My Plays, because the session points at them and not the other way round.

Printed plays that point back at the moving one

A printed play is a still picture of a thing that moves, and that has always been the sad part of the PDF. Now, when you export a play card or print a booklet, there is a tickbox: Link back to the animated play. It is ticked by default.

Leave it ticked and the paper carries a QR code. A player, a parent or an assistant coach points a phone at it and watches the play animate in their browser — no account, no app. On a booklet, every play page gets its own.

Untick it and nothing is stored at all: no code, no saved copy, and the artefact prints exactly as it did before this existed. The code has to save a shareable copy of the play to work, so that tickbox is where you say yes to it — the same thing "Copy share link" has always done.

Two places deliberately have no code yet: the football call sheet and the wristband insert. One code per call would eat half the diagram at a legible size, and what those actually want is a single code for the whole sheet — which needs a playbook to have a shareable link, and it does not have one yet. It is the next thing.

Dark mode reaches the canvas

If you run your system dark, the pitch itself now follows, instead of being the one white rectangle in an otherwise dark app. The colours over the turf were re-measured for contrast rather than just darkened.

Every dialog in the app is also now the same dialog. The practical difference you will notice: ask the app two questions in a row and the second one waits its turn instead of replacing the first one mid-sentence.

Football: a touchdown is a carry or a catch

Football plays had a fixed target in the end zone, borrowed from the sports where scoring means shooting at a goal. Gridiron does not work like that — the ball crosses the line in somebody's hands — and the borrowed target was pulling the ball away from the player scoring by as much as 24 yards. It is gone, and the ball now finishes with the scorer.

Field goals still have no way to be drawn. That is a real gap and it is on the list.

You draw plays on a Tuesday night on a laptop. You use them on a Saturday morning on a phone, standing on grass, holding it in the hand that is not holding a whistle, with eleven under-12s waiting. Those are two different jobs, and until now Playmaker only did the first one.

Open any playbook and press Sideline mode.

The play, and almost nothing else

No toolbar, no modes, no export buttons. The pitch is drawn as large as its own shape allows, and every control lives in the bands a pitch's proportions leave empty at the top and bottom of a phone — so nothing is ever on top of the play. Swipe left for the next play in your running order, right to go back. The order is the one you set on the playbooks page, which is the same order the printed booklet uses.

Turn the phone sideways and the pitch gets about 30% bigger, because a half pitch is wider than it is deep. Sideline mode works that out and tells you.

A palette for daylight, measured rather than guessed

Screen colours are chosen indoors, and indoors is not where this gets used. A phone in the open shows you the colours it is emitting plus whatever the sky is bouncing off the glass, and that reflection lands on the dark half of every pair as hard as it lands on the light half.

So we measured it twice: the usual contrast ratio, and the ratio you actually get with the reflection added at a real ambient brightness. On the editor's palette, a blue player on green turf is 1.6:1 in bright open shade. Sideline mode's is 3.6:1, the white lines go from 4.6:1 to 5.9:1, and every sport's surface is taken to the same darkness so a white line reads the same on a basketball court as on a soccer pitch — today it does not, by more than a factor of two.

One honest note: nothing on any phone is legible in direct sun with the glass facing the sky. That is the hardware, not the palette. Open shade is where this makes the difference, and open shade is most Saturdays.

Buttons for a thumb, not a fingertip

The accessibility floor for a tap target is 44 px, which is 11.6 mm — an index finger belonging to somebody sitting down. A thumb pad is 19 to 25 mm across. Every control in sideline mode is at least 72 px, which is 19 mm, so you can hit it without looking and without aiming.

It stays awake, and it works when the bars drop

Sideline mode asks your phone to keep the screen on, so it does not lock in the middle of an explanation, and it hands the screen back the moment you leave.

The whole playbook arrives with the page. Once it is open, swiping to play twelve needs no network at all — which matters, because a suburban sports ground has one bar. Load it in the car park and it is yours for the morning.

American football is on the canvas, and it arrived with the thing football coaches actually ask for first: the printout.

The field is measured in yards, because football is

Fifty yards from a goal line back to the 50, at the real 160 ft of width. A yard line every five yards, hash marks 53 ft 4 in in from each sideline, the numbers twelve yards in and reading up the sideline the way they are painted, and the ten-yard end zone shaded above the goal line.

Fifty yards rather than a hundred is deliberate. A whole field is more than twice as tall as it is wide, which fits a screen by shrinking your players to dots. A route tree lives inside twenty-five yards of the line of scrimmage, so the snap goes on the 25 and the end zone stays in the frame doing work.

Routes keep their cuts

Every other sport here has its movement smoothed, because a run drawn with a finger is a noisy line. Football is the exception, and it is the whole point of a football diagram: a slant, a post and an out are the same two straight legs with a different angle between them. The cut is the information. So on the gridiron a dragged route is drawn as the route you dragged — five and break in, twelve and up — at the yard you drew it, in the editor and in every export.

Ten templates, four of them flag

I formation, shotgun trips, five wide, singleback spread, goal line heavy and a cover two shell for the defence. Then flag: 5v5 spread, 5v5 stack right, 7v7 trips right and 7v7 bunch left.

Flag is not eleven-a-side with players removed, so it is not treated that way. The line to gain is a fixed line rather than ten yards from the last play, there are no-run zones, there are no hash marks, and in most rule sets the quarterback cannot run — which means every play is a route combination. There is a page of its own for it now, at /flag-football-play-designer, and a guide on building a first flag playbook with two plays you can press play on.

The wristband and the call sheet, free, no account

This is the one every football app leads with, and every one of them charges for. Ours does not.

The football wristband maker takes a typed list of play calls and prints two things from it: a numbered insert for the vinyl window on a wrist coach, and the coach's one-page situational call sheet. No signup, no trial, nothing to install.

Some detail worth knowing, because it is the difference between a card that fits your band and one that goes in the bin:

• The insert sizes are measurements, and the product each came from is printed beside it. The strongest of them were taken from the printable templates the band manufacturers publish themselves, by measuring the page box of their own PDFs.
• The grid is arithmetic, not a preference. Twelve calls on a varsity insert prints two columns of six at eleven point; sixty prints three columns of twenty at seven point, which is the smallest type any manufacturer sets in their own templates and therefore the floor here. It tells you the grid and the type size before you print.
• The call sheet really does fit on one page — the layout tries both orientations and every row height down to a legibility floor, and if your list is too long it says so, and by how many.
• The flag call sheet is built from the flag rulebook, not from the tackle sheet with sections deleted. Four downs to the line to gain, the no-run zones, and the situations that exist in that game.

Print at 100% with "fit to page" switched off, and check the scale bar on the sheet against a ruler. Once, for your printer, and then never again.

And a page for the coaches searching for this

Free football play designer and free flag football play designer are both live, along with a page for each of the ten templates and an honest, dated comparison of the football tools — nine of them, with what each free tier really allows and what the paid plans cost, read off each vendor's own page.

Draw something. It opens on a real field and it costs nothing.

Playmaker started as one thing: a play you can draw in thirty seconds and send to somebody as a link. That is still the whole idea. But a lot has landed around it over the last few weeks, and from now on you can watch it happen here.

What is new

• Animated plays, shared as a link. Draw the runs, press play, copy the link. Whoever opens it watches the play animate in their browser — no account, no app, no PDF that loses the movement.
• Five sports on the same canvas. Soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball and baseball, each with the right pitch under your players.
• Your plays, saved. Name a play and it lands in My Plays, ready next week instead of being redrawn from memory.
• A canvas that survives the sideline. Mobile controls sit where your thumbs already are, so you can adjust something at half time without a laptop.
• Embeddable. Drop a play into a blog post or a team site and it stays interactive.

What we are working on next

Play templates you can start from, a formation library, and export options for the coaches who still want something printed for the fridge.

This changelog

Every update from here on gets a page like this one. There is a bell in the canvas and in your dashboard that quietly picks up a dot when something new lands — it will never interrupt a play you are drawing. If you would rather hear about it by email, tick product updates in your settings, and unsubscribe from any one of them in a single click.

Thanks for coaching with us.