What’s new in Playmaker

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.