Free play wristband maker

The bit that usually goes wrong is the size

Everybody who has ever made a wrist coach insert has printed one that did not fit. You draw the plays, you lay them out in a word processor, you print, you cut — and the card is three millimetres too wide for the vinyl window, or it fits and the writing is cut off by the stitching. Then you do it again.

Two things cause it. The first is that "wrist coach" is not one product: an adult single-window band, a youth band, a three-window quarterback band and a sleeve-style playbook band all take different cards, and the difference between the smallest and the largest is more than an inch. The second is that browsers and print drivers default to fit to page, which quietly scales the whole sheet down by a few per cent so it clears the printer's margins. A card 3% small looks perfect and does not fit.

This tool fixes both. Every size in the picker is a measurement taken from a product that exists, recorded with the product it came from, so you can check it against the band in your kit bag before you print anything. And every sheet carries a scale bar at the bottom with its length printed beside it — hold a ruler against it, and if it does not measure what it says, your printer scaled the page and you should print again with scaling set to 100%.

One card per play, cut apart

A cell on the sheet is one play, and the cell is the insert. Three plays means three inserts, printed side by side on one sheet with cut guides between them — which is how these products are actually used. Trying to fit three plays across one 4.75-inch window gives each of them about eight tenths of an inch of height, which is not a diagram, it is a smudge.

Each card carries the play's number, its name, and the play itself drawn exactly as the designer draws it: the same pitch, the same markings, the same players, the same runs. It is the same rendering code as the app, not a second drawing of it, so a card cannot show you something the animation does not.

What you can put on one

Anything you can open in Playmaker. Start from one of the formations and set pieces that ship with the app — a corner routine, a defensive shape, a penalty corner, a fielding alignment — or draw your own play on the canvas first and save it. Soccer, basketball, field hockey, rugby and baseball are all drawn to their real dimensions, so a card for a field hockey penalty corner has the shooting circle on it and a basketball card has the arc in the right place.

American football is here too — the field is drawn to its real dimensions, eleven-a-side and flag, 5v5 and 7v7. A gridiron wristband is usually a different artefact from a play card, though: it is a numbered list of calls rather than a picture, because twelve diagrams on a wrist coach window gives each of them a fifth of an inch. That list, and the situational call sheet that goes with it, are on the football wristband maker. Use this page when you want the play drawn on the insert.

Printing it

Choose A4 or US Letter — the sheet packs as many cards as fit on the paper you have, and tells you how many that is before you print. Then:

1. Print at 100%, with "fit to page" or "shrink oversized pages" switched off.
2. Check the scale bar at the bottom of the sheet against a ruler.
3. Cut along the guides. Card stock survives a wet Saturday better than copier paper, and a laminator or a strip of packing tape over the face of the card survives most of a season.
4. Slide it in with the play upright as you would read it on your own wrist.