Play designer · Sideline caller · Season record
Your playbook, from the whiteboard to the wrist.
ShinyPlaybook is a football play designer built for coaches who actually stand on a sideline. Draw plays on a real field, print the arm band, push the call to a watch, keep the game log while you keep the score — then find out what your team is genuinely good at.
iPhone · iPad · Android phone & tablet · Apple Watch · Wear OS
01 — DRAW IT
A real field, not a blank rectangle
The canvas is a football field with yard lines, hash marks and a line of scrimmage sized for the level you actually coach. Everything you draw is stored in field coordinates, so a play looks identical on a phone in a pocket, a tablet on the bench, a printed page and a watch face.
Seven tools, one thumb
Everything the whiteboard does, without the smudge.
- Straight — down & in, down & out, go
- Curve — drag the handle to shape a hook or an option
- Freehand — draw it exactly the way you say it
- Zone — coverage circles for the defensive install
- Select, add player, erase
The notation your team already reads
Offense as circles, defense as crosses, plus squares and triangles when you need them — each token labelled and coloured by you. Lines get colour, solid / dashed / dotted, and an arrow, block or settle cap, so a route, a blocking assignment and a motion never look alike.
Sized for your league
Pick Flag 5v5, Youth 7v7, Youth 9v9 or Tackle 11v11 and the field, the default personnel and the line of scrimmage all follow. Zoom the downfield distance in yards, or fit the whole play, so a 5-yard flat route and a 40-yard shot both get the space they need.
Watch it run before they do
Play the routes back in motion, right on the canvas. It is the fastest way to catch two receivers arriving in the same window — and the fastest way to show an eight-year-old what "clear it out" means.
Books, not a pile of drawings
Group plays into playbooks — a base install, a red-zone package, a two-minute sheet — and into your own categories inside each. Filter offense from defense, duplicate a play to make the variant, rename, delete. Everything shows as a thumbnail of the real diagram.
The between-series whiteboard
A field with no formation, no players and no book attached — just ink. Draw the adjustment on the sideline in ten seconds, keep it if it was any good, and find it still there next time you open the tab.
For your team: every coach on your staff draws in the same notation, at the same scale, on the same field — so the install you hand your assistants is the install they teach.
02 — GET IT TO THEM
Three ways off the screen
A play only helps if it reaches the player. ShinyPlaybook ships every route out of the app that a youth football sideline actually uses — paper, a picture, and a watch — so you are never dependent on the one your league happens to ban.
Playbook & QB arm band
Print the whole book as a coaching handout, or lay the offense out as a quarterback arm band card. Colour for your own copy, black & white for the twelve you run off at the library. Goes straight to the system print dialog — AirPrint, a PDF, or the printer at work.
Text a play to anyone
Export any play as a clean PNG and send it wherever your team already talks — the group chat, a parent's phone, your coordinator's email. The parent who missed practice gets the diagram in ten seconds, not a description of it.
The play on a wrist
Native companions for Apple Watch and Wear OS, feature-for-feature the same. The watch carries your whole library and lets a player scroll it between drives — and when you send a call from the phone, that play appears on the watch immediately.
- Send from the play editor, the play list, or the live scoreboard
- Diagrams render on demand and stay cached on the watch
- Works from the lock screen complication
For your team: the quarterback stops jogging to the sideline to be told. You get the call in front of them while the huddle is still forming — and if your league only allows paper, the same book prints an arm band that says exactly the same thing.
03 — CALL IT
A scoreboard that remembers the game
Game day is one screen, designed to be used standing up, in the cold, between whistles. Nothing you need on a normal snap is hidden behind a menu.
Set up in four taps
Choose the books you are calling from — a base install and a red-zone package can both be live in the same game — then downs per series (three or four), halves or quarters, period length, and whether your league's clock counts up or down.
Down, distance, clock, score
Everything moves with one tap: gain, first down, turnover, score, flip possession, next period. The clock is derived from a timestamp rather than ticked into a field — lock the phone for two minutes and it comes back showing two minutes gone.
What you called, and where
Every call is logged with the situation it was called in — "Q3 4:12 · 2nd & 7" — the book it came from, and the result you tapped in afterwards. Read it backwards from the last snap while you decide the next one.
Log what they showed
After a snap, tap what the other team was in: man, Cover 2, Cover 3, other zone, blitz or prevent when you have the ball; spread, trips, bunch, empty, tight, motion or trick when they do. Plus how many they rushed. All optional — "nobody looked" is a valid answer and the default.
Yards, in one sheet
Yards gained, touchdown, first down, turnover, penalty, incomplete — recorded as taps on a sheet sized for a glove, not typed into a form. Miss one and nothing breaks; every average the app shows you is over the snaps you actually recorded.
Survives the pocket
The game is written to disk as it happens. The app being killed mid-quarter by a cold phone is treated as the normal case, not the exception — reopen it and the score, the clock and every call are exactly where you left them.
For your team: one person on your sideline keeps the scoreboard, and by doing so accidentally produces a complete, situational record of the game — with no clipboard, no spreadsheet, and nothing to type up on Sunday.
Assistant
A coordinator who has read your playbook
The assistant never invents a play in front of your team. On the sideline it recommends your own plays — the ones your kids have already practised — and tells you why. When it does draw something new, it hands it to you as a suggestion to accept or throw away.
A whole install, from a short form
Answer what it asks about your team — flag or tackle, players on the field, how many seconds the rusher counts, how far your quarterback throws accurately, whether your back is a burner, who needs bracketing, how much man versus zone you want — and it designs a full playbook, offense and defense, drawn on your field in your notation.
What your book can't answer
Point it at a playbook you already have. It reads your actual plays — how deep you ask the quarterback to throw, whether you play man or zone, how many are on the field — so you are not re-answering questions your book already answers. Then it tells you what the unit has no answer for and proposes the plays that would fix it. Nothing is saved until you tick it.
Three calls, best first, with reasons
On the scoreboard, one button. It reads the down, the distance, the clock, the score, the unit on the field, what the other team has been showing you all night — and what your own plays have actually gained against that look — then hands you three plays from your books, drawn out, each with a sentence on why. Send one to the watch, or ignore all three.
For your team: a volunteer parent coaching their first season gets a second opinion that only ever suggests plays their own team has practised — and an experienced coordinator gets a fast second read on a night when the other team keeps sending four.
The assistant is powered by an Azure OpenAI deployment configured in the build. Every other feature on this page works with no network at all.
04 — LEARN FROM IT
The season, totalled honestly
Every finished game is kept: the final score, the full call log, and what the other team was doing. Across the season it adds up into the two reports that actually change how you call a game — what your plays do, and what beats them.
Play usage
Every play you have ever called, totalled over every game on the device — so a staple you run in nine games reads differently to one loud Saturday.
Opponent tendencies
The point is the crossing, not the counting. "Cover 3 on seven snaps" is a note. "You have averaged 8.1 against Cover 3 and 2.0 against man" is an adjustment.
For your team: you stop arguing about which plays work. At the end of the year you can show a parent, a coordinator or a board exactly what your offense did and against what — and you go into next season having cut the six plays nobody could run.
WHO IT HELPS
One app, five jobs on your sideline
A youth football staff is usually four adults, two of whom found out on Tuesday that they were coaching. Here is what each of them gets.
One book everyone works from
Build the install once, print it for the staff, and hand the same plays out as PNGs. At the end of the season the history tells you what to keep — not what you remember keeping.
Call from several books at once
Keep a base install, a red-zone package and a two-minute sheet as separate books and put all three in play at kickoff. The tendencies report tells you when to stop calling into the look that is stopping you.
The call, before the huddle breaks
The play arrives on the watch, or on the arm band in exactly the same notation as the drawing they learned it from. Between drives they can scroll the whole book themselves.
Never stuck for a call
Ask for three plays and get them drawn out, with the reasoning written down — always from the book your team has practised. Build a starter playbook from a short form on the drive to the first practice.
The diagram, not a description
Text the play straight into the team chat. The kid who missed Thursday sees the same drawing everyone else did, and the parent walking them through it in the driveway has it on their phone.
YOUR DATA
No account. No server. No season held hostage.
Plays live on your device as documents in a local database. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into on a field with no signal, and no company between you and your playbook.
Email yourself the season
One tap writes your whole library to a file and hands it to the share sheet — mail it, drop it in a cloud folder, keep it. Restoring is picking that file back up on any device.
iCloud, between your own devices
On iPhone and iPad, playbooks and plays sync through your own iCloud — draw on the tablet at home, call from the phone on Saturday. Deletions carry across properly, so a play you cut stays cut.
Games stay where they happen
Playbooks sync; the live scoreboard does not. A game is one thing happening in one place, and a tablet on the bench should never fight the phone in your hand over the score.
QUESTIONS
Before you put it on a wrist
Is a watch legal in my league?
Check before game day, and assume the answer is league-by-league. The NFL FLAG rulebook prohibits electronic communication between a player and a coach during league and tournament play, and NFHS added a 2025 rule banning devices that record or transmit audio or video. A watch showing a diagram is arguably neither — but an official can rule against you on the field, so ask your commissioner first. This is exactly why the app ships the printed arm band and the shared PNG as well: use the watch for practice, walkthroughs, scrimmages and 7v7, and paper wherever your league says paper.
Does it work with no signal?
Yes. Drawing, printing, sharing, the watch link, the scoreboard and the whole history are on-device and work in airplane mode. Only the AI assistant needs a connection.
Will the assistant invent plays my team hasn't practised?
Not when it is calling a game. Sideline advice only ever picks from the playbooks you put in play at kickoff, so the diagram it shows you is one your team has already run. The playbook builder and the gap analysis do draw new plays — but those are proposals you review, edit and choose to save.
Can I share a playbook with another coach?
Today: print it, send a play as a PNG, or send them your backup file. Coach-to-coach playbook import is the next thing on the list.
How many watches can a coach send to?
One — the watch paired to the phone doing the calling. That is a phone-to-watch link, not a broadcast, so today the pattern is a single watch worn by the quarterback. Sending to every player's watch at once is planned, not shipped, and we would rather say so here than in a review.
Does Android sync?
Not yet. Google Drive sync is built but not switched on, so on Android use the backup file to move a library between devices. iCloud sync works on iPhone and iPad today. Sync is within one platform either way — an iOS coach and an Android coach can't sync to each other.
What is it built with?
.NET MAUI on iOS and Android, drawing on a plain graphics canvas with no third-party rendering engine, storing plays as JSON documents in SQLite. The Apple Watch companion is native SwiftUI; the Wear OS companion is a .NET Android app. Both watches speak the same feature set.
GET IT
Draw it Thursday. Call it Saturday. Know why it worked by Sunday.
ShinyPlaybook is in TestFlight on iOS, with Android and the store releases to follow.