Squad selection what-if checker
Problem
The depth chart that decides who plays lives in a slide deck, updated by hand the night before a fixture. When an assistant coach wants to try a different selection, perhaps resting a player nearing a rest-day threshold or working around a loan-quota limit, the checking happens in their head or on a scrap of paper, not against the actual rules. Eligibility conflicts and rest-rule breaches usually surface only when the team administrator reviews the list against the submission deadline, by which point the coach has already committed mentally to a plan that has to be unpicked. Nobody can quickly compare two or three genuine options side by side; each version means redrawing the whole deck.
Product idea
A sandbox for testing a squad selection before it becomes the one that gets submitted. Load the current roster and the season's limits (squad size cap, loan slots, age-eligibility bands, minimum rest days since last match) once. From there, build a draft selection by toggling players in and out and see live flags for any conflict: a loan slot over quota, a player short of required rest, a position group left thin. Build a second or third draft and compare them side by side rather than redrawing a slide each time. It writes nothing to any system of record and submits nothing. It is deliberately a place to try things, not the place where the real squad sheet lives.
Who it is for
Assistant coaches drafting selection options, the team operations manager who owns squad limits, and the team administrator who currently catches conflicts too late to matter.
Possible first version
A single-screen web app: upload the current roster and enter the season's limits once (squad cap, loan slots, age bands, rest-day rule), then build a draft selection and see live conflict flags. Save and compare up to three drafts side by side. Out of scope for version one: no integration with any registration or roster system, no connection to the actual submission workflow, and no write-back anywhere. Limits are entered manually each season and updated by hand if a competition changes its rules.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 1-2 week prototype
- Roles involved
- Assistant coach, Team operations manager, Team administrator
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Collegiate athletics, Academy & youth, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Spreadsheets and slide decks, Squad and roster management tools
- Product framing
- Test or simulate
Questions we get asked
What do we need on day one to try this?
A roster export, even a CSV pulled from a spreadsheet, and the limits that apply to your squad this season: cap size, loan or work-permit slots, age-eligibility bands, and the rest-day rule your welfare policy sets. Nothing is entered automatically, so someone has to type the limits in once at the start of the season and update them if a competition changes them mid-year.
Does this replace the slide deck we use for the depth chart?
Not on its own. The slide deck is where the settled plan lives; this is where a coach tries a plan before it is settled. Some clubs end up retiring the deck once drafts here are reliable enough to present directly, but that is a decision to make after using it, not an assumption to build on. It also does not touch the separate workflow that turns a final selection into a submitted, signed-off squad sheet.
Our coaches already know the rules and pick the squad from memory. Why formalise it?
Most of the time memory is enough, which is exactly why the tool matters on the weeks it isn't: a loan slot that quietly filled up, a rest-day threshold that shifted because a fixture moved, a quota nobody double-checked because the coach was confident. The tool is not correcting the coach's judgement on who should play. It is checking the arithmetic underneath that judgement before it becomes a problem at submission.
Does it pick the squad for us?
No. It has no opinion on who should play and makes no recommendation. It takes whatever selection a coach proposes and checks it against the rules that are configured, nothing more. If a club wants selection recommendations, that is a different and much less trustworthy product; this one deliberately stays a checker, not a picker.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
Tell us about itMore in Team & roster operations
- Dual-squad player allocation simulatorA scenario tool that lets a club test how splitting a shared player pool across two simultaneous fixtures affects each squad's numbers, before either team sheet is written.
- Fixture congestion squad depth simulatorA scenario tool that projects squad depth across a congested run of fixtures against rest rules, showing where a position group would fall short before the block starts.
- Kit and equipment issue-and-return workflowA workflow that replaces the kit manager's notebook with a request-issue-return ledger, flagging outstanding items automatically before travel dates and season-end stocktakes.