Personal & experimental
Dugout
Plan the innings. Bring the card.
A visual lineup planner that helps youth baseball coaches organize positions and playing time.
Overview
Dugout is a visual lineup planning tool I created to help youth baseball coaches organize player positions, manage substitutions, and plan playing time across innings. Inspired by traditional magnetic lineup boards, it brings the planning process into a digital format and provides a printable lineup card coaches can use during games.
The problem: planning beyond the first inning
As a youth baseball coach, I found that planning lineups could be surprisingly time-consuming. Beyond putting players in positions, I needed to balance playing time, rotate players fairly, avoid benching kids in consecutive innings, and still put together a competitive lineup.
With games often lasting only four innings, managing a roster of 9 to 12 players requires some thought. Absences, injuries, and last-minute changes make planning more challenging.
Using my phone during games wasn't practical. I was already using GameChanger, and between coaching bases and managing the team, I needed something I could quickly reference without another screen.
The solution: a familiar board, made digital
I started with the familiar concept of a magnetic baseball lineup board and wondered why the same experience couldn't be digital.
Dugout lets coaches visually organize players across innings, making it easier to see who's playing where, who's sitting out, and how players are being rotated. The board brings batting order, field positions, bench assignments, and lineup checks into one view. Coaches stay in control of the decisions, with a clearer picture of the plan before the game.
A plan I could take to the field
Once the lineup is planned, coaches can save a simplified lineup card and print it to take to the field. It gives assistant coaches, players, and parents a shared reference for the game plan.
A mockup of the lineup card coaches can save and print for reference during a game.
My role
Dugout is a personal project inspired by my own experience coaching youth baseball. I identified the problem, developed the concept, designed the experience, and used AI-assisted development to begin building the application around a workflow I knew firsthand.
The traditional magnetic lineup board gave me a practical starting point. I adapted that familiar way of arranging players into a digital planning experience, rather than beginning with extensive prototyping.
Current status
Dugout is in beta and publicly available for other coaches to try. It remains an ongoing personal project, with the goal of making lineup planning easier, encouraging fair playing time, and helping coaches arrive at games with a plan they can use.
