A rugby playbook app: plays that move, on every player's phone

Every team has the same playbook: a marker whiteboard in the changing room, a blurry photo in the WhatsApp group and three players who actually know it.

On Tuesday you walk through the scrum move. On Saturday, ten minutes into the second half, 12 runs the wrong line and 15 arrives a second late. It's not that they weren't listening. A rugby play isn't a drawing, it's a sequence: who moves first, which line, and when the pass goes.

A photo can't show that.

What goes wrong with the old whiteboard

A marker board has three problems that better handwriting won't fix:

• It's static. Every arrow is there at once. The 10's loop and the 15's run look simultaneous, and they aren't.
• It gets wiped. What you explained on Tuesday is gone by Thursday, and whoever missed training never saw it.
• It lives in a group chat. The photo sinks under forty messages and nobody digs it out on Friday night, which is exactly when they'd need it.

A play in phases that runs by itself

In the Kanteo playbook a play is built the way you'd explain it on the pitch: phase by phase.

Pick the starting situation (scrum, lineout, kick-off, defence, open play) and the pieces line up in position. Then drag each player with your finger to where they need to be in the next phase, and the arrow draws itself. Every phase has its own note, something like "10 fixes and passes behind to 12", so the explanation doesn't depend on you being in the room.

Press Play and the move runs. The pieces travel from phase to phase at the speed you choose, on a loop if you like, and you finally see what the photo never could: the timing.

You can use half pitch or full pitch, with or without opposition, with cones and a ball.

Type it in your own words and it draws itself

Drawing six plays phase by phase takes an afternoon. That's why there's Describe it.

You write the play the way you'd tell an assistant coach:

Scrum on the left. 9 feeds 10, who passes to 12; 10 loops around outside and 15 hits the gap.

In under a minute the play is built: pieces in place, every phase with its movement and its note. It always comes out as a draft, so you can check it and drag anything that doesn't look right before anyone else sees it. What used to take an afternoon becomes a few minutes of tidying up.

Publish it and the whole squad has it

While a play is a draft, only the coaching staff can see it. When it's ready you publish it, and from that moment every player has it on their phone, moving, on Tuesday, on Friday night and on the bus to the game.

The player who missed training sees it exactly like the one who was there. Someone joining mid-season gets the whole playbook sorted into groups (scrum plays, lineouts, kicking game, whatever you decide) instead of asking for photos from September.

And if this week's opponents already know it, you hide it and it disappears without being deleted.

Your captain can draw too

In plenty of teams the person who designs the backs' moves isn't the coach, it's the 10 or the captain. There's a permission just for that: Draws plays.

You switch it on from the player's profile, and they can create and publish plays without becoming a coach. They don't see squad selections, match reports or their teammates' personal details. Just the playbook.

How to build the season's playbook

If you're starting from scratch, an order that works:

• Start with five. Two scrum moves, two lineouts and one from open play. A forty-play book nobody knows is worth less than five everyone does.
• One play, one name. The same one that gets called on the pitch. If it's "Gamma" in the changing room, it's "Gamma" in the app.
• A note on every phase. One sentence, not a paragraph. It's what the player will read on their phone.
• Publish before training, not after. Let them arrive having watched it move, and spend the session running it.
• Duplicate for variations. The same move with 13 as a decoy is a copy with two phases changed, not a new play from scratch.

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The Kanteo demo opens with the playbook already set up and plays inside: run them, move pieces and see what a player gets, with no sign-up. Open the demo or, if you've seen enough, set up your club in two minutes.