Autumn is here, and for me that means that we’re done with all that 7s silliness and it’s time for rugby 15s season. This year our club has a new coaching staff and we’ve got a lot of new faces around the men’s team due to new people moving into the area and several moving away. We’re intense as far as most amateur athletics go, but even still it’s only four hours a week in the same place, and due to various life commitments it’s rare for all of our typical starters to be together. So, like most every business I’ve been a part of through my career, we have to build our culture remotely. We still get together outside of practice in various sized groups for everything from volunteering to socializing, and of course during match days we’re all together, but that’s only 12-15 Saturday’s a year. We’ve got a couple Whatsapp groups for sharing highlights from matches, a bit of healthy trash talking about our favorite teams during the International windows, details of day to day operations of the club, and of course some general banter.

A lot of culture comes down to having a shared understanding. A set of ideas that everyone in the group can bring to mind when a name is said. That can be the name we use for a certain field, or a piece of equipment, or even the nickname that someone is known by. But in our world, few things are more important than having that shared understanding of plays. The short set of words that tells everyone on the field where all 15 of us should be and where we should be going. That quick shout brings the same vision into everyones head when our Halves are yell it across the pitch. That understanding doesn’t come for free, the coaches, captains, and veteran players have to be invested into the language and concepts themselves, and they’ve got to put the effort in to growing that understanding with others.

One of the best mediums for sharing that is visually. We’ve all got the vision of the coach drawing up a play on a chalkboard in the classroom, clipboard in the huddle, or kids drawing it out in the dirt for sandlot ball. Theres a reason we say a picture is worth 1,000 words.

There’s more than a few applications on the market that let people do this on computers. I remember my own football coach having a simple application to do it before my senior year. Some of these are very good. However, all the ones I found seem to be driven by mouse clicks to define the animations and keyframes. And after trying to build a few plays using them, I realized that wasn’t for me. If you know me, you know that I don’t tend to like clickops very much. If there is a way to define things in plain text, and have those things version controlled, then I will almost always opt for that for long-term maintenance and flexibility, even if it’s often a little bit more investment up front.

Seeing nothing on the market that let me do that, I decided to scratch my own itch and spent a couple of hours last week and authored rugby-motion. Building heavily on motion-canvas for the keyframing logic, it allows the user to define the plays in YAML format, defining where each player starts, and where they should be at given timestamps. It allows for defining their position relative to other players as well as to their own previous position. It outputs to a small and simple mp4 files at resolutions meant for cell phones so that our players can “study” pretty much anywhere. Having just created it we haven’t use it much, but the response has been very positve.

I’ve got some ideas for including an audio overlay, along with optional subtitles, to allow even more in depth explanation, and my early experimentation with PocketTTS, that looks very promising. It’s been a fun project and I look forward to extending it as I get feedback from my club and others.