How it works

A week

1. The match goes up. An admin posts a fixture, or a standing weekly schedule posts it automatically so nobody has to remember.
2. People say yes, no or maybe. First to say yes hold the spots. Once the squad is full, later yeses queue in order, and if somebody drops out the next in line is in.
3. Teams get made. The balancer splits whoever is in by grade and position, keeping the sides level and giving every side somebody in goal. The manager can then move anybody by hand.
4. You play. The teamsheet is readable at arm's length in daylight, because that is where it gets read — outdoors, before kick-off, with eleven people crowded round one phone.
5. Somebody marks who turned up. Including the people who said yes and did not. If a teammate covered for them they are named; if it was somebody's cousin, that is recorded too and no rating is asked for.
6. You rate the people you played with. One tap each, five teammates, under thirty seconds. Nobody ever sees who gave what.

Team balancing

Ratings accumulate into a skill grade per player, per group. When teams are dealt, the balancer spreads keepers first, then everyone else strongest-first onto the lightest side, then runs a bounded pass of swaps that narrows the gap between the strongest and weakest teams.

Two sides, or four across two pitches, or a three-team rotation — the same machinery handles up to six teams and sixty players on one sheet.

Trust

Everyone starts at the same place. Saying you are coming and turning up earns a little back. Saying you are coming and not showing costs a lot. Recovery is deliberately slower than the fall, and it gets slower again for somebody carrying cards — so a pattern takes real weeks to repair, the way it should.

Every change is a line in a ledger that is append-only. Nothing is edited and nothing is deleted; a correction is another line. That means a player's record reads as what actually happened rather than as whatever somebody last decided it should say — including when an admin reverses their own call.

Cards

Yellow and red, for the things groups already argue about: not showing, pulling out late, aggression, unsporting behaviour.

A card is not one person's decision. Members flag an incident, and a card only exists once enough of them agree — and when they disagree about how serious it was, the mildest reading wins. The player gets one reply, and it stays attached to the card permanently.

A yellow clears itself if the next match is clean. An admin can void a card entirely, and when they do the trust comes back — as a new line, with the card still on the record marked voided.

Ratings

Each sport is rated on four things a player of that sport would recognise — attack, defence, passing and stamina for football; scoring, defence, playmaking and rebounding for basketball; raiding, tackling, escaping and stamina for kabaddi. Keepers are judged on keeping, not on shooting.

Scores are shrunk toward the group average until there are enough of them to mean something, so one bad afternoon does not define a new player and a score cannot be reverse-engineered from a handful of ratings.

And they stay anonymous. Not by policy — by construction.

What a group sees, and what it does not

A group sees its own matches, its own scores, its own attendance and its own cards. It does not see what happened in anybody's other groups. The one thing that crosses that line is a player's overall rating and trust on their profile, visible to anyone who shares a group with them — a deliberate trade, and one we describe honestly on the privacy page rather than glossing over.