Why I built this

This summer, a coach I respect told me he was not sure he could keep coaching.

It was not the kids and it was not the baseball. It was all of the peripheral responsibilities that came with coaching. Work had gotten busy, and between game plans, lineups and practice plans he was losing two to three hours a week to a laptop. He is a veteran coach. He already had systems for everything else. This was the part that was going to make him quit.

I knew exactly what he meant because I had experienced those same feelings on more than one occasion.

I have spent nearly two decades as an educator, including several years teaching 8th grade social studies, and I now work at a university. I have also coached Little League for more than ten years as an assistant, a co-coach and a head coach, and in that time I have had the privilege of coaching close to 200 kids. I introduced both my boys to tee ball at four and they caught the bug immediately. Both lefties, which I did nothing to deserve.

It has been one of the real joys of my adult life, and not only the part with my own kids in it. Baseball is a game of adversity and failure and it can be unforgiving. Helping a nine-year-old work through a mistake, focus on the next pitch instead of the last one, back up a teammate, shake a hand after a loss: that has been worth more than the wins. I have never regretted an evening spent on a ball field.

But being a good coach means a lot of work nobody sees. League meetings, emails, phone calls, GameChanger, uniforms, team parents. And then, the night before every game, the hardest one: the lineup.

A lineup is part science and part art. There is strategy in it and it changes with the situation. Pool play is not the finals. The regular season is not All-Stars. On top of that sit the pitching limits, the required rest days, the catcher eligibility rules and, in most leagues, mandatory play. Underneath all of it is the thing that actually matters: doing right by every kid on the roster, putting each of them somewhere they can succeed.

Get it wrong and the consequences are real. Injuries. A coach suspended for a pitch count violation. A kid who feels forgotten. A hard conversation with a parent or a league official. All of it is preventable, and preventing it is what takes the time.

A careful lineup used to take me about 45 minutes, with a pencil and an eraser and several drafts. A practice plan took another 15 to 30, because a good practice is structured the same way a good lesson is, with goals, stations, a schedule, and a sense of purpose. Two games and a field practice in a week, and I was at two hours before I had even coached anybody.

And then a parent texts at eight on Saturday morning to say their kid has a fever. Now the hour is gone. Every inning shifts, the pitching plan moves, somebody has to cover a position they were not slotted for, and you are rebuilding it in the parking lot with the game starting in forty minutes. Most of us have done the other thing instead: carried a lineup we knew was not quite right and hoped nobody noticed.

So I built the thing I wanted. Pick your pitchers, and Even Innings does the rest in about a minute: every player in every inning, playing time spread across the season, every pitching limit already checked, on one page you can carry to the field. When that text arrives, mark the player out and rebuild. It takes a minute before you head to the field or it can be done in the car instead of eating an hour you do not have.

And it does not assume every game is the same game, or every team the same team. Most Competitive puts your best gloves at the hardest spots, which is what a tournament asks for. Developmental moves everyone somewhere new, which is what a Minors team in February needs. Balanced plays to win while it keeps rotating, and that is what most of a season actually looks like. Pick the one that fits the day and the age you are coaching. If none of them fit, empty the grid and set every inning yourself.

I built it to get my evenings back. I also built it to keep a good coach in the game. He was the first person I showed it to, he is still coaching, and we are using it together this spring.