Questions clubs ask

What is Court Craft?

Court Craft is a web app that a sports club runs on. It puts training drills, fixtures, a video library, club information and coach tools in one place, on every player's phone, in the club's own badge and colours. It was built for Huish Tigers Basketball club and has been running live since September 2026 with eighty players across five squads.

Who is it for?

Grassroots and junior clubs, where coaching is mostly volunteered and the admin currently lives in a group chat, a spreadsheet and somebody's memory. It is aimed at a club running several squads rather than a single team, and it is designed for players young enough that collecting email addresses from them is a problem in itself.

Is there an app to download?

No. Court Craft is a web app. A player opens a link and adds it to their home screen, where it gets its own icon and runs full screen with no address bar. There is no app store, no review queue, and an update reaches everyone the moment it ships rather than when they remember to install it.

How do children sign in without an email address?

A player signs in with their first name and shirt number, for example Luca10, plus three words their coach generates and hands them. There is no email account, no password to forget and nothing to verify. Coaches sign in the same way. A coach can reissue anyone's three words at any point.

What does it hold about a child?

As little as it can, and a club should know exactly what that is:

• A first name, and an initial only where two players in a squad share one.
• A shirt number, a squad, and the scores they log themselves.

It holds no surnames, no addresses, no dates of birth, no phone numbers and no photographs of players. There are no trackers, no analytics and no advertising cookies: one cookie, so a player stays signed in. Everything sits on a single server in the United Kingdom, and nothing is sold, shared or passed to a third party. Season records are deleted automatically after three seasons.

Does it work without phone signal?

Yes. Sports halls eat reception, so the drills, the timer and everything a player has already logged keep working with no bars at all, and catch up when they are back outside. That was a requirement rather than a nice extra: a training app that needs wifi is useless in the room it is meant to be used in.

Can we use our own drills and our own standards?

Yes, and this is the part most clubs care about. Your coaches create their own sections and their own drills. For each one they choose how it is scored, either the most repetitions inside a time window or the fastest time for a set number of repetitions, set the clock anywhere from five seconds to ten minutes, attach a video, and set all four of their own standards for bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

A new club starts with an empty library and fills it with its own coaching. The drills, the timings and the standards belong to the club, not to the app, and no other club's material comes with it.

Can our coaches change things themselves?

Yes. Coaches add players, issue and reissue sign-ins, manage squads, post fixtures with meet times and travel details, add videos and write the club pages. The club's admin coach decides who is a coach. Nothing on that list needs a developer, which is the difference between a tool a club uses and a tool a club is stuck with.

Will it look like our club?

Yes. A club sets its badge and its colour once, and every screen follows: buttons, progress rings, headings, the tab bar and the icon that lands on a player's home screen. It is not a logo dropped into somebody else's app.

Does it work for sports other than basketball?

Nothing in it is specific to basketball beyond the words a club chooses. Fixtures, squads, travel details, a video library, timed skills work and club information are the same shape for netball, badminton, football, rugby and most club sports. Basketball is simply where it was built first.

Who owns the data, and can we leave?

The club does, and yes. The data is backed up nightly and is exportable on request. There is no lock in and no per-player monthly fee waiting to grow with your membership.

What does it cost?

It depends on how many squads you run and what you want loading before you start, so we quote per club rather than publishing a price that fits nobody. The first conversation is free and there is no obligation at the end of it. Clubs are not flush, and we would rather find out early whether this is realistic for yours than waste your committee's time.

Who built it?

Niggle, a one-person studio building small bespoke tools. Court Craft runs on Node.js and SQLite on a single server, in plain JavaScript with no build step and no third-party packages anywhere, so there is no supply chain to audit and nothing quietly rotting in the background.