Freeball help

What Freeball is

A student manager or a coach scores the match on a tablet, tapping the player and then what that player did. The tablet keeps working with no wifi at all and catches up when it is back online.

Nothing is typed twice. The box score, the per-set tables, the rotation numbers, the season reports, the public page families watch, the MaxPreps and Hudl exports and the between-set AI summaries all come from the same play-by-play. When something was recorded wrong, you fix the rally and every number that depended on it is recalculated.

The three surfaces

The admin site

The pages you are reading this in: Seasons, Teams, Players, Matches, Reports, Rule sets, Devices, Members and Settings, all under your organization. This is where a season is set up before game day and where the numbers are read afterwards.

The scorer app on the tablet

A separate app, installed to the tablet's home screen and paired once to a device you create on the Devices page. It holds the day's matches, the rosters and the rule sets, and it scores offline. It is the only place a match is actually scored; the admin site never scores.

The scorer carries its own button-by-button help. Tap the ? on its toolbar, or More then Help: how to score. This help center does not repeat it.

Freeball Live for fans

The public side. No account and no sign-in: a family opens your organization's page, picks the match, and follows the score, who is on court, the last rally and the play-by-play as the bench scores it. Freeball Live can be installed to a phone's home screen and can send a notification when a match starts.

A match only appears there if you gave it a public or unlisted visibility. See creating a match.

Roles and who can do what

Everybody in your program has one role in your organization. They stack: each role can do everything the one below it can.

• Viewer: reads matches, reports, player pages and rosters. Changes nothing.
• Manager: the student manager who scores. Adds and edits seasons, teams, players, matches and match rosters, reads rosters from a photo, and creates and revokes devices. This is the lowest role that can open the scorer.
• Coach: everything a manager can do, plus rule sets, importing a match from a file, Rebuild stats, correcting the play-by-play after the match, generating AI set summaries, and setting a match's visibility.
• Admin: everything above, plus Members (adding people, changing their role, removing them) and Settings (name, location, time zone, public player names).

Separately from all of that there is a site admin, an operator of Freeball itself. A site admin reviews new organizations at Admin in the nav and approves or rejects them. It is a flag on a person, not a role in your organization, and it gives nobody a place in your program.

Privacy

These athletes are minors, and the defaults are built around that.

• A new match is private unless somebody changes it. A private match has no public page at all.
• Public pages show jersey numbers only. Names appear there only when an admin turns on "Show player names on public live pages" in Settings, and even then it is a first initial and a last name, and only for your own players, never the opponent's.
• The between-set AI summaries send jersey numbers and stats. They never send a player's name, a note, or the opponent's name.
• The one place a name does reach the AI is the roster sheet photo, because reading the names off the sheet is the whole point of that feature. The photo is never kept by Freeball, and it is not used to train AI.
• An organization that has not been approved yet has no public pages at all.

Terms and conditions

The terms and conditions say who Freeball is for, who is responsible for athlete data, what the AI-assisted features may and may not be used for, and how to get data deleted. Everybody with an account accepts them: at sign-up for the person who created the organization, and at the first sign-in for everybody else. When a new version is published you are asked once more. See the reference.

Where to start

• Getting started walks a new program through setup in order, from sign-up to a match ready to score.
• Match day is the walkthrough of an actual night: the tablet, the sets, and what a coach reads afterwards.
• Reference has one section per page of the admin site.
• Stat definitions says exactly what every abbreviation on the box score means and how it is worked out.
• Questions and answers covers the things that go wrong in a gym.