A sport is a JSON file

Friday morning, the WOLFMODE playbook spoke exactly one sport. By Friday night it spoke six — football, soccer, volleyball, baseball, and softball joined basketball — on the whiteboard, in 3D, and on this website. That's not a story about typing fast. It's a story about one rule we refused to break.

The rule is written at the top of our engineering guide: adding a sport must stay cheap — a JSON config, not new application code. If you find yourself hardcoding a sport, stop and reconsider.

Here's what that means in practice. Every playing surface — the gridiron, the pitch, the court, the diamond — is described in a small data file using five drawing shapes: rectangles, lines, circles, arcs, and tick marks. A basketball key is a rectangle and two arcs. A penalty box is three rectangles and an arc. Hash marks are a column of ticks. That one file is read by three different renderers: the whiteboard in the app, the 3D scene's floor, and the play designer on this site. Draw the field once, in data, and every screen already knows it.

So when it was time to go multi-sport, "supporting football" didn't mean rebuilding anything. It meant describing a football field — and then doing the real work, which is coaching content, not code. One day, three releases:

Morning — football. The gridiron surface, plus ten real installs: I-Form Power, bubble screen, trap, play-action shot, 4-3 Cover 3, Cover 2, a fire-zone blitz, and three drills — every player carrying a job description and "when → then" reads.
Afternoon — four more sports. Soccer's attacking half with the penalty arc, a volleyball court where the net is a first-class line, and proper dirt diamonds. Twenty-three more plays: corner-kick routines, serve-receive patterns, double plays, bunt coverages, Rondo, Pepper, Around the Horn.
Evening — all of it in 3D. The animated scene now builds each sport's venue — goal frame, net and posts, real bases — with the right ball, moved by the same possession model: hand-offs stay glued to the runner, passes fly, and a gold ring follows whoever has the ball.

A quick word on how one day holds three releases. The build desk here is a human-and-AI pair: we set the rules, watch the builds, and say the true thing; our AI partner does the typing at a pace we frankly can't. The judgment stays human — the velocity doesn't have to be.

The details are where it gets honest

The first version of our football field was a full 120-yard stadium. It was geometrically correct and completely wrong: twenty-two players huddled into the middle quarter of the screen, and the whole thing read like a toy. Real coaches don't diagram stadiums — they diagram a slice of field around the line of scrimmage. So the surface became a 40-yard window, six units to the yard, hashes on the high-school thirds. Same five shapes, different truth.

Defensive playbooks forced a second decision: in a defensive install, the defense is the team being taught. So Cover 3 puts the defense in your team's color, with roles and reads on the corners and safeties, and the offense is the scout look. Small thing. It's the difference between a diagram and an install.

And some details arrived the way they always do here — a founder watching a build live and saying the true thing. Friday's version: "the ball needs to be with the player running with it — and can the carrier be highlighted?" An hour later the ball tucked properly on every field and the gold carrier ring existed. That loop — build, watch, say the true thing, fix it while it's warm — is the actual product process, same as the day Xavier told us the play designer "still feels like a digital whiteboard."

Why this matters if you coach

Because it means the playbook you get isn't a basketball feature wearing your sport's jersey. Your field looks like your field. Your positions are your positions — QB and TB, SS and 2B, setter and libero. And when a coach who knows more than us looks at our installs and starts itching for a red pen — that is exactly what we want. The starter plays are written to be corrected by experts. If you've played or coached at a high level and want to put your fingerprints on how a generation of kids learns your sport, the door is open.

You can try all of it right now, no login: draw a play in any of the six sports, then hit 🎬 and watch it run in 3D on the right field. Share the link with anyone — it opens on their phone.

— The build desk, WOLFMODE

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