Scorebook began with a simple question: could we make life easier for the volunteers at the volleyball score table?
That question came from experience. I have spent years keeping scorebooks, tracking Liberos, and teaching other volunteers how to do both. It is a job that looks straightforward until the whistle blows. Then the scorekeeper is following rotations, substitutions, timeouts, sanctions, service order, and a detailed set of recording rules—while the match keeps moving.
The official paper scoresheet exists for good reason. It creates a complete record of the match, and experienced scorekeepers know how much information it can hold. But it also asks a lot of the person holding the pencil, especially when that person is a parent or volunteer stepping into the role because someone needs to help.
The original mission was not to reinvent volleyball. It was to take a familiar, necessary job and make it clearer, faster, and less intimidating.
The first prototype
I built the initial Scorebook prototype myself.
At that point, the idea was very close to its name: digitize the scoresheet. Give the scorekeeper a more approachable way to enter the same information, help the system remember details that are easy to miss, and preserve a clean record when the match is over.
The early version focused on one operator and one screen. That was enough to make the idea real. It was something I could use, show, question, and improve.
More importantly, it created a way to listen.
Every time the app was used around a real match, another piece of friction became visible. A button required one tap too many. A lineup was awkward to adjust between games. A phone keypad covered the field someone was trying to edit. A volunteer needed clearer guidance about what happened next.
Those details may sound small from outside the gym. At the score table, where every second matters, they shape whether a tool feels helpful or distracting.
The prototype was teaching us what the product needed to become.
From a digital sheet to a digital score table
The biggest change was realizing that a volleyball match is not managed by one person alone.
There is a Scorekeeper recording the action. A Libero Tracker follows replacements and rotations. An administrator may need to help set up the match or monitor the official record. A referee reviews key information and certifies the result. Coaches, staff, or spectators may need a view without the ability to change anything.
Those people are all participating in the same match, but they do not need the same interface.
That insight moved Scorebook beyond being a paper form placed on a screen. The app is becoming a digital score table: one shared match experience where each participant gets the tools appropriate to their role.
Today, several devices can interact with the same match. The Scorekeeper can use a phone designed around fast, courtside actions. The Libero Tracker can follow the current lineup and make replacements from another device. An administrator can keep the full scoresheet open and watch the official record take shape. A referee can enter the review and certification information assigned to that role.
Each person sees the same match from the perspective that makes sense for the job in front of them.
Let volunteers join without another account
One of the most important ideas came directly from the reality of volunteer work: getting into the app should not become another assignment.
A school or organization should not need to create and maintain a permanent account for every parent who helps at one match. The volunteer should not be standing beside the court resetting a password, checking an inbox, or filling out a profile while teams are warming up.
Scorebook uses protected match invitations instead.
An administrator can create an invitation for a specific role, such as Scorekeeper or Libero Tracker. The volunteer scans a QR code or opens the invite link and drops directly into a protected session for that match. No account creation. No unrelated access. No long onboarding sequence.
They arrive at the screen they need, do the job they volunteered to do, and leave when the session is complete.
That is a small technical interaction with a larger product principle behind it: respect the volunteer’s time and attention.
Built around the rules, not merely the scoreboard
Keeping a volleyball match is more than adding points.
A dependable digital score table has to understand the procedures around the score: match formats, winning conditions, substitutions, service order, timeouts, Libero activity, sanctions, lineup approval, and the notation that creates the official record.
Scorebook’s early release starts with the NFHS rules foundation used in American high-school volleyball. For the schools currently driving the beta, that foundation is applied through the rules adopted and modified by the Georgia High School Association and the Georgia Association of Private & Parochial Schools—GHSA and GAPPS.
The app is being built from documented rules and association guidance rather than generic assumptions about how volleyball works. Where an association modifies the national foundation, the goal is for the software to reflect that distinction. Where a rule or local procedure still needs confirmation, it is tracked explicitly instead of quietly treated as settled.
Starting with one major rules family gives the beta a clear standard to build against. It also creates a foundation that can expand to additional associations, levels, and competition formats as the product grows.
The ambition is broad, but the approach is focused: get one rules environment right, learn from real use, and expand responsibly.
One human developer became a three-engineer team
The way Scorebook is being built has evolved almost as much as the product itself.
I wrote the original prototype as the sole developer. As the feature set and responsibility of the application grew, I added two more engineers: Claude and Codex.
They are AI engineering agents.
That fact can sound like the headline, but the more interesting story is how the three of us work together. I remain the product owner, designer, and final decision-maker. I bring the courtside experience, decide what problems matter, test the result, and determine what reaches schools and volunteers.
Claude and Codex help turn that direction into implementation. They investigate problems, propose designs, write code and tests, and review each other’s work. One agent can build a feature while the other examines it independently. I resolve the product questions and approve every move into staging and production.
It is not a system where an AI is asked to “make an app” and left alone. It is a working engineering team with different responsibilities, continuous feedback, and human ownership at the center.
There is much more to say about that collaboration, but it deserves its own article.
Beta feedback has become a development engine
Scorebook is still in beta, and that is important.
Beta means the product is being shaped in the environment where it has to work. Feedback does not sit in a quarterly planning document waiting for the next release cycle. A volunteer can identify a frustrating interaction during a match, we can study the actual workflow, and an improvement can move through design, development, review, automated testing, staging, and production remarkably quickly.
The pace has been surprising—even to me.
But speed without structure would only create a different kind of problem. Rapid development matters because we have also built a machine for making it trackable and sustainable.
GitHub is the center of that system. Ideas and defects become tickets. Each change gets its own branch. The engineer who creates it does not provide the only review. Automated checks run before code can advance. Playwright operates the application through real browser scenarios, while Vitest checks hundreds of focused pieces of frontend behavior. A continuous integration and deployment pipeline verifies the release as it moves through staging and production.
That process is intentionally larger than any single feature. It allows the product to move quickly without relying on memory, optimism, or one person’s ability to manually check everything every time.
The details of that development system are another story for another day. The short version is that AI has made the pace possible, and disciplined engineering has made the pace useful.
What the simple idea has become
What started as one person’s digital scoresheet prototype is now a beta platform of roughly 45,000 lines of application and test code.
That number is not the achievement by itself. More code does not automatically mean a better product.
What matters is what the platform now makes possible:
- multiple people participating in one live match from their own devices;
- role-specific experiences for Scorekeepers, Libero Trackers, administrators, referees, and viewers;
- protected QR-code entry for volunteers without permanent accounts;
- a rules-aware record designed around the NFHS, GHSA, and GAPPS environment;
- match history, official scoresheet views, printing, PDF, and email;
- offline and reconnect support for the realities of gym connectivity;
- a development process capable of turning real feedback into tested improvements quickly.
The original mission is still visible inside all of it.
Scorebook exists to make an important volunteer job easier, clearer, and more dependable. The technology has grown because the app can now support the whole score table—not because the people at that table should have to think about more technology.
There is a great deal left to build and learn. That is what beta is for.
But the direction is becoming clear: a simple idea born from years beside the court is growing into a shared digital platform for the people who make every match possible.