Equal Playing Time Generator

In youth sports, the #1 priority of a basketball coach shouldn't be trying to win every game but to provide an opportunity for kids to have fun, gain confidence, and work on their skills in friendly competition. These days, more and more youth leagues agree with this statement and mandate coaches to provide fair playing times for all players.

Splitting playing time fairly isn't as trivial as it might sound. As a coach, it's pretty easy to lose track of how long your players have already played and who to substitute for whom. That's why I've created a tool that helps you to divide playing time fairly among your players!

Just pick the number of players on your team and the length of the game and you get a recommendation on how to substitute your players including a rotation chart and substitution plan.

If you want to create more complex rotations check out the Rotation Planner App that let's you create a subsitution pattern using an easy drag-and-drop interface.


Equal Playing Time Generator


A few things to notice:
  • This substitution pattern doesn't take into account the positions of your players and just rotates through your roster (Player 6 subs in for Players 1, Players 7 subs in for Players 2 etc...)
    So if you want to make sure that you don't play 3 centers and no point guard at the same time, sort your players by position (PG-SG-SF-PF-C-PG-SG...) this way you always substitute players who play the same position
  • Picking shorter playing stints makes sure that every player plays the same amount of time in the first and second half. If your roster has an uneven number of players, longer stints lead to players playing more time in one half than the other.