The watchlist is the app

Saturday, somewhere in your association there's a dozen matches under way, and the players you want to watch are scattered across all of them — three in the 1sts, two in the 2nds, three in junior games, one has to play for his school.

Nobody has solved this with a search box. A search is something you do once and throw away. A coach needs the opposite: something that persists, that they built deliberately, and that every other screen in the app organises itself around.

That thing is the watchlist.

A true list, not a query

The first design decision was to make a watchlist durable. It is a list you maintain — you add someone, move them between lists, pin the list you live in, share it with your assistant coach who can re-share it down to the junior coordinator. Owner writes, recipient reads.

The second decision is invisible, and it does the real work.

A row on a watchlist is not a name — names fragment. The same cricketer turns up with a middle initial one season and without it the next, plays two grades in the same summer, moves clubs and starts a fresh record. Add them to a list as a name and you get a card with a third of their cricket on it and no way to know.

Adding a player to a watchlist in PlayStats merges the fragments into one identity. Every number on the card — batting, bowling, fielding — is computed across all of them. Two-club juniors read St Joseph's College · Geelong CC on the same row. The card knows which club is which half of the year. It is the least glamorous feature we have built and it is the reason the numbers are clean.

Filters are a lens, not a setting

Watchlist filters — season, grade, format, batting position — used to be saved per list, as a property of the list itself. It looked helpful — it's quietly catastrophic.

A coach narrowed a list to one grade to answer one question, then closed the app. The grade pinned itself to the list. Months later that same list showed em-dashes down the entire column for anyone who had never played that grade — including a batter with 937 runs and another with 1,471. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing. It just silently answered a question nobody was asking any more.

The rule that came out of it: a watchlist is a list, which is durable; a filter is a lens, which is not. Every list opens clean — current season, all grades, all formats, all positions — and any narrowing you do lives for that session and then returns to default. You don't ask a list one question. You ask it nine in ninety seconds.

On Saturday, the list becomes a subscription

The list is also how live works. You don't watch a match — you watch your people. Put a list on and every active player surfaces, whichever ground they're on, whichever grade they're in.

The live rail sits at the top of Home and from this season it carries a scope chip — All lists ▾, or the name of one list. For a coach with a hundred names across four lists, the old view was a wall. Pick a list and the rail re-scopes to exactly that group, in one move.

The rail sizes itself to the day, because five players live and forty live are different problems:

"At stake" is ordered, not guessed: a milestone just reached, then anyone at the crease or with the ball, then just-out, then figures from earlier, then yet to bat. The numbers in the tail plus the cards on screen always add up to the total in the heading — nobody disappears without the screen telling you. Pick a list with nobody live and it shows honestly: 0 live here · 7 in all lists.

The scope chip applies to the Performances feed and the full Live screen too. One choice, made in the first screenful, points Home at the job you're actually doing today.

That's the whole idea, really. The list is the thing you maintain; everything else in the app is a view of it.