Cycle-ball tactics on your phone: the Bikeball Playbook

Draw plays, set up set pieces, watch the move run: the Bikeball Playbook is open to everyone from today. It runs in the browser, needs no account and speaks five languages — built for cycle-ball coaches and players who explain tactics at the side of the court.

Anyone who coaches cycle ball knows the problem: a play is almost impossible to explain in words. Since 27 September 2026 there has been a tool for it on the web. The Bikeball Playbook is a tactics board for cycle ball that runs in the browser — on a phone in the hall just as well as on a computer at home. Place the bikes, drag the riding lines, draw the shots, tap play, and the move runs.

The court is drawn to scale: 14 by 11 metres, with the goal area, the defence zone, the four-metre mark and the centre circles exactly where the UCI rules put them. To set up a corner, a kick-off, a free hit or a four-metre penalty, pick the formation from the list of set pieces instead of pushing every bike into place by hand.

A play is made of steps. In the first the bikes stand in their starting positions, in the second where they should be after the first move, and so on. Between steps the bikes and the ball travel smoothly, and a timeline scrubs the sequence back and forth — the way a coach walks through a cycle-ball drill frame by frame. Each rider gets one riding line per step and there is one ball path, so the drawing stays readable.

Cycle ball is played off the front wheel, and the Playbook draws it that way: riding lines start and end at the tip of the bike, not at its centre. To carry the ball, drag the shot line onto the green riding line of that bike — the ball then follows the bike curve for curve until it is played on.

Saving needs a free account; drawing works without signing in. Finished plays travel by an eight-character code: the coach sends the code, the player redeems it and gets a copy of their own. If one of them changes something later, the other's version stays as it was — a play is a draft, not a shared document.

The interface speaks German, English, Japanese, Czech and French, the languages of the big cycle-ball nations. It costs nothing, carries no advertising and needs no app: open bikeball.app/playbook in a browser. The rules are at bikeball.app/en/cycle-ball-rules, the glossary of terms at bikeball.app/en/cycle-ball-glossary.