Building a lineup

Building a lineup

A lineup hangs off an event — any event, not only a race. Build one every practice if it’s useful.

From the admin event page, or from the Coach tab if you want to skip the drilling, create a lineup, give it a name, and attach a boat. The seat map comes from the boat’s type: two sided columns (Left and Right for dragon boat, Port and Starboard for rowing) plus the special seats that hull needs — drummer and steers for a dragon boat, cox for a coxed shell. Sculling boats get one plain column.

Drag paddlers from the rail on the right onto seats. Drag a seated paddler back to the rail to take them out, or onto another seat to swap. The rail shows each athlete’s availability and preferred side, so you’re not guessing.

Warnings

Warnings recalculate every time you open the lineup, not only when you save, and none of them block you:

  • Side imbalance, left against right
  • A paddler seated off their preferred side
  • A paddler in the boat who cancelled, or who’s marked as not coming

Hard errors do block: too many rowers for the hull, the same person in two seats, someone who isn’t on the team, a side on a seat that has no side, and a boat already committed to an overlapping event.

Treat warnings as information. Seating someone off-side to balance the boat is a normal coaching decision; the warning makes it a decision rather than an accident.

What a balanced boat needs

Side balance. Left and right should be close in total weight and comparable in power. An imbalanced boat crabs and the steersperson fights it the whole race.

Trim. Front-to-back distribution. Heaviest paddlers go in the engine room, benches 5–7, not the bow.

Technical seats matched to ability:

SeatsBenchesWhat you need there
Stroke1–2Metronomic timing, calm under pressure, ignores everything behind them
Front3–4Clean technique, transmits the rate back
Engine room5–7Raw power; timing matters less
Back / rocket8–10Power plus timing; hardest seats to follow from

Practical workflow

  1. Close sign-ups mentally a day or two before the event
  2. Create the lineup and attach the boat
  3. Fix the technical seats — stroke pair, drummer, steers — by hand first
  4. Hit Suggest and let it fill the engine room, or drag the rest yourself
  5. Read the warnings
  6. Save, then print the manifest for the dock
  7. Expect to revise it on the morning

Athletes don’t see lineups in the app. The lineup editor and the manifest are admin surfaces, so tell your crew their bench and side yourself: print the manifest, post it in the group chat, or read it out on the dock. Paddlers do see their own preferred side on the roster, which is enough for them to spot a mistake in their profile before you build around it.