Rugby substitution app for minis and junior coaches
Work out who plays when before kick-off, then keep the rotation fair while the match is actually happening. Free to use on the phone in your pocket, with no sign-up.
The problem with rotating a minis squad
Every junior coach has had the same morning. Fourteen children turn up for a squad of ten. Two arrive at half seven having already missed the warm-up. One goes off holding a wrist in the second quarter and somewhere on the touchline a parent is counting how long their child has been stood watching.
Doing that arithmetic in your head, on a cold pitch, while also coaching, is the part nobody warns you about. Most coaches end up with a scrap of paper that stops being accurate about four minutes in.
What Equal Play does
You enter your squad plus how many players are on the pitch, then it builds a rotation across the whole session so that game time comes out as level as it can. Then, when the morning does what mornings do, you tell it what changed and it rebalances the games that haven't happened yet.
- Fair rotation across the full morning, not one match. Minis fixtures are usually several short games and fairness only means anything measured across all of them.
- Late arrivals. Mark a child as arriving late and they're excluded from the games they genuinely missed, then brought fully back into contention for everything still to come.
- Leaving early. The same in reverse, for the child who has a birthday party at eleven.
- Injuries. Take a player off and cover comes on automatically, chosen from whoever is most owed time.
- Mid-game swaps. Swap two players and the half-game each of them played is counted properly rather than rounded away.
- More than one team. If you run an age group and help with another, each keeps its own squad and its own record.
Everything is stored on your own phone. The rotation planner needs no account, there's no team code to circulate and nothing to lose if a parent asks you to delete their child's name. Player names never leave your phone.
How the fairness works
Rather than cycling players in a fixed order, Equal Play tracks how much each child is owed. A player's fair share is the number of games they were available for multiplied by the rate everyone should be playing at. Subtract what they have actually had and you get a debt. Whoever is owed most goes on next and ties break in favour of whoever has been waiting longest.
That sounds fussy, but it's the only approach that survives a real festival. A fixed rotation falls apart the moment somebody arrives late or limps off, because it has no way of knowing that one child is now three-quarters of a game behind everybody else. A debt model just recalculates and carries on.
If you want to see the underlying arithmetic for your own squad, the equal playing time calculator shows what a perfectly even split would look like before any rotation planning.
On match day
- Enter the squad who have turned up and how many go on the pitch.
- Set how many games you're playing and generate the plan.
- Work down the card for each game. The players who should be on are listed and the ones sitting out are shown alongside.
- When something changes. A late arrival, a knock, an early finish. Record it and let it rebalance the remaining games.
- At the end, the summary tells you what each child actually played, which is a far better answer to give a parent than "roughly the same as everyone else".
Does it only work for rugby?
No. There is nothing rugby-specific in the rotation itself, so it works for football, hockey, netball, basketball or anything else where a squad is larger than the number of players allowed on at once. It's built around rugby because that's where the awkward cases turn up most often: big squads, several short games in a morning, children drifting in and out.
Playing time rules
Age grade rugby in England sets two limits. The maximum a child may play in a day goes up a grade at a time, so the figure to check is your own appendix. The floor is the same everywhere: the RFU's Half Game Rule, which is that every player in the match day squad gets at least half of the available playing time. For how to check both, see Regulation 15 playing time for coaches. Read against the RFU's 2026/27 appendices in August 2026.
Common questions
How do you rotate a rugby squad fairly?
Track how much game time each child is owed rather than cycling them in a fixed order. A player's fair share is the games they were available for multiplied by the rate everyone should be playing at. Subtract what they have actually had and whoever is owed most goes on next.
What happens when a player turns up late?
They are excluded from the games they genuinely missed, then brought fully back into contention for everything still to come. A fixed rotation cannot do this, because it has no way of knowing one child is now three-quarters of a game behind everybody else.
Is there a free rugby substitution app?
This one is free with no account and no team code to circulate. Everything stays on your own phone, so player names never reach a server and there is nothing to delete if a parent asks.
How do you keep it fair across a festival rather than one match?
Fairness measured inside a single short game is close to meaningless, because a squad of fourteen cannot divide evenly into ten places. The rotation is built across every game of the morning instead, so a child who sat out most of game one has first call by game three.
The rest of Equal Play
Match day is one half of it. The other half is the Tuesday before: a catalogue of 100 drills for minis rugby, written for the age group you coach under Regulation 15, plus a session planner that adds the minutes up while you build so you find out at the kitchen table rather than at the pitch.
- Rugby drills by age group, U7 to U12, with what arrives when
- U9 drills, the tackle year, plus U10 once rucks arrive
- Ready-made sessions for every grade, free to read with no account