What's new
What has changed in VolleyRoster, and what it means when you're actually using it.
October2026
You pick the starting rotation on the setup screen.
The rotation from the builder used to be the only one a match could open in. If you saw the other team and wanted to start somewhere else, you had to leave setup and do the rotation step again. Setup now asks which rotation to start in, in the numbers you call on the bench, and you can change that choice there until the first point.
You can change the lineup after you've pressed Start.
Pressing Start used to lock the six in. If you got to the gym and changed your mind before the first point, the setup screen only offered Resume or Discard. You can pick a different lineup, change the rotation or who serves, or edit it in the builder and come back, and the court follows. Once a point is on the board, that set keeps its six and the next set is where a lineup change goes.
Deleting a lineup asks first.
Delete on a lineup used to remove it immediately, six and all. It now asks, names the lineup, and lets you put it back. The matches you already played with it stay in your season.
Review shows each lineup on the court.
The last screen before a match listed your six by position, which tells you who is playing and not whether they are standing where you meant. Each lineup now has a small court beside its serving order — numbers in their starting spots, your libero in her own colour where she comes on — and with more than one lineup you can pick the one that starts by pressing its court.
The tracker asks who serves first instead of assuming.
“We serve” used to be chosen for you before you had looked, and when the other team actually served first, winning that opening rally did not rotate you — the court on screen stayed one place behind the floor for the whole set. It now waits for your answer. From the second set on it alternates the way the rules do, and leaves a deciding set for you to call.
One rotation number on the tracker, not two.
After a side-out the header said Rotation 6 while the message under the court said you had rotated to 2, and the picker for the next set counted a third way. All of them now use the number you would call out — the zone your setter is in. A new set also opens in the rotation you started the last one in, not wherever it happened to finish.
Start game opens on the lineup you just built.
Pressing Start game on the review screen could land you on a tracker telling you to build a lineup — it was looking for your team somewhere the builder had stopped keeping it. It now opens on the team you were just working on, and if you open the tracker on its own at a match, it picks up your most recent one.
Say how the other team compared, before you start.
One tap on the setup screen: stronger, even or weaker. It is the difference between “we side out better since we changed the lineup” and “we played three weaker teams”, and without it every comparison across a season is a guess. Asked before the first serve on purpose — afterwards the answer gets coloured by the result.
Your team can say what it actually is.
Age group and level, both optional, both in the team dialog. A 48 per cent side-out is poor for an 18U club side and remarkable for a 13U recreational one, and the app had no way of knowing which you were — so it could never tell you whether a number was any good. Now it can be asked that question.
September2026
Your teams are there when the gym has no signal.
Signed in, your teams lived on the server and nowhere else — so a coach who built a lineup at home and drove to a match with no reception was told to go and build a lineup. They are now kept on the device as you read them, and that copy answers whenever the network cannot. The tracker starts, the match records, and everything catches up when you are back on wifi.
Your libero stops vanishing for a whole rotation.
Two rotations have your middle serving, so she steps on to take it — and the app then left her standing in the passing cup for the rest of that rotation, which is the one place a team with a libero never puts her. She now steps off the moment the other team has the ball, and your libero takes the pass.
In play shows the rally you served, as well as the one you passed.
In the two rotations where your middle serves, she is in the back court for that entire rally — substitutions happen between rallies, never during one. In play now asks which rally you mean, so you can show your team both pictures: the one you served, and the one your libero passed.
Serve receive is drawn the way you would actually set it up.
The players who are not passing — the setter releasing, the middle at the net, whoever is tucked out of the lane — used to stand a step inside where they really are. They are now out on the sideline, tight to the net and deep behind the endline, which leaves the three passers a clean lane and makes it obvious at a glance who is taking the ball.
Rotations are named for the setter.
The buttons used to read 1 through 6 in the order they were built, which isn't what those numbers mean to anybody. Rotation 1 is now the one where your setter is in position 1, and the cycle runs 1, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 — the same thing you'd call across the court.
Where the libero defends is your call.
Middle back to start with. If you keep yours at left back, flip the toggle and the diagram moves them across, with your outside sliding over to cover the middle. Nothing in the rules settles this one, so it shouldn't have been settled for you.
The in-play diagram looks like the real thing.
Setter up at the net, where the second ball actually gets set. Front row on one line. Back three level across. It used to put everybody at slightly different depths, which read less like a system and more like six players who hadn't quite lined up.
Room for 24, and a red shirt.
Twelve was never going to hold a training group or a club squad. And if someone's out for the season, mark them red shirt — they stay on the roster, they stop turning up as a sub you can bring on.
The squad card counts as you fill it.
It says “max 24” before you've added anyone and “14 of max 24” once you're going, so you know how much room is left without counting down the list.
Press a rotation to see the six you lose it in.
The season view will tell you which rotation is leaking points. Now you can tap it and there they are — who was on, what they were playing — instead of going off to work out which lineup that was.
The dashboard is a season, not a filing cabinet.
It used to be a list of games you'd already played. It now answers what you're actually asking in February: which lineup is holding up, which rotation keeps letting you down, and whether that player you keep shuffling about is genuinely better in one spot than the other.
Your season knows which six played which set.
That's the part that makes comparing lineups worth doing. A lineup's numbers are the sets that lineup was on court for — not the whole match averaged out and handed to everyone.
Lineups read in the court's own colours.
The tag beside a name in a report is the same tag on that player on the court. One colour per job, the whole way through, so you're not translating as you read.
A match comes out as a spreadsheet.
One tab per set. Open it in Excel, hand it to a parent, drop it in a folder with the rest of the season.
Sign in and your teams come with you.
Sort the lineups out on the laptop at home; they're on your phone when you get to the gym.
Leave, and take your season with you.
The download sits right beside the delete button, so you're not hunting for your own data on the way out the door.
Learn and Help live in different places now.
Learn is the reading — why a rotation works, what the rule book actually says. Help is how to do a thing in here. When they shared a shelf you were always in the wrong one.
A proper block-and-floor-defence guide.
Perimeter, rotation, where the seam goes when the ball's hit wide — on a court that moves while you read it.
Back goes back a step.
Each stage of the builder has its own address, so the back button takes you one step up the build rather than dumping you on the front page.
August2026
Put it on your home screen and it works without a signal.
Reception dies about four steps past the lobby in most gyms. Track the match anyway.
All six skills, errors and all.
Serve, receive, set, attack, block, dig. The errors matter as much as the kills when you're reading it back on Sunday.
The stat sheet is about one player at a time.
It was a wall of counts. Now you pick a player and read their match through the phases of play, which is closer to how you'd talk them through it.
Colour tells you the phase.
Serve, side-out and transition separate out at a glance, so you can see whether a problem is your serving or your receiving without doing sums.
The libero is a role, not a switch.
Say who yours replaces and how you use them, and every rotation does it properly from then on.
Change the squad after the whistle.
Someone turns up late, someone rolls an ankle in the warm-up. Sort the squad out without starting the match again.
Serve receive traced from real diagrams.
All three systems, drawn from the diagrams coaches hand out, rather than something that only looked about right.
Step through a rally.
Serve, receive, in play — one tap at a time, walking pace. Handy when you're showing a player what's meant to change and when.
A word when the set's already won.
It used to let you keep adding points to a set that finished at 25 and say nothing.
Buttons you can hit with a thumb.
Bigger rotation pills, and the help bubbles open properly on a phone. You're holding this in one hand at the side of a court.
Every game you've tracked is still there.
Open any of them and get the full report back, not a summary.
The report is built from the match itself.
Every touch you logged is still in there, so you can narrow any card down to a single set and see where it went.
Rotations named after whoever serves them.
“Maya's rotation” lands; “rotation 3” doesn't. Nobody on a bench thinks in numbers.
Every player has a page.
Their skills, their phases, their season — and you can get to it straight from the squad instead of going through a game first.
A backup file that's actually yours.
One tap and the season's on your laptop. And nothing older can land on top of something newer, so an old copy can't quietly undo a match you just tracked.
Shirt numbers required, and no two the same.
Two number sevens halfway through a third set is not a puzzle you want to be solving.
A player you took off can come back.
And deleting anything takes two deliberate presses, because nobody has ever meant to do that by accident.
Demo mode.
A full sample season, two teams, a weakness hidden in it to find. Have a proper poke about before you type in a single real name.
July2026
One squad, many lineups.
Type your players in once. Every lineup after that picks from them, so you're not writing the same fourteen names out again.
A path through the build.
Players, lineups, rotation, sets, review. You can see where you are and what's still to do.
Positions mode.
Left front, middle back, right back. If you don't run your team by “opposite” and “outside”, you don't have to start now.
Any player, any position.
The system gives you a sensible starting six, and then gets out of the way. It's a suggestion, not a rule you have to argue with.
Substitutions that don't argue with you.
It stopped policing league sub limits and re-entry. You know your competition's rules better than it does — it just records what you did.
Pick the rotation you start in.
You don't always start in 1, and now you don't have to pretend you do.
The court is drawn to scale.
A true 9-metre square, so what's on the screen is shaped like the thing in front of you.
Dark mode.
For a gym with the lights down and a phone at full brightness.
The whole builder on a phone.
Not a shrunken desktop screen — built to be used standing up.
June2026
The first version.
A rotation builder for the 5-1, 6-2 and 4-2, serve receive, the in-play switch, the libero as a proper substitution, printable cards for each player, saved teams, and a live tracker that rotates along with you.