Behind the Build: Adding Manual Team Selection
When Birdie Board first started taking shape, one of the earliest goals was to make team setup as smooth as possible. Golf matches can be anything from friendly scrambles to competitive multi-round events, and no two groups organize teams the same way. Some want complete control. Others just want the app to handle it. That balance led to the creation of a simple but powerful feature: Manually Set.
In this early development video, I walk through how players can now manually set their teams. You’ll see three sections on the screen:
Unassigned Players in light gray
Red Team
Blue Team
Players can be dragged and dropped between boxes to build teams however you want. It’s fast, visual, and easy to tweak as you go.
This new button sits right alongside another feature we built earlier—Auto Balance. That one uses a number-partitioning algorithm to automatically divide players based on their handicaps. In short, it tries to make each team’s total skill level as balanced as possible.
The idea came from real golf trips. On my last trip, we used the Auto Balance feature for our daily team games. On the final day, we had a 1v1 format, and thanks to the algorithm, most head-to-head matchups ended up with handicaps within just one or two strokes of each other. It made the competition tighter and more fun.
But Auto Balance isn’t the whole story. Sometimes, golfers just want to choose teams their own way—mixing friends, rivalries, or random pairings. The Manually Set option gives that flexibility. You can even combine the two: auto balance first to get a fair starting point, then fine-tune the lineup manually.
This feature might not sound flashy, but it represents what Birdie Board is all about—making real-world golf simpler, faster, and more fun to organize. Every new button, even one as small as this, comes from real matches and real feedback.
If you’re curious about how Auto Balance works in action, check out my post about that golf trip here. It’s a great example of how these small details behind the app translate directly into better games on the course.
