FieldToPlay

Anyone in Portugal who plays a five-a-side, padel, tennis or basketball pickup match knows the routine. Three group chats to find players. A different app for each facility. A phone call to confirm the slot is actually free. A bank transfer to whoever booked. The friction is enough that people just don't play.

FieldToPlay's founder came to Black Bean™ with a clear thesis: there should be one place to find a court, fill the roster, and pay your share. The execution had to feel native to the way Portuguese players actually organise — informal, friend-driven, last-minute — without copying the corporate-league software built for the US market.

The brief was short on pages and long on specifics. A real-time view of facility availability, a player-card system to know who you're playing with, multi-sport from day one, mobile-first because people book from a phone in the car park, and trustworthy enough that strangers join a game and actually show up.

Sports booking lives or dies on the data model. Get the relationships wrong and every feature you add later fights the schema. We spent the first week mapping out facilities, courts, surfaces, opening windows, recurring time blocks, single-day exceptions, sport types, ratings, and how a 'game' bridges all of it.

Once the schema held up to a dozen edge cases (a court that's clay on weekdays and synthetic on Saturdays, a facility that closes on holidays except this one specific Saturday), we sketched the routes. Public discovery (browse facilities, browse open games) had to be aggressively SEO-friendly — it's how new players find the platform. Logged-in flows (book, join, manage your card) prioritised speed and finger-distance over visual flourish.

Visual design came last and was the easiest part. Players don't want to be impressed by a sports app — they want to find a court, see who's playing, tap a button. Spacious type, big tap targets, calm green accent, and a clear status hierarchy: confirmed bookings dominate, tentative ones quiet down, cancelled ones disappear.

FieldToPlay runs on Next.js with the App Router, a Postgres database with PostGIS for proximity queries, Drizzle for type-safe schema work, and a thin tRPC layer between the app and the database. Auth is e-mail magic-link plus a phone-number OTP step before joining a stranger's game — low-friction for honest players, just enough barrier to deter ghosters.

The booking engine works against a normalised availability table that pre-computes open slots per court, refreshed by a cron whenever a recurring rule or exception changes. That sounds boring, and it is, but it's why a search across forty facilities returns in under sixty milliseconds while every booking attempt is racing-condition safe.

Player cards are the social layer. Each player has a profile that grows with the games they show up to: sports they play, level, neighbourhoods they cover, reliability score (am I going to flake?), and recent partners. Strangers get enough signal to feel safe joining a six-a-side with a host they've never met.