Changelog

Night-Before Teams, a Playbook, and Expanded Profiles

Teams now auto-assign the night before each game — you get an email with your color (Black, White, or Blue) and your roster, and the game detail page flips from a flat roster into three bordered team cards. The Playbook moves to its own page covering both on-court rules and off-court community standards. Profiles pick up pronouns, an Instagram handle, and a private gender field used only to help balance teams.

Auto Team Assignment

• About 24 hours before each game (10–12 or 15–18 signups), an algorithm assigns players to Black, White, and Blue teams using height, a skill signal (highlights per past game), positions, gender distribution, and past-team variety across the last 5 games
• Every assigned player gets one email with their team color and teammates. The subject reads You’re on Team Black for Apr 27; the body shows the team color block, a teammate list, and a link to the game page
• Roster changes between assignment and tip-off (late signups, cancellations) trigger a stability-first rebalance — only players whose color actually changed get an update email
• At T−1h, admins get a “final teams” email summarizing the roster, sub counts, and late changes
• Admins can regenerate or clear any game’s teams from the admin win-recording page, which now also prepopulates the winning team picker with the auto-assigned teams
• A plain-language explanation of how the algorithm picks teams lives in TEAM_MATCHING.md in the repo

Team Cards on the Game Detail Page

• When teams are assigned, the game page now shows three bordered cards — Black, White, Blue — each with a 2px team-color border, the orange-triangle-style corner accent (in the team’s color instead), a hairline kicker bar, and the team’s roster
• Before teams are assigned, the roster consolidates into a single Roster card with the site signature blue border + orange triangle. As the week goes on, this one card evolves into the three team cards — same chrome family throughout
• A note under the team name in the team-assignment email clarifies that team names match jersey colors. The page repeats the note below the card grid so first-timers know what to grab at the gym
• Mobile orders the Teams card above the Details card so the changing content surfaces first

Pronouns, Instagram & Gender

• Pronouns — a free-text field (placeholder she/her, he/him, they/them) that shows on your public profile under your name when set. Moved up to slot 03 in the profile editor since it relates to how you’re addressed
• Instagram handle — optional, with an Instagram glyph on your profile that links out. When we share highlight clips on our Instagram account, we’ll tag the handle. Clear it to stop tagging
• Gender (Woman / Man / Nonbinary / Prefer not to say) — optional and always kept private. Used only as one of several signals the team balancer uses to spread non-male players evenly across teams. Never shown on your profile
• Height is now required when you save your profile, since the balancer can’t work without it. Existing profiles without a height stay as-is until they next edit
• Username section renamed and reworded so it no longer reads as “claim your Instagram handle” after the new IG field

The Playbook

• New /playbook page with two sections. The On the court section has the existing house rules (first to 7, foul calls, sub rotation, disputes)
• The Off the court section is new — Respect, Harassment, Privacy, Consequences, and Reporting. Spells out the behavior standards and a warning → suspension → permanent-removal ladder
• Linked from the game-detail Questions card, the game-confirmation email, the team-assignment email, and every email footer
• Replaced the inline playbook on the thank-you ticket with a “Read the full playbook” link so the rules have a single canonical home

Policy Updates

• Privacy Policy now covers the new profile fields, including an explicit note that gender is private and never displayed. A new Automated Team Matching section discloses the algorithm’s inputs, that gender isn’t surfaced, and how admin override works. A Your Choices section explains how to edit or clear any field
• Terms pick up a Community Conduct section referencing the Playbook and a Profile Content section noting that pronouns, Instagram handles, and photos are public
• Effective date bumped to April 24, 2026

Faster Avatars

• The dashboard and games list now use the optimized avatar component everywhere — no more broken-image placeholders when clicking through pages quickly
• Optimized avatar variants cache at the Vercel edge for a week. The first player to load a page warms the cache; everyone else gets a near-instant hit after that
• The first six avatars on each game row load eagerly so you don’t see them fade in after the page renders
• When a player uploads a new avatar, the previous file is now removed from storage instead of sitting there orphaned. Cleans up historical orphans on the next upload too

Details & Roster Refactors

• The Details section on upcoming games is trimmed from four cards to two (Location, Questions). Date and Time were duplicative of the game-ticket hero above; time window is now a small caption under Location
• Location card has a small map pin icon next to “Upper East Side” — clicking still opens Google Maps with the full venue + street
• Questions card picks up a Playbook link next to WhatsApp and Email
• Past games drop the “Hoopers” H2 and gray tray around the roster — the bordered ROSTER card stands on its own alongside the video

Smaller Things

• Email template app-name prefix removed from subject lines (the sender address already carries the brand) — “Monday Hoops NYC: You’re playing Apr 27” becomes “You’re playing Apr 27”
• Test-mode email redirect helper (EMAIL_REDIRECT_TO env var) routes every outbound email to a single inbox, so testing team-matching against the prod database can’t notify real players
• README rewritten with current stack, dev setup, architecture overview, and a documentation index pointing to the SIM files, TEAM_MATCHING.md, and the rest of the docs
• Two new scripts for one-off inspection: scripts/inspect-team-balance.ts prints per-team balance for a game; scripts/profile-coverage.ts reports what percentage of active players have each balancer field filled in