The problemThe text has your name on it
You want to drill Tuesday. You text one person and wait. You can't text five at once, because three might say yes and now it's a four-person session you wanted one-on-one. So you go one at a time, which is slow, and slow means you're still unresolved as the day gets close. Then you text everyone in a hurry and get the double booking you were trying to avoid.
The group text doesn't fix it. Nobody wants one for drilling. And asking a better player to drill is an ask with your name on it. It costs you something to send and it costs them something to turn down. After it goes quiet twice, you stop asking.
What I builtA session nobody has to answer
Drillbag makes the first yes final. Someone posts a court. The people they drill with hear about it, in the order they chose, and the first tap takes the spot. Nobody can be bumped and nobody can overbook, so you don't wait on one reply before the next person hears.
A posted session isn't addressed to anybody. Somebody takes it or nobody does. The better player sees a free night they can take instead of a request they have to answer. Some nights they take it.
Nobody is turned down, because nobody was asked.
How it worksThree beats
- Post. A day, a time, a court, how many. Your Tier 1 hears first. If it's still short by the time you set, it opens to the next tier on its own.
- Hear. A ping lands on the right phones, or a text where there's no ping. No feed, no thread, nothing to scroll. You only see a session when the person who posted it put you in a tier.
- Tap. First tap takes the spot. When enough people are in, the session says ON, and everyone in it hears that too. Nobody has to say no, because nothing asked them.
What it replacedThe group text, and the twenty texts before it
For the crew it runs for, posting a session is a few taps and hearing about one is a ping. Who hears about your sessions is yours to sort, and nobody is shown where you put them. It works the same way back. The whole thing is private and invite only: somebody already on it adds you and texts you a link.
On the recordThe facts, same six for every one I build
- The problem
- Filling a court by text, one person at a time, because texting five at once overbooks it.
- What we built
- Someone posts a session, the people they drill with hear first, one tap takes the spot, and the session says on or off by itself.
- How long
- One week. Designed on August 25, 2026; on the crew's phones September 1.
- Running since
- September 1, 2026, for one crew in Boise. Invite only, at drillbag.app.
- By the numbers
- 21 people, 20 sessions, posted by 8 of them, as drillbag.app says of itself.
- What it replaced
- The group text, and the one-at-a-time texts before it.
- Built for
- My own crew. Private, invite only, and I'm in it.
- Made of
- One small server, no dependencies, a single database file. Pings by web push, texts from a toll-free number when there's no ping.