Draft Night: Open Source Little League Draft Software
For over a decade, I’ve been running Little League drafts out of a Google Sheet. You know the drill: a meticulously crafted spreadsheet, a dozen coaches with varying comfort levels around technology, and me hovering over the shared document praying nobody accidentally deletes a formula.
The snake draft order alone caused confusion every year. Round 1 goes 1 through 14, round 2 goes 14 back to 1, and by round 3 someone’s asking “wait, whose pick is it?” Then there’s the coach kids—players who need to land on specific teams in specific rounds based on their ranking. Managing all of that while trying to keep the draft moving was a juggling act.
This year, I finally built the thing I’ve wanted for a decade.
What It Does
Draft Night is a real-time draft management app. The admin runs the board, coaches follow along on a read-only view, and nobody can accidentally break anything.
The snake draft logic is automatic. Coach kids get pre-placed in their assigned rounds. There’s a 60-second timer to keep picks moving, desktop notifications so coaches know when something happens, and each team gets MLB colors so you can actually tell the columns apart at a glance.
During the draft, you can edit player notes on the fly, swap players between teams if a trade happens, and manually place picks if you need to fill in a slot retroactively. If someone gets drafted by mistake, you can undo it. If the whole thing goes sideways, there’s a nuke button.
The Stack
Next.js 14 with the App Router, Neon PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, and Server-Sent Events for real-time updates. Deployed on Vercel.
It’s Free
The code is open source and on GitHub. If you’re running a Little League draft—or any snake draft, really—feel free to grab it. Pull requests welcome.
I built this for my own league, but if it saves someone else from the Google Sheets nightmare, even better.
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