“My phone died at 19-17. I thought: that is the whole match gone”
What happens to a running match when the network drops, the app closes or the battery gives out — and what you actually lose.
A sports hall on a Saturday morning is rarely a place with four bars of signal. Concrete walls, a stand full of phones, a mast just that bit too far away. That is exactly where a coach has to keep score. So a volleyball scoring app offline was never an edge case for Dennis Boekhout — it was the starting point. He built Koach on his own phone, in his own hall.
A conversation about the question every coach asks before scoring live for the first time: what if it goes wrong? About what sits on your phone at that moment, what you really lose, and the way out that is always there.
Every coach about to score live for the first time asks the same thing. What is it?
“What if it goes wrong. That is always the first question, and I think it is a good one. You are about to trust a whole match to a phone. If that thing decides halfway through that it has had enough, you are standing there with a set you cannot reconstruct.
“In most of the halls I visit the signal is poor. Basement courts, a hall tucked behind a dyke, two bars that do not survive a full stand. An app that does nothing without internet simply does not belong there.”
You say this happened to you.
“Last season, away game. My phone died at 19-17 in the third set. It did not crash — it was just flat, black screen, gone. I thought: that is the whole match gone. I borrowed a power bank from a parent in the stand, and when the app came back up the match was still sitting there exactly as I had left it. 19-17, same lineup, same player serving.
“That was the moment I knew that part was right. Not because I had designed it that way, but because it happened to me.”
So where does that match actually live at that moment?
“On your phone. That is the whole answer. Every tap goes to the device first, and only then, if it can, to the server. Not the other way round. The score, the serving order, who is on court, who the setter is, which libero is in, whether you are playing best of three or best of five, and the entire undo stack: all of that sits on your own device.
“That sounds obvious, but it is exactly where we got it wrong early on. I had fields that went to the server but were never stored locally. Restart the app and the serve jumped to the opponent at every set change, whatever you had chosen. You only find things like that by using it yourself for a whole winter.”
Does the coach see that something is up?
“Yes, right at the top. If the connection drops, a dark pill appears there saying ‘Offline mode’. Hold your finger on it and it tells you that your changes are stored on this device and will sync automatically once you are back online.
“As soon as there is signal again that pill turns orange: ‘Syncing’, with the number of changes still waiting. The number counts down to zero and then it disappears. I want you to be able to see that without thinking about it. An app that quietly pretends everything is fine is worse than one that admits it cannot send anything right now.”
So what genuinely does not work without internet?
“Anything that has to come from outside. Koach pulls the pool standings and the fixture list from the federation — over here that is the Nevobo, the Dutch volleyball federation. No connection, no standings: it simply tells you they could not be loaded. Same for importing your fixtures and for sharing a result.
“And your teammates see nothing of your match until you have signal again. That is the honest boundary. Scoring works without internet, watching together does not.”
And if the app closes completely? Flat battery, or iOS throwing it out of memory?
“Then you open it again and pick the match up where you were. Without signal too: the app writes a fresh copy of your whole team to the device after every change, so a cold start simply brings back the last state.
“It took a while before that was fully right, mind you. Early on the score came back but the lineup set one started with did not, or the automatic libero swap was suddenly off. Those are the things you only notice standing in the hall with two sets left to play.”
That screen stays on for the whole match, doesn't it?
“That is deliberate. While a match is running, Koach keeps your screen awake. Otherwise your phone falls asleep in the middle of a rally and you have to unlock it, get the app back and only then tap — and that is exactly the moment a point does not get recorded.
“But it costs power, and I will be honest about that. Two hours of scoreboard with the screen on will drain your battery. I keep a power bank in my bag the way I keep a spare whistle. That is not a flaw in the app, that is just what a screen does.”
So what do you actually lose when it goes wrong?
“Almost nothing, but not nothing, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Worst case, the tap you were making at that very moment. That copy on your device is written right after every change, so we are talking about the last few seconds, not the last set.
“What you can genuinely lose is points somebody else was counting on their own phone at the same time. I will come back to that.”
About that second phone. Can somebody take over?
“Yes. In the Scorekeeping block you can authorise a player or team member with a linked account. They keep score for that match on their own phone, and you see the result in the app as soon as they finish. Handy if you would rather stand on the sideline than stare at a screen.
“One rule though: score on one device at a time. There is one running match per team, and two phones will overwrite each other's points. The app warns you the moment it notices someone else is counting as well, but it cannot fix it for you. And handing over mid-match only works if there is a connection right then — so it is not a backup plan for a hall without signal.”
And if everything goes wrong? No phone, no app, nothing?
“Then you just enter the result afterwards. You can do that for any match, even days later. You put in the set scores, and the sheet where you fill in points and faults per player opens straight after. The match gets an ‘Entered manually’ label and counts towards the season like any other.
“One warning: do not do that for a match you did score live. Entering it manually replaces the per-player totals, and then the momentum, the playing time and the per-set numbers are gone. The app says so, but do read it.”
You are strict about this. Why?
“Because an app that does nothing without internet has no business in a sports hall. Full stop. I have tried apps that went off to load something halfway through a set. That is not annoying, that is unusable: you miss two rallies and after that your whole record is wrong.
“My advice to anyone who does not dare yet: start a friendly match, put your phone in airplane mode and score a full set. Do that once at home or at training and you will not have to think about it on Saturday. You build that trust before it is 19-17, not after.”
Put your phone in airplane mode
Try it yourself: start a friendly match, switch your phone to airplane mode and score a full set. You will see straight away what stays put and what waits until you have signal again.
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