Trace It, Don't Redraw It: Turning a Whiteboard Photo Into a Digital Play

Every staff has the same drawer: a phone full of whiteboard photos from a late-night install session, a napkin sketch from the parking lot after Friday's game, a play an assistant drew on a legal pad during a coaches' clinic. None of it is in the playbook. All of it should be.

Redrawing a hand-drawn play from scratch is the reason it never happens. You already did the hard part — you know the formation, the routes, the assignments. Staring at a photo on your phone while re-clicking through a play editor to reproduce it is just friction, and it's easy to lose a detail in translation.

Trace Photo, in the Play Editor's canvas toolbar, skips the translation step entirely.

How it works

Click Trace Photo and choose a picture of a hand-drawn play — a real whiteboard, a clipboard, a legal pad, whatever's in front of you. The photo drops in behind the field as a reference layer.

From there:

• Position and scale it. Click Adjust to drag the photo into place and resize it. A ghost circle shows you the size a player token will be, so you can match the photo's scale to what you're about to draw.
• Fade it back. An opacity slider dims the photo so your own players and routes stand out clearly once you start drawing on top of it.
• Trace it with the normal tools. Place players, draw routes, add blocking and motion — the same Player, Route, Block, and Motion tools you'd use on a blank field, just guided by the photo underneath.
• Hide or remove it anytime. Toggle the photo off to check your tracing against a blank field, or remove it once you're done. Removing the photo never touches the players and routes you've already placed.

Why tracing beats redrawing from memory

The difference between tracing and freehand redrawing isn't speed — it's fidelity. When you're reproducing a play from memory or from squinting at a photo on your phone, small details drift: a route breaks a yard early, a lineman's split looks a little off, a motion path doesn't quite match what actually got drawn on the board. Tracing removes that guesswork. The photo is right there under your cursor the whole time.

It's also faster to get something onto the field than starting from a blank canvas, especially for a play with an unusual formation or a route combination you don't diagram often. You're not inventing placement — you're following a guide that's already correct.

A manual tool, on purpose

Trace Photo doesn't use AI to guess at the play for you. It's a reference image and a set of alignment tools — you're still the one placing every player and drawing every route, which means you're never stuck reviewing an AI's interpretation of a blurry photo. What ends up in your playbook is exactly what you drew, guided by exactly what was on the board.

Have a whiteboard full of plays that never made it into the system? Start free and try Trace Photo from your next play's editor — no card required.