Getting Started
OpenPlay Football is a structured JSON language for describing educational football plays independent of rendering or simulation.
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Demo Schema v0.1
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A structured language for describing football players, assignments, timing, and decisions.
OpenPlay Football schema documentation
OpenPlay Football Demo Schema v0.1 is a structured JSON format for modeling American football plays. This documentation explains how a validated play record represents players, field coordinates, formations, routes, blocking assignments, defensive coverages, timing, decision points, and educational narratives.
Developers, coaches, educators, and football learners can follow these 13 guides in order to understand the schema from its basic document structure through complete examples and future plans. Each topic connects football terminology to reusable data that can support diagrams, animation, simulation, and coaching explanations.
Document Structure
Every document uses a strict common envelope plus offense-specific or defense-specific sections.
Coordinates
OpenPlay uses field-relative coordinates so records remain independent from screen size and rendering technology.
Players and Alignments
Player records provide stable identities, football positions, labels, initial coordinates, alignment language, and team side.
Assignments
Assignments are discriminated records that connect one player to a route, block, rush, coverage, handoff, or supporting responsibility.
Routes
Route assignments describe receiver movement as ordered semantic path segments rather than renderer-specific drawing commands.
Blocking
Blocking assignments encode pass protection, run responsibilities, and movement without tying them to a particular diagram implementation.
Defensive Coverages
Defensive documents combine player-level coverage assignments with a whole-call description of front, coverage, pressure, run fits, and disguise.
Timeline
Timeline events provide ordered semantic moments for a future animation layer without embedding animation-library code in content.
Decision Points
An offensive decision point pauses a concept at a meaningful read and presents bounded football choices with different consequences.
Narratives
Narrative fields make each OpenPlay record useful as educational content even when no diagram or simulation is running.
Examples
Canonical repository records are the executable examples for OpenPlay Football version 0.1.
Future Vision
OpenPlay Football 0.1 demonstrates that one structured play record can support diagrams, animation, simulation, decisions, and explanation. This roadmap separates what exists now, what Challenge Lab funding targets, and what remains a longer-term possibility.