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How we designed watch-first scoring

The specific design decisions behind CourtSauce's Apple Watch scoring interface — two tap zones, Crown to undo, the display, and what we got wrong before we got it right.

Before CourtSauce, I used a phone-based scoring app during pickleball. By the end of a typical match, I’d interrupted play to record points between fifteen and forty times, depending on how long the games ran. Each interruption took three to eight seconds. That’s two to five minutes of match time spent on bookkeeping — more than some entire games.

The watch idea wasn’t a design insight so much as an obvious question: why are we using the device that isn’t on our body?

Starting from the wrist

The first design constraint was extreme: the Apple Watch screen is small. On a Series 6, the 44mm case gives you a display about the size of a large postage stamp. On a Series 4, even smaller. Whatever we put there had to be readable at a glance, operable with a finger wearing court gloves, and usable while sweating.

This ruled out most of what phone-based scoring apps do. No detailed score history. No player roster. No settings. Those live on the phone. The watch shows exactly what you need during a point: the current score, and who’s serving.

For pickleball specifically, that means:

Fitting that legibly on a watch face, while making it usable in motion, took several iterations. The final display uses large numerals for the score and a smaller server indicator below. Colours distinguish the serving team at a glance. The layout changes when server sides switch so the serving team’s score is always on the correct side relative to their court position.

Two zones, one tap

The primary interaction is a tap to award the rally. We considered several alternatives:

Swipe gestures: Swiping left or right to distinguish between the two teams. This felt natural on paper and terrible in practice. In the middle of play, a swipe is imprecise — you can easily swipe the wrong direction under mild adrenaline. It also requires more deliberate motion than a tap, which costs attention.

Separate tap zones: Left half of the screen scores for your side, right half for the opponents. This is what we shipped. The obvious trade-off — you glance to confirm the right zone — we addressed two ways: colour-coding each side so the right target is unmistakable, and adding a no-look shortcut for your own points (below).

Digital Crown for scoring: We considered using the crown as the scoring input — turn one direction for a point, the other for undo. It didn’t feel right for scoring: the crown motion is good for scrolling and selection, but it doesn’t feel like “record an event.” So scoring stayed on the tap zones. Undo, though, is where the crown eventually earned its place — more on that below.

The two zones won because they map directly to what you’re tracking: who won the rally. Serve rotation — which server, which side, when partners switch — is handled automatically, so you never tell the app “player 2 is serving now.” On Series 9 and later, Apple’s Double Tap is the no-look fast path: a pinch records a point for your side instantly, with a one-tap “actually, them” correction if you need it.

Crown to undo

Scoring needs a reliable undo, because mistakes happen — you tap too quickly, you tap twice, you tap while you’re still mid-rally.

We first shipped undo as a long press on the watch face. It worked, but it had two problems in real use: it competed for the same surface as scoring, and it buried undo inside a menu alongside other actions. Over many matches the Digital Crown — the control we’d set aside for scoring — turned out to be exactly right for undo. Your fingers already know it, it’s physically separate from the tap zones, and it can’t be triggered by the motion that scores a point.

So undo moved to the Crown. One deliberate turn backs out one point — and no matter how far or fast you spin it, it’s always one point per flick, restoring the score and the server. Turn it the other way to redo. The long press now opens only the secondary, deliberate actions — recording a conduct penalty, ending a match early, abandoning — the things you genuinely want behind an extra step.

One early concern with any undo: accidental triggers during normal wrist motion. The Crown answers that cleanly — a deliberate turn isn’t something casual movement produces, and there’s no on-screen target to brush. Accidental double-taps (scoring twice in quick succession) were the more common mistake in testing, and those back out with a single flick of the Crown.

Serve rotation as a solved problem

Pickleball’s serve rotation is the feature players most frequently ask for by name. Two servers per side in doubles. Server 1 and Server 2. Side switching. The end-of-game reset. Getting this wrong ruins the game.

Our implementation tracks all of it automatically. You never tell the app “player 2 is now serving” — you just record the point, and the app knows who serves next based on the rules. The watch face updates accordingly after every point.

The edge cases took longer than the main flow:

We tested each of these with real players who spotted inconsistencies our internal team had missed. The squash pro who reviewed the squash implementation found three rule variants we hadn’t accounted for. Sports rules have long tails.

What the phone does during the match

While the watch handles scoring, the iPhone runs in parallel. During a match, the phone app shows:

The phone is the secondary display, not a scoring surface. If you’re watching a match, the phone is where you follow it. If you’re the scorer, you’re wearing the watch.

The two sync over Bluetooth. The watch sends each scored event to the phone immediately. If Bluetooth is momentarily interrupted (this happens at outdoor courts with interference), events queue and sync when the connection restores. We’ve never lost a point to a sync failure.

Designing for tennis and squash

Squash and tennis present different design problems.

Squash is fast. The pace of play is faster than pickleball, which means the time between points is shorter and the tolerance for fumbling is lower. The tap-to-score, Crown-to-undo model transfers well, but the display needed to handle PAR scoring (to 11, with two-point win requirement) and traditional scoring (to 9, with hand-out tracking). We’re implementing both.

Tennis has natural scoring structure — Love, 15, 30, 40, Deuce, Advantage — that’s displayed differently than a simple number. The watch face for tennis shows the conventional score notation rather than integers. That took more thought to lay out clearly in the available space.

Tennis also has sets. After a game ends, the watch transitions smoothly to the next game. After a set ends, you see the set score before beginning the next set. The transitions needed to be deliberate without being interruptive — you should know clearly when a game or set ends, without the app getting in the way of playing the next one.

What we still improve

The current CourtSauce Pickleball watch face is the fourth significant revision. It’s the best version, not the final one.

Things on our list: better handling of the case where two players on the same team need to be tracked individually (for per-player statistics rather than per-team), more voice note controls from the watch face without going to the phone, and a simpler way to handle unusual match formats that don’t fit standard options.

Watch hardware will improve too. Larger displays, faster processors, longer battery life — all of these open design options that aren’t practical today. We build for the hardware that exists, with an eye on what’s coming.

The watch-first philosophy is a constraint and a liberation. It forces clarity about what actually matters during play and frees everything else to live on the device where there’s space to do it properly.

Why CourtSauce exists covers the origin story. Why CourtSauce covers the broader product philosophy.