Court Shade

Watch it work

You stand at the net and turn round once.

No forms, no guessing distances, no satellite guesswork about your trees. The phone reads the skyline at every degree as you go — the house, the boundary hedge, the big gum on the west side — and how high each one stands from where you actually play. Then it puts your whole year on one chart.

Why one turn is enough

The trees never move. The sun does.

Your skyline will be the same next August as it is today. Only the sun changes, and the sun can be calculated exactly. So one scan answers all 365 days — including the thing no weather app and no sun-mapping tool will tell you: the stretch where your court is simply not worth using.

Why it is not just a sun app

Shadowmap and the rest read a model. This reads your court.

Every sun-tracking app works off modelled building and tree data, and a suburban court with a twenty-metre gum on the boundary is exactly where that data is at its worst. None of them turn it into playing hours for one particular court, and none of them know your court has no lights.

• It knows dark from shaded. Almost no private court has floodlights, so sunset sets your last hit — half the answer on a winter afternoon.
• It knows about glare. A low sun straight down the line of the court is not a shade problem, and it ruins more matches. It gets its own reading.
• It inverts in winter. Shade is the enemy in summer and sun is the prize in July, and finding the sun is the harder question.
• It has no server. No account, nothing to log into, and your court's position never leaves your phone.

Three steps, once

1. Set your court up

   Name it, fix it on the map, say which way it runs. Four answers.
2. Scan it

   Stand at the net and turn on the spot. Any daylight, any weather — you are measuring the skyline, not the shade.
3. Keep it for good

   The year is worked out on your phone in under a second, and it stays right every day after that, because the app keeps counting as the sun moves.

Courts you look after, not just your own

For court builders and maintenance firms.

If you resurface and maintain private courts, this is something to hand a client at the end of a visit — and it writes your next job for you. "Your court has forty-one dead days from late November. Take four metres off that oak and you get six weeks of them back." That is a quote you can send, off a reading that takes a minute to capture.

Blocks for your whole book, optionally with your own name on the front door. hello@courtshade.app

What it costs

Free while it is in testing.