This season marks my youth softball coaching debut, an opportunity to impart my likely outdated baseball knowledge on a group of 5 and 6 year old girls. Beyond trying to stay positive and excited for an hour plus, the main challenge of coaching is organizing all the various tasks that come up.

One such task is setting a weekly lineup, which requires setting a batter order and assigning fielding positions by inning.

Some of the key rules that we’ll want to implement in the lineup:

1. Randomize the batting order each week.
2. Rotate the players on defense so that players don’t spend two innings in a row in the outfield, and the choice spots (pitcher, 1B) get fairly distributed.

Spreadsheet Logic

First we enter in all the names of the girls on the team, and for each week, we’ll assign a random number 1-10 which will be their spot in the order:

Then we can put them in order using Index(match):

Then we want to set up a rotation for the field – we use two columns, with the right column showing what position they will play after playing the left column. Players will rotate from LF to 3B to LCF to SS to RCF to 2B and so on:

We’ll then set the positions for the first inning, then for each subsequent inning, we’ll lookup the next position from the table above with vlookup:

And that’s the spreadsheet, you can check it out here: Softball Lineup Generator

To save a copy, go to File –> Make a copy