Why We Built NetCaptain: A Decade of Coaching and the Chaos of Running Nets

It's ten past six on a Tuesday. Thirty players are drifting in from work, school and everywhere in between. You've got three nets, ninety minutes of light, and a plan in your head that started falling apart the moment the first player asked, "What net am I in?"

If that feels familiar, you're not alone. Between us, we lived that Tuesday night for more than a decade, at both ends of the game, and it's the reason NetCaptain exists.

Let me introduce us.

NetCaptain was founded by two cricket coaches with a lot of seasons behind them. I'm Matt Bremner, now in my fourth year as Head Coach at Fitzroy Doncaster in Victorian Premier Cricket, after eight years as Head Coach of the Inner East Emus in underage representative cricket and time at East Doncaster at community level. My co-founder, Peter Dickson, has spent his own years coaching at community level. Between the two of us we've coached junior rep, community club and premier cricket. We've coached the lot, and we've loved every bit of it.

And no matter the level, we kept hitting the exact same wall.

When I took on the Fitzroy Doncaster role, I had a clear picture of what I wanted to build. A professional environment. Structured, organised, every player knowing exactly what they were doing and when. Players walking in ready to train, not standing around waiting to be told where to go. That was the goal, and I was determined to get there.

Then reality hit.

There was no net captain to run the nets. Players were rocking up at all different times. Bowling loads were uneven, some players bowling all night, others barely rolling their arm over. The graded nets I'd carefully planned weren't running the way I'd drawn them up. The batters wanted to hit early. The bowlers all wanted their turn, and keeping pace and spin even across the nets was a job in itself. Every one of those things needed sorting on the spot, while the session was already underway.

By the end of most nights, I wasn't coaching anymore. I was managing. Managing who was next, managing who'd missed out, managing the chaos. And at community level, Peter was fighting the very same battle with his own squad. Different grade, different players, same story every single week.

So we did what coaches do. We started writing it all down. Every issue, every breakdown, every "this needs fixing." Who arrived late and how it threw the whole net order out. How to keep bowling loads fair without a whiteboard, a spreadsheet and a stopwatch all going at once. How to make sure the kid in the lower grade got the same quality session as the gun in the ones.

Then we started talking to people. Coaches, presidents, committee members, from clubs all over the place. We wanted to know if it was just us.

It wasn't.

The same thing kept coming up, over and over. It wasn't a Fitzroy Doncaster problem, and it wasn't even a Premier Cricket problem. We'd both seen it at junior rep level. We'd both seen it at community level. Every coach we spoke to was fighting the same battle, running their session on the run with nothing behind them but a whiteboard and a good memory.

Then it went further than we expected. Once we started talking to clubs in the UK, New Zealand and South Africa, we realised every country had its own version of the exact same issue. Different accents, same chaos. Everywhere in the world, cricket coaches were spending the first twenty minutes of every session working out a puzzle, and the rest of it holding that puzzle together.

That's when it clicked. This wasn't a bad-luck-with-numbers problem, or a one-club problem. It was a cricket problem. A universal one. And nobody had properly fixed it.

So we decided to.

That's why NetCaptain exists. Not because someone sat in a boardroom and dreamed up an app. Because we lived through more than a decade of trying to coach cricket while managing chaos, and we knew the thing we'd been wishing for all those Tuesday nights had to be built, and built properly.

So that's what we did. Between us, Peter and I had coached across every level of the game and knew precisely where a training night falls apart. Then we partnered with Laburnum, a Melbourne technology team with a long track record of building serious software at scale, to build it the right way. NetCaptain isn't an app knocked together by AI. It's cricket software built by cricket people and proper software people, working side by side.

NetCaptain builds your net schedule in seconds. It takes your squad, their roles and grades, who's bowling pace and who's bowling spin, and who's actually turning up, and it gives you a complete, balanced session before you've even left home. Bowling loads capped so nobody gets overworked. Nets matched to grade so every session is competitive. Late arrivals handled smoothly, without having to rebuild the whole session from scratch. And every player can see their own night on their phone before they arrive, so nobody's asking "what net am I in?" ever again.

It's the tool we wish we'd had, on all those nights we walked in with a plan and a whole lot of hope.

The best part, for us, is what it gives back. It gives coaches their sessions back. Instead of standing in the middle managing traffic, you're actually watching your players, fixing a technical flaw, having a proper chat with the quiet player who's been working hard in the third net. You're coaching again. That's why we got into this in the first place.

We built NetCaptain because we've stood in your shoes on that Tuesday night, more times than we can count. We've lived through it. If any of this sounds like your training nights, then it was built for you.

You can see exactly how it works for your club at netcaptaincricket.com, and start a 14-day free trial whenever you're ready.