The best baseball tournament planning tools in 2026 are Rizzler (the only coaching app with a dedicated tournament planner that maps pitcher availability, rest days, and lineup strategy across multiple games), spreadsheet templates (customizable but manual), and paper planning (free but error-prone). Tournament planning is the hardest part of coaching, and surprisingly few tools address it directly.

Rizzler's tournament planning feature is purpose-built for multi-game weekends. Enter your games, set your league's pitch count and rest day rules, and Rizzler maps out pitcher availability across every game. After game one, update pitch counts and the planner recalculates who's available for game two.

The tournament planner connects directly to game planning, AI batting order, and AI fielding positions — so your lineup for game three is built with full awareness of what happened in games one and two.

Strengths: Automatic pitcher availability tracking, rest day compliance, multi-game lineup planning, works on web and iOS. Limitations: Tournament planning requires the Pro plan ($14.99/mo).

Google Sheets or Excel with a custom tournament planning template gives you full control. Build your own pitcher availability grid, rest day calculator, and lineup planner.

Strengths: Free, fully customizable, works offline (Excel). Limitations: Manual data entry, no automatic rest day calculation, prone to formula errors, no mobile-friendly dugout use. See Rizzler vs Spreadsheets.

A notepad, your phone's notes app, and a printout of pitch count rules. This is how most coaches still plan tournaments.

Strengths: Zero cost, no learning curve. Limitations: High error rate (especially rest day math), no game-to-game carryover, data lost after the weekend.