Introducing Hit Weather: Know If It Will Rain Before You Commit

You agree to a hit on Saturday morning. Saturday morning arrives at 34 degrees with a northerly wind, or worse, a band of rain that turns up exactly when you do. Everyone has driven 20 minutes to stand around a wet court. Hit Weather is the small feature that stops that happening.

What it is

Hit Weather puts a real forecast in the places where you decide to play tennis. Not a generic city forecast you have to go and look up. The actual conditions for your court, on the day, scored for whether it is good tennis weather or not.

It shows up in three places:

Your dashboard. A weather widget with today's conditions and an hour-by-hour playability bar from 7am to 9pm, so you can see at a glance when today's best window is.
Hit pages. Open a hit and the forecast for that exact date and location sits right next to the court and time.
The full forecast page at /weather, with a five-day outlook for your primary club.

The playability score

The part we are most happy with is that the forecast is read for tennis, not just reported. Every hour gets a playability score out of 100, worked out from four things:

Conditions. A thunderstorm tanks the score. Heavy rain is near the bottom. Clear or lightly cloudy sits at the top.
Temperature. Roughly 15 to 25 degrees is treated as ideal. Above the high 30s the score drops hard, because nobody should be chasing lobs in that.
Wind. A light breeze barely matters. A strong wind, the kind that turns your ball toss into a lottery, pulls the score down.
UV. An extreme UV reading nudges the score down as a reminder, sunscreen or not.

Each hour also gets a plain-English line. Something like "Ideal tennis conditions today, get out there" or "Courts will be soaked, save it for another day." You should not have to interpret a weather code to know whether to play.

Why we built it

Two reasons.

First, weather is the single most common reason a social hit falls through, and it is the most avoidable one. A hit cancelled an hour out because of rain that was forecast three days ago is a hit that should have been planned for a different time. Putting the forecast where the hit is made means the decision happens before anyone drives anywhere.

Second, the Australian summer is genuinely a safety question. We have a separate blog post on playing through the heat. A playability score that drops on a 38 degree day is a quiet nudge in the same direction: maybe move it to the morning.

The honest bits

It needs a primary club. The forecast is pulled for your primary club's location, so the widget only appears once you have set one. Pick the club you usually play at.
Forecasts have a horizon. Weather data is reliable for about two weeks out. A hit further away than that will not show a forecast yet, because an inaccurate forecast is worse than none.
It is a forecast, not a promise. Weather is weather. The score is a strong steer, not a guarantee. Treat a marginal day as marginal.

On the data itself, since people ask. The forecast comes from Open-Meteo, a free and open weather service, and results are cached for between 30 minutes and a couple of hours. That keeps the feature fast and means we are not hammering an API every time a page loads.

How to use it this week

If you have not already, set your primary club so the widget knows where you play.
Check the dashboard widget before you propose a hit time. Aim for the green part of the bar.
When you open a hit, glance at the forecast next to the court details before you commit.
For anything a few days out, open /weather and pick the best day of the five.

One small ask

Hit Weather is a small feature, so a small ask. If you spot a forecast that feels off for your court, tell us. Local microclimates are real, and the more we hear, the better we can tune it.

Plan around the weather instead of being surprised by it. Fewer wet drives, fewer baking afternoons, more tennis that actually happens.

Cheers, the RallyHub team

Quick context if you are new here: RallyHub is an Australian social tennis platform built by two brothers. Invite-only beta. More blog posts here.