[LOW] UI polish batch: "1 players" / "1 expenses" pluralization, recovery prompt offering an empty draft, stale "Action needed" badge after acknowledgement

[njrini99-code]

Small user-visible defects collected during the 2026-08-02 in-browser test matrix. Grouped because each is a one-line fix.

1. Pluralization — "1 players", "1 expenses"

• Announcements list: an announcement targeted at one player renders "1 players" on the card. The compose dialog gets it right ("1 player selected") — only the card is wrong.
• Travel expenses panel: a trip with one expense renders "1 expenses" under Total Expenses.

Both need the same conditional-plural treatment already used elsewhere in the codebase (e.g. ${n} round${n === 1 ? '' : 's'} in golf.ts).

2. New Round offers to restore a draft with zero holes

Starting a fresh round pops the recovery modal:

Recover Unsaved Progress?
Found locally saved data with 0 completed holes. This data may have been saved when the app was interrupted.
[Discard] [Restore]

Offering to restore nothing is pure friction on an otherwise clean start, and it trains players to dismiss a dialog that matters when it has real data in it. Suppress the prompt when the recovered draft has 0 completed holes (just discard silently), or at minimum don't offer "Restore" for an empty draft.

3. "Action needed" badge persists on an acknowledged announcement

After a player acknowledges an ack-required announcement, the card correctly flips its counter to 1/1 ack and the filter chips for Unread and Action needed disappear — but the "Action needed" badge on the card itself remains. The card simultaneously reads "Action needed" and "1/1 ack".

Badge should clear once the viewing player's own acknowledgement is recorded.

4. Approach miss grid: two buttons both render the letter "L"

In the approach miss-direction 3×3 grid, ↑ L (Long) and ← L (Left) both display "L"; only the arrow glyph distinguishes them. The aria-labels are correct ("Long", "Left"), so this is visual only — but at a glance in the field the two are easy to confuse. Consider Lg/Lft, or dropping the letter and relying on the arrow plus position.

---

All four verified in-browser on Demo University Golf as coach and as Cole Bennett.

[coderabbitai]

🔗 Related PRs

#203 - fix(fairway): demo-day fixes — stats parity, signals/goals/stats bugs, build font [merged]
#213 - fix(round-review): momentum per-hole, SG caption consistency, rounded % [merged]
#274 - Coach UX polish: round names, SG labels, message senders/scroll, sidebar collapse [merged]
#954 - Fix train: overnight QA issues #943-#950 + #952 (7 lanes, validated as one tree) [merged]
#967 - Redesign: player CoachHelm — fix overlaps, de-jargon, collapse hollow panels [merged]

---

📝 Issue Planner

_{Check the box below or use the @coderabbitai plan command to generate an implementation plan and prompts that you can use with your favorite coding assistant.}

• Create Plan

---

🧪 Issue enrichment is currently in open beta.

You can configure auto-planning by selecting labels in the issue_enrichment configuration.

To disable automatic issue enrichment, add the following to your .coderabbit.yaml:

issue_enrichment:
  auto_enrich:
    enabled: false

💬 Have feedback or questions? Drop into our discord!

[njrini99-code]

3 of 4 fixed in a93b0d988 (PR #1221). One I could not confirm — details below.

✅ 1. Pluralization. "1 players" → "1 player" on the coach announcement card; "1 expenses" → "1 expense" on the travel summary. Scoped to the two sites actually observed — the codebase has ~40 other ${n} players interpolations and sweeping them all would be an unrelated diff.

✅ 2. Empty-draft recovery prompt. The guard was Object.keys(inProgressShotsByHole).length > 0, and the tracker writes a key for the current hole as soon as you land on it — so a brand-new round with an empty shot array still counted as recoverable data. Now requires an actual shot (.some(shots => shots.length > 0)). The copy is also honest when there are shots but no completed holes ("Found shots saved locally for a hole in progress") instead of announcing "0 completed holes".

✅ 4. Ambiguous grid letters. MISS_DIRECTION_CONFIG in src/lib/types/golf.ts gave both Long and Left shortLabel: 'L'. Now LG / LT, so two adjacent buttons no longer carry the same glyph.

❌ 3. Stale "Action needed" badge — NOT fixed, and I could not reproduce the cause.

The derivation reads correctly:

// FairwayPlayerAnnouncementCard.tsx:199,205
const [hasAcknowledged, setHasAcknowledged] = useState(!!ann.has_player_acknowledged);
const needsAck = ann.requires_acknowledgement && !hasAcknowledged;

and the server side looks right too (announcements.ts:568, acks.some(a => a.player_id === playerId)) — and it must have returned a row, because the same render showed 1/1 ack.

The plausible mechanism is the card remounting from a refetch whose has_player_acknowledged came back stale, since useState's initialiser only runs on mount. But I only observed this once, in a single DOM snapshot, and I deleted the test announcement during cleanup — so I cannot currently distinguish a real bug from a transient render I caught mid-refresh.

I chose not to ship a speculative useEffect sync for it. Adding code against an unconfirmed mechanism is worse than leaving an honest note. Reproducing needs an ack-required announcement, an acknowledge, and a list refetch — happy to redo that if you want it chased.