When you share a formation to create a new play your new play will inherit the default player colors and labels that are defined in the formation. But, you don’t have to keep those defaults if you don’t want to.

Here’s an example of a formation that has two players labeled “HB”:

And here’s a play that was created by sharing that formation that uses both of those halfbacks in the play:

Changing their labels from HB to HB1 and HB2 makes it easier to identify them when explaining the play or writing player notes.

You can also leave the labels the same and change the player’s colors.

Here’s a formation:

and a play created from that formation:

Because labels work best when they use only one or two characters it can be better to change player colors to differentiate the players vs. changing their labels. This can also make player notes more clear too – it’s easier to quickly locate the blue WR vs. finding WR1.

In both of these cases the original formation isn’t changed with changes to the play making it easy to define formation defaults that work most of the time and override the defaults in plays that are the exception.