Drill library submission and review queue
Problem
A coach sketches a drill on a whiteboard, photographs it, and sends it to the coaching staff messaging group. The description of what it is for, which age group it suits, and the coaching points that make it work stays in that coach's head. Nobody tags it, so it cannot be found again except by scrolling back through months of photos or asking around. The coach developer, who is supposed to own the quality and consistency of what gets used pitch-side, often has no idea a drill exists until they see it running in a session. When a coach leaves the club, whatever they built and never wrote down leaves with their phone.
Product idea
A submission form for a new drill: a photo or diagram upload, a description, the coaching points, equipment needed, age group and focus area tags. It enters a queue the coach developer owns, moving through submitted, in review, changes requested and published states. The coach developer can approve, send it back with a reason, or decline it with a reason attached rather than letting it quietly disappear. Published drills land in a searchable library filtered by tag. It deliberately does not try to read the photo and guess the tags or coaching points itself; a human reviews every entry before it becomes part of the shared library.
Who it is for
Academy and assistant coaches submitting drills, coach developers who own review and tagging, and head coaches who sponsor a consistent drill standard across an age group structure.
Possible first version
A web form for submission with photo upload and a fixed tag set covering age group, focus area and equipment, a reviewer queue with approve, request changes and decline actions, and a searchable published library filtered by tag. Version one has no automated tagging or image recognition and no integration with a video analysis platform or session planning tool. Published entries can be exported as a link or CSV for use elsewhere.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Head coach, Assistant coach, Academy coach, Coach developer
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Academy & youth, Collegiate athletics, Federation / governing body, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Messaging apps, Session planning tools, Playbook and document tools
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
Coaches already share drills in our team chat. Why would they bother submitting them here instead?
They will not, unless submitting is close to as fast as posting a photo. The form should take under a minute: photo, a few tags, done. The reason to bother is that a drill posted in chat is effectively gone within a week, while a submitted one is findable by every coach in the club for as long as the club exists. That argument only lands once a few coaches have searched the library and found something useful, so early adoption depends on seeding it with drills the coach developer already has.
What do we need in place before this is worth turning on?
A person willing to be the reviewer, and a tag set that person agrees with: age groups, focus areas, and whatever equipment categories match your kit. That is genuinely it for version one. You do not need an existing digital drill library to start; the coach developer's existing photo folder is a reasonable source to seed the first batch of published entries.
Who is actually responsible for working the review queue once this exists?
The coach developer, or whoever currently sets standards for session content. That is an ongoing job, not a one-off setup: submissions need a response within a reasonable time or coaches stop submitting and go back to the messaging group. If nobody has the hours to own that queue, the tool will fill up with unreviewed drills and lose the trust it needs to replace the informal habit.
Does it write the coaching points or generate tags from the photo automatically?
No, and that is a deliberate limit rather than a gap to fill later. The coaching points and tags come from the submitting coach and get checked by the reviewer. Automating that step would let inconsistent or wrong guidance into the library faster than a human ever would, which defeats the point of having a coach developer review it at all.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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