New athlete onboarding and clear-to-train workflow
Problem
When a new athlete joins, whether by signing, draft, transfer or promotion from the academy, setting them up across the performance stack falls to whoever remembers to do it. A sports scientist emails the strength and conditioning coach to book baseline force plate testing, chases medical staff for the pre-participation exam and insurance forms, and asks someone in operations to configure a GPS unit and add a wellness survey login. All of this runs over group chat and email threads, tracked, if at all, on a shared onboarding spreadsheet with one column per athlete. Steps get missed during a busy pre-season: an athlete takes on full training load with no baseline test on file, and if a later force plate result looks asymmetric, staff have nothing to compare it against. Nobody currently owns confirming that every step closed before the athlete takes the field.
Product idea
A workflow that opens when a new athlete record is started and spins up a fixed set of onboarding tasks with a named owner and due date for each: medical staff sign off the pre-participation exam and insurance paperwork, the strength and conditioning coach books and confirms baseline force plate and GPS testing, and the sports scientist adds the athlete to the wellness survey distribution list and issues a GPS unit. Each task shows as open, overdue or closed. An overdue task escalates automatically to the Head of Performance instead of relying on someone remembering to chase it. The athlete's record carries a single clear-to-train status that only turns green once every task closes. It does not write into the athlete management system, the medical record or the wellness tool; each owner still records the actual result there, and this only tracks that the step happened.
Who it is for
Sports scientists and Heads of Performance who currently coordinate new-athlete setup by email, plus the strength and conditioning coaches and medical staff who own each onboarding step and need to know what is still outstanding.
Possible first version
A manually created onboarding record per athlete, built from a fixed task template: medical clearance and insurance sign-off, baseline force plate and GPS testing, wellness survey enrolment, and GPS unit assignment. Each task has an owner, a due date and a one-click complete action, plus a task list view per owner, an overdue-escalation email to the Head of Performance, and a single clear-to-train flag on the athlete's record. Out of scope for version one: any connection to the athlete management system, medical record system or wellness tool. Nothing is auto-created or auto-verified; every task is opened and closed by hand.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Sports scientist, Head of Performance, Strength & conditioning coach
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Collegiate athletics, Academy & youth, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Athlete management systems, Medical and injury records system, Wellness survey tool, Spreadsheets
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
What do we need on day one to get this running?
A fixed onboarding checklist that matches how your organisation actually clears an athlete to train, and a named owner for each step. No data migration and no connection to the athlete management system or medical system is required to start: someone opens a new onboarding record for the athlete and works through the tasks. The value comes from having one place that shows what is outstanding and who owns it, not from any upfront data load.
Does this replace our athlete management system?
No. The athlete management system stays the system of record for the athlete's actual medical file, testing results and profile. This sits alongside it as a thin coordination layer that tracks whether the onboarding steps were done, not what the results were. Each owner still records the outcome, the exam, the test, the wellness enrolment, in the system they already use; this only tracks that it happened and by when.
We already run onboarding off a shared spreadsheet. Why change it?
A spreadsheet works until someone forgets to update a cell or two people edit it at once, and it does not chase anyone. If your current sheet reliably gets every athlete cleared before they train and nobody has ever missed a step, there is no reason to replace it. This is worth it once the volume of signings, or the cost of a missed baseline test, outweighs the admin of maintaining another tool.
What happens if an athlete starts training before every step is closed?
The tool does not block anyone from training; it has no way to enforce that and should not pretend to. What it does is make the gap visible: the clear-to-train flag stays amber or red and the outstanding task stays assigned and overdue until someone closes it. Whether an incomplete athlete actually trains is a decision for coaching and medical staff, not something this tool decides for them.
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.
Tell us about itMore in Athlete performance & sports science
- Cross-system athlete availability status boardA live status board that pulls load, wellness and medical hold flags for each athlete into one view and alerts a named person when a threshold is crossed before the next session.
- Daily wellness survey completion monitorA single board showing which athletes have not yet submitted today's readiness survey, with one alert to a named coach before the missing responses become a training-load blind spot.
- Force plate baseline deviation monitorA live board that compares each new force plate result to an athlete's own rolling baseline and alerts a named performance staff member the moment asymmetry or output drifts, instead of waiting for a week-old spreadsheet review.