Pitch-side voice assistant for drills and session plans
Problem
An academy or assistant coach running a session away from the head coach works from a printed session plan and whatever they remember from the drill folder. The drill library itself lives in one person's head, in a folder of photographs, and in the head coach's notes app, none of it visible to the coach actually running the session. When a question comes up mid-session, how a drill progresses, how many players it takes, whether the contact level suits the age group, there is no one on the touchline to ask. A message goes to the coaching messaging group and sits unread until the session has already moved on. The coach improvises, the session drifts from what was planned, and nobody downstream knows it happened.
Product idea
A chat and voice assistant built from the club's own session plans, drill library entries and playbook, not from general coaching knowledge. A coach on the touchline asks by phone, for example how many players a given rondo needs or what the next progression is, and the assistant answers from that content alone, with the diagram or photo attached if one exists. Where the library has no answer, or the question touches contact level or session load for an age group, it does not guess. It logs the question against that session and sends it to the coach developer or head coach to answer before the next one runs. It does not write session plans or invent drills; it only surfaces what has already been recorded and flags the gaps that recording missed.
Who it is for
Academy and assistant coaches running sessions solo, coach developers who maintain the drill library, and the head coach who would sponsor giving touchline staff direct access to it.
Possible first version
A phone-based chat interface, voice optional, with content ingested from uploaded session plans, drill descriptions and photographs rather than pulled live from any planning tool. A search and question-answer layer over that content, an escalation queue for unanswered or age-restricted questions, and a notification to the coach developer when one lands. Coaches are added manually to a fixed roster for version one. There is no integration with the club's session planning tool or athlete management system, and no automatic ingestion from a video analysis platform; content goes in the way it does today, by someone uploading it.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Academy coach, Assistant coach, Coach developer, Head coach
- Relevant to
- Academy & youth, Professional club, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Session planning tools, Playbook and document tools, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Voice or chat interface
Questions we get asked
Our coaches already text the head coach when they're stuck. Why add a tool for that?
Texting works when the head coach is free and looking at their phone, which during a session with another group they usually are not. That is the gap this fills: a question gets answered from what is already written down without waiting for a reply, and if the library genuinely does not cover it, the question still reaches the head coach, logged against the session rather than sitting unread in a busy afternoon. If your current messaging habit already gets answered inside the session, you do not need this.
What do we need to give it before it's useful?
The library you already have: session plans, drill write-ups, whatever photographs or diagrams exist, however scattered. There is no need to tidy or standardise any of it before the first version works, because someone uploads it as it is and the assistant only answers from what is actually there. What it exposes quickly is how much of the library is really written down anywhere, which for most clubs is less than the head coach assumes.
Does this replace our session planning tool?
No. Your session planning tool stays the system where plans are written and stored. This sits in front of it for the moment a coach needs an answer without opening a laptop, and version one works from uploaded copies of that content rather than reading the planning tool directly. Whether a live connection is worth building is a question for after the first version proves the touchline use case matters.
Who has to keep the answers accurate once this exists?
Usually the coach developer, since they are the one who already fields these questions informally. The ongoing cost is answering the escalation queue promptly, because an unanswered question sitting for a week defeats the point, and re-uploading the library whenever drills change. If nobody is willing to own that queue, the tool becomes a well-kept record of questions nobody answered, which is worse than the messaging group it replaced.
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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