Weekly session plan readiness board
Problem
Session plans for the week sit in whichever document or planning tool a coach happens to use, copied from last week's version and edited in place. The head coach or coach developer has no way to see, across every age group and team, which sessions for the coming week are actually built, which are still a blank copy of last week's plan, and which have been checked by anyone senior. The first anyone hears about a missing plan is often the evening before, when an assistant coach messages asking what tomorrow's session actually is. By then there is no time left for a coach developer to review it, so it goes out unread.
Product idea
A status board with one row per team or age group and one column per session in the week ahead. Each plan carries a state: not started, drafted, reviewed, or published, set by whoever owns that step. A countdown shows time remaining to the scheduled session. Rules run against that countdown: if a plan is still in 'not started' or 'drafted' at a set cut-off before kickoff, the board sends an alert to the head coach and the coach developer by name, not to a general channel. It does not write session content and does not touch the playbook. It only tracks whether the pipeline that produces a session plan is on schedule, and says so before it is too late to act.
Who it is for
Head coaches and coach developers who need to see readiness across every squad at once, and assistant and academy coaches who own the drafting and review steps for their own sessions.
Possible first version
A shared grid, one row per team, one column per day, with a status dropdown (not started, drafted, reviewed, published) that anyone with edit access can update by hand. A configurable cut-off time per status triggers a message alert to two named recipients, typically the head coach and the coach developer. Version one has no connection to any session planning tool or document store: status is set manually, and the underlying plan itself still lives wherever it already lives. Historical status data and reporting on how often cut-offs were missed are out of scope for v1.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Head coach, Coach developer, Assistant coach, Academy coach
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Academy & youth, Collegiate athletics, Federation / governing body
- Systems in play
- Session planning tools, Playbook and document tools, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need in place before this could work?
Nothing beyond agreement on the four status states and who owns each one. There is no historical data to migrate and no session content to import, because the board tracks status, not the plan itself. The one real prerequisite is naming, for each team, who is responsible for moving a plan from drafted to reviewed, since a status board with nobody accountable for the middle step just becomes a more visible way of watching nothing happen.
Does this replace the session planning tool or document we already use?
No. Whatever coaches use to actually write a session, whether that is a planning tool, a shared document or a template, stays exactly where it is. This sits alongside it as a single view of status across teams that none of those tools give you on their own. If a future version pulled status automatically from the planning tool that would be a real integration project, and version one deliberately does not attempt it.
Our coaches already tell us informally when a session isn't ready. Why do we need a board for that?
Because informal telling only reaches you when a coach remembers to send it, and it fails exactly when it matters most: the week someone is on leave, coaching two teams, or simply behind. A board does not depend on someone thinking to flag it. It also gives the head coach a single place to see three teams behind at once, which a string of separate messages never quite adds up to.
What happens if a plan is genuinely still in progress at the cut-off for a good reason?
The alert fires anyway. That is intentional: this tool reports state and elapsed time, it does not judge whether the delay is reasonable. A coach developer who receives the alert can look at it, decide it is fine, and move on in seconds. The failure mode being fixed is silence, not judgement, so a false alarm that takes ten seconds to dismiss is a fair trade for never missing a real one.
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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