Built for the Tuesday-night coach
You volunteered to take the U9s. Nobody handed you a methodology with the squad list. This is the tool you wish you'd had.
The problem nobody warned you about
Most amateur youth coaches operate in a vacuum. The club recruits volunteers with little coaching background, hands you a squad of 8–12-year-olds, and expects you to deliver meaningful, age-appropriate development sessions every week. No tooling. No framework. Usually no coaching support.
So Tuesday night you sit down to plan Thursday's session. An hour later you have a rough idea, a couple of YouTube clips, and a vague memory of what you did last week. Thursday you run it. Saturday you watch the game. A parent asks how their kid is doing and you say “great, really coming along” because the honest answer is that you don't actually remember what specifically improved.
By February you can't tell which drills landed and which were a waste of forty minutes. By May you've forgotten what your January goals were. The season ends, the squad rolls over, and the next coach starts from zero.
CoachIQ takes the planning off your plate, keeps a record of what you've worked on, and gives you something concrete to point at when a player or a parent asks what's changed. That's the whole pitch.
How it fits the week
CoachIQ is built around the loop you already run, not a new one.
- Tuesday night. Pick a focus, pick a duration, hit go. Read the plan, tweak a drill if you want, save it.
- Wednesday. Glance at it on your phone. Star the two or three coaching points you want to lean on during the session.
- Thursday. Open the coaching view at the pitch. One drill at a time. The starred points are right there. Run it, change it on the fly, finish.
- Thursday night. Write a quick reflection: what worked, who stood out, what you want to come back to next week. Two minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers to the questions every coach asks before they try it.
- Does it work offline?
- Not yet. Generating a session needs a connection — that 30-second window when the plan comes back. Once it’s saved, open it on your phone before you leave the car park and the coaching view stays loaded if your signal drops on the pitch. Full offline mode is on the list, not in the build yet.
- What if only 6 players turn up?
- You re-generate. The form asks how long you have and what you’re working on; tweak the duration or drop a note like “only 6 tonight, half a pitch” in the coach notes and the next plan comes back sized for that. Drill scaling warnings on the squad-availability slice will catch this automatically soon.
- Can I edit a generated plan?
- Yes. You can swap a drill out via the per-drill chips (“make it harder”, “more 1v1”, “less running”) or regenerate the whole thing with new notes. The plan saves to your archive once you’re happy with it — nothing is locked the moment Claude returns it.
- What age groups does it support?
- U6 to U14 is the sweet spot — the AI is told the age group, the format (5v5, 7v7, 9v9, 11v11), and what your squad is good at and not. Older age groups work, but the coaching points lean toward youth development language rather than senior tactical prep. If you coach U16 and the output feels off, tell us — that’s the kind of feedback we want.
- Do I need football coaching experience?
- Helps but isn’t required. The output reads like a coach wrote it — drill setup, coaching points, progressions, a small diagram. If you can read a session plan and run it, you can use CoachIQ. The 12-attribute model is laid out plainly so you don’t need a UEFA badge to fill it in honestly.
Worth a session of your time
Free during early access. Set up your squad, generate one plan, and decide if it saves you the hour it took to read this page.
No credit card. Google sign-in.