DRAGENcoach In development
The plan is good. It is just not where your eyes are.
Coaching is behavior: cue, rep, feedback, again. A Board Certified Behavior Analyst teaches those four things for a living. DRAGENcoach is that job, pointed at practice.
This page teaches the method first. The free version is a printed card and a clock. The software comes after, and only if you want it.
What coaches say goes wrong at practice
Seven things every coach recognizes.
None of these is a knowledge problem. Coaches know what to do. These are attention problems: the plan lives somewhere other than the field.
1. Looking down
The plan is on a clipboard or a phone. Every glance at it is a moment not watching the athletes, and the athletes can tell.
2. Time slips
The first drill runs long because it is going well. The last two get squeezed or cut, and they were the ones that needed the work.
3. Dead time
Long explanations and slow transitions. Athletes stand in line. Standing in line teaches nothing and invites everything else.
4. Uneven attention
The loudest and the best get the reps and the feedback. The quiet athlete in the middle goes a whole practice without a word aimed at them.
5. Vague feedback
"Good job" and "come on" in the moment, because the specific point for that athlete was decided last night and is not in front of you now.
6. Forgetting the per-player point
You knew what each athlete needed to hear today. By the third drill, half of it is gone.
7. No record
What actually happened is gone by the drive home. Next practice gets planned from memory, so the same block runs long again.
The free version, today
How to close the gap by hand, on paper
This is the whole method. It costs a sheet of paper and a phone timer. The software below only makes it hands-free.
- Five blocks, clock times. Before practice, write five blocks with a real start time on each (5:00, 5:15, 5:35, 5:55, 6:15). Not durations. Clock times are what you can actually check with a glance.
- One point per athlete. Next to each name, the single thing you want to say to them today. One. If you cannot pick one, you do not have a plan for that athlete yet.
- Tape it to the clipboard, set the timers. One phone alarm per block start. The alarm looks up for you, so you do not have to look down.
- Say the point, tick the box. When you say an athlete's point, tick it. At the end, the unticked names are the ones you missed. That list is the fix for uneven attention, and it takes no extra effort.
- Two minutes after. What ran long, who got nothing, the one thing to carry forward. Next practice starts from that line, not from memory.
Try it: a coach writes "shooting, 20 minutes" as block 1. What is wrong with it, and what should it say?
Answer: it has a duration, not a clock time, and no point to make. It should say "5:00 shooting hold the follow-through" or whatever the one point is. Why: during practice you can check a clock in half a second; you cannot add up durations while watching ten athletes. And a block with no point becomes reps without feedback, which is the dead time from box 3.
Where DRAGENcoach helps
The same card, in your eye line, hands free.
DRAGENcoach is being built now. This is what it is built to do, said plainly, with the parts that are not finished marked as such.
The plan appears when it is time
You lay out the blocks and the per-athlete points on your own computer before practice. During practice, the current block sits in the corner of your vision in the Even Realities G2 glasses, in short lines. When the clock hits the next block, the next block appears. Nobody looks down.
Time cannot slip quietly
A block that runs past its clock time is the first thing you see, not the last thing you remember. The choice to run long is still yours; it is just a choice now, not an accident.
Each athlete's point, by name, at the right drill
The point you wrote for a player shows up in the block where it applies, so "good job" turns back into the specific thing you meant to say.
Who has not heard from you
Say the point, tap the ring, and the name is ticked. Names with no tick stay visible. The quiet athlete in the middle stops being invisible, because the plan is doing the remembering.
The record writes itself
Each tap is a line in the log: block started, block ended, point said, note added. After practice, the two-minute review is already half written, and the next plan starts from what happened instead of from memory.
Your athletes' information stays yours
The plan and the log live on your own computer. Nothing about an athlete is sent to an outside AI. The G2 glasses have no camera. A person, you, approves every word.
Coach a team? Be a pilot.
Pilot coaches shape what gets built. Tell us the one thing you wish you did not have to think about during practice.