FAQ
Questions, answered straight.
Everything coaches, players, families, and directors ask most, grouped by topic. Search for a phrase or filter by who you are.
30 questions
Getting started
- What is Coach Sidekick?
- Coach Sidekick records a practice or match, attributes the feedback a coach gives to the specific players it was meant for, and turns it into a personalized digest with matched drills for each player. Coaches review and approve everything before it reaches anyone. The result is a feedback loop that compounds: what a coach says becomes something a player can act on, and something a director can see.
- Do I need a special microphone, or is my phone enough?
- Your phone works. A clip-on lav mic helps outdoors where wind is a factor, but a modern phone in your pocket or on the sideline captures enough clean audio for accurate attribution. Start with your phone and upgrade only if you find you need to.
- How long does processing take after a session?
- Most sessions are ready for review in under 15 minutes, including transcription, player attribution, and feedback categorization. Longer sessions (60+ minutes) or heavy background noise can push that toward 30 minutes. The session shows its status live and lands in the coach's review queue the moment it is ready.
Recording sessions
- Can a coach keep private conversations off the record?
- Yes, by not hitting record. Coach Sidekick only captures audio from sessions a coach explicitly records. There is no retroactive privacy filter: if it was recorded, it went through the pipeline. For sensitive conversations such as discipline, player health, or personal matters, pause recording or do not record. The clearest mental model: if you pressed record, assume it will be reviewed.
- What kinds of sessions can be recorded?
- Practices, matches, halftime talks, team meetings, and a coach's own voice memos all work. Anything where a coach is giving feedback is fair game. Coach Sidekick captures the audio a coach chooses to record and nothing else.
Attribution & review
- How accurate is the attribution, and what if it gets a player wrong?
- It works well in most cases, and the review step is the safety net for when it does not. Every session is the coach's to check before anything reaches a player: edit an attribution, reassign a cue to a different player, or remove it entirely. We would rather be transparent that the AI is not perfect than pretend it is.
- Can players see feedback before a coach approves it?
- No. Every piece of feedback goes through the coach's review first, and nothing is auto-sent. The coach can edit, reassign, or remove anything before releasing it, and only what they approve reaches a player.
For coaches
- Does my director see what I said in my sessions?
- If you coach at an academy on Coach Sidekick, yes: directors see your recorded sessions, the feedback you approved, and the coaching analytics derived from them (attention distribution, feedback-type patterns, session cadence). That is intentional, because directors cannot develop their staff if they cannot see what their staff is doing. They do not see audio you chose not to record, feedback you removed before approval, or notes you keep private. If you are a solo coach on the Starter plan, none of this applies, because there is no director in the system.
- Does my director see my Session Debrief?
- The Session Debrief is private to you. It is a reflection generated from your own sessions, for your eyes only. Your director does see the coaching analytics and the feedback you approved, because they cannot develop their staff without visibility into the work. The Debrief itself stays yours. If you coach solo on the Starter plan, there is no director in the system at all.
- Is any of this used to rank or grade me against other coaches?
- No. The analytics and the Debrief are built as a mirror, not a grade. There is no score, no ranking against other coaches, and no leaderboard. They surface patterns so you can adjust before your next session. That is the entire purpose.
For players
- Can my coach see what I do with my feedback?
- Yes. When you mark a drill as completed, add notes about how it went, or check off focus points, your coach sees that. That is the feedback loop working: your coach tells you what to work on, you work on it, your coach sees what you did, and the next session's feedback gets sharper.
- What if I disagree with something my coach said?
- Write it in your notes on that feedback item, and your coach will see your notes. You can also bring it up in your next session, and coaches usually appreciate players who think critically about their feedback. What you cannot do is delete feedback from your view, because it is part of the development record for that session.
- Do I have to do the drills?
- No. The drills are suggestions matched to what your coach said about you, not assignments with grades. They are there because your coach noticed something specific and the drill is designed to help. If you want to get better faster, do them.
- Can I go back and see feedback from earlier in the season?
- Yes. Your full feedback history stays in your account as long as you are enrolled with the academy. Some academies archive older sessions after a year, so check with your coach or director for specifics at your club.
For parents & families
- Will I see other kids' feedback?
- No. Coach Sidekick is private by design: each player's development summary is visible only to that player and their parents or guardians, never to other families. There is no shared parent feed, no leaderboard, and no “how does my kid rank” view.
- What ages is this appropriate for?
- Coach Sidekick is built for youth soccer academies, which typically means ages 7 through 18. For players under 13, our policy is to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting their information, consistent with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). If you have a specific question about your child's age or program, your academy director will know exactly how Coach Sidekick is deployed at their club.
- My child is a teenager and may not want me reading everything. How does that work?
- That is worth a direct conversation with your child. Family access to your child's summaries is provided through your academy, and the summaries exist because families benefit from visibility into what is being worked on. If you and your teenager prefer a different arrangement, the academy can configure access accordingly. We design for healthy family dynamics, not surveillance.
- How do I get access for my family?
- Through your child's academy. Coach Sidekick is not something families subscribe to directly, it is a tool your academy provides. If your academy does not currently use Coach Sidekick, the fastest way to get it is to forward it to your director.
For directors
- How much admin does this add to my staff's weekly load?
- For coaches, recording adds zero incremental time, because they hit a button on their phone. Review averages 5 to 10 minutes per session once coaches get into the rhythm. For directors, the ongoing load is near zero, because analytics are on-demand rather than push notifications. Most of your involvement happens during initial onboarding and then as-needed conversations with individual coaches when a pattern surfaces worth talking about.
- Can I see every coach in my academy, or just my own staff?
- You see every coach in your organization, plus the sessions, feedback patterns, and player development trends across all of them. Academy-wide visibility is the whole point for directors. If you need role-based scoping, for example age-group coordinators seeing only their tier, tell us, because we are building that for Academy-tier customers.
- What is the time-to-value? When will we actually see a return?
- You will see the product working after the first recorded session, usually week one. Meaningful coaching analytics emerge after 4 to 6 sessions per coach, which is enough data to show attention distribution, feedback patterns, and drift. Parent retention impact, which most directors care about, tends to show up across a season as families receive personalized digests for several weeks.
- Does this replace Hudl or Veo?
- No, it is complementary. Hudl and Veo solve video analysis: what happened on the field, tactically. Coach Sidekick solves the coaching conversation around it: what you said, who you said it to, and what happens next for each player. The problems do not overlap, so clubs that film keep filming and run both.
- How do we get our coaches to actually use it?
- Two things matter. First, recording has to feel frictionless, so coaches trust we are not creating busywork. Second, coaches need to see value for themselves, not just for you. The coach analytics are designed so coaches want to review their own sessions, not just comply. During onboarding we work with each academy to set this up.
Drills & the skill library
- How are drills matched to a player?
- Matching starts from the feedback a coach approved. Each piece of feedback resolves to a skill in the taxonomy, and the system pulls the drills tagged to that skill, weighted by how directly they train it. So a player works on what their coach actually flagged, not a generic plan for their position.
- Are all 357 drills animated?
- No. A growing number of drills include step-by-step animations rendered by the same engine that powers the tactics board, and the rest carry full written setups, coaching points, and progressions. Every drill is usable today, and we add animations to more of the library over time.
- Where does the skill taxonomy come from?
- It was built by hand and structured into a graph: 168 skills across four domains (technical, tactical, physical, psychological), tied to the game moments where they show up and grouped into higher-order composites like switching the point of attack. It is the same vocabulary that drives attribution and analytics, so feedback and drills always speak the same language.
- Can I filter the library down to exactly what I need?
- Yes. Filter by domain, difficulty, player count, and the specific skill a drill builds. The Skill Atlas works the other way around too: start from a skill, composite, or game moment and see every drill that targets it.
Privacy & data
- How is a child's data protected?
- Protecting minors' data is a first-class priority. Audio and transcripts are encrypted in transit, and our infrastructure providers encrypt stored data at rest. We are building Coach Sidekick's youth-privacy program, including verifiable parental consent for players under 13, defined data-retention limits, access controls, and the ability for parents to review and request deletion of their child's data, in consultation with legal counsel who specialize in children's-data compliance. Our formal privacy policy will be published before these capabilities are generally available. See our youth data and safety page for the full picture.
- What data do you store, and where?
- Audio is encrypted and stored on Cloudflare R2 (US-based). Transcripts, feedback, and metadata sit in a PostgreSQL database on Neon (also US-based). Our formal privacy policy and terms of service are being finalized with counsel, so reach out if you need current drafts for procurement review.
- Who can see a player's development record?
- The player, their coach and director, and any parent or guardian linked through the academy. It is private to that circle. There is no shared feed across families and no ranking of one player against another.
Still have a question?
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