Here is the story of how this app was made ...

I love football. I haven't always, but it started when I went away to college. I started to watch the Vikings as it was something I could talk to my Dad about when I visited home. A few years later, I made some close friends while studying to get my degree in Computer Science and decided to get Vikings season tickets and used the tickets as a way to stay in touch with a great friend who graduated before me. It was 1998. If you are a Vikings fan, you'll realize that was a great season with a disappointing ending. But this isn't a story about me being a Vikings fan. It is a story about how I learned to coach and ultimately develop this app.

It was 2018 and my son was in 1st Grade. We had just registered him to play flag football. During registration, you were asked if you'd like to volunteer to coach. I have never coached anything before so I was hesitant when my wife asked. Being an introvert and never coaching before was causing me lean towards not doing it. I don't recall exacly how it was decided, but I volunteered as it was a way to be involved in my son's activities and I enjoyed watching football. (This is where you laugh ... ha ha.)

I received the roster and parent contact details and organized our first practice. My brother had a son who was the same age as mine, so he registered to play and offered to help coach. It really helped to more help. I appreciated when parents volunteered as well. We had 9 kids on our team, five of them were in Kindergarten. Practices were fun, but we quickly learned the kids had a short attention span. Pulling grass, watching butterflies (it was Spring time) and noticing a bird flying above were just a few distractions we had to overcome.

The goal was to have every kid get a touch. The simplest way was to run the ball. I watch a lot of football, so this should be an easy concept, right? Well, trying to get distracted kids to listen was a challenge, much less line up, not move and run a play. Oh, did I mention there are certain areas on the field during a game you are required to pass? Yep, we needed a QB who could throw. As a first time coach, I didn't see anyone who could do this very well at the time. Most kids when asked, didn't want to, which I thought was a little strange. It came down to two kids, maybe three who demonstrated they could drop back and make a throw to the general area of a receiver. My son was one of them and I admit I struggled with the idea of playing him at QB. I didn't want to be 'that coach'. Regardless, I worked with him outside of practice and again, we only really had to execute a pass play a few times a game, so it wasn't really a concern at the time. We still needed a way to show the kids which play to run.

The coaching materials shared at the time referenced the NFL Flag Football playbook plays, which didn't have any running plays. I didn't find anything else online at the time that would help so I eventually bought a sketch diary and used colors to represent different players and positions for a play. The kids had plenty of crayons but colored pencils worked the best. I started with a formation where we had one running back and two wide receivers. The center was always blue and I made the quarterback yellow. The running back was red and receivers were orange and green.

After a game or two, we realized we needed to adjust and have two running backs, allowing a fake handoff or simply show the defense there are multiple players who might be getting the ball. Naturally I went overboard and drew up 20 different plays. Each play was drawn on a page of paper and I didn't want to redraw them so I tore out each page and laminated them and created a 'flip book' with a key ring to hold them together. This worked well at first, but prooved challenging when I wanted to have basically the same play called, but run slightly different with the fake handoff going to a different player and a different direction. I needed to be able to flip a play. So I redrew the plays, with a flipped version on the backside of each page. I of course went overboard and made multiple variations, marking the routes with a number, to indicate which player goes first and who goes second. I used a star shap to indicate a handloff. Empty was a fake. Filled in was a real handoff. Now I had a new set of plays, laminated of course. A new flip book.

The flip book worked really well. It visualized the play for the kids to see, and after time, they knew where to go and generally line up. But I needed something better. I wanted to be faster in the huddle. I couldn't spend 10 or 15 seconds flipping through the book to find the play and show the kids. I needed to be more efficient. Play calling needed to be more efficient. I wanted to have an advantage.

I had recently tought myself how to develop mobile apps and decided to create something that would allow me to find a play quickly and flip it. I also wanted to be able to assign attributes to a play and be able to filter the play list to help me find the play. I think it was my 2nd or 3rd season when I had the idea. I had an arsenal of plays and wanted that competitive advantage to call them at a moments notice.

The first version worked great. It was still rudimentry at the time as I was drawing up plays and saving them as images. Two images for each play, one flipped. I'd import the image files into my app and modify the play list to include it. I'd launch the app, run a few tests and verify the new play appeared in the list and I could filter, view and flip it. I was ready for a new season.

I quickly realized the app needed to be improved. Drawing the plays outside of the app as images and importing them was very time consuming. It wasn't efficient and I was adding plays between games throughout the season. The app did it's job, but it needed more features.

The kids are now in 3rd and 4th grade and the goal is still to have each kid touch the ball. I was using a notebook to track touches, scores and tackles. So I developed a feature to allow me to capture game stats and help keep score during the game. It was something I put together quickly and unfortunately didn't get used much. Mainly because I was really using the app to call plays and I'd watch the execution and focus on the coaching aspect. I'd forget to capture the stats and enter them into the app. Another coaching tool I incorporated around this time was a wristband. I used the play image files and created a template of plays I'd print and cut out to fit into a player's wristband. I started with a layout of 4 plays on each card, but eventually created a layout that allowed 6 plays on each card. With 3 cards in a band, that allowed for 18 different plays. And yes, I again realize some may think this is a little too much, but I wanted to be prepared.

The features I really needed was the ability to draw a new play on the fly. I've seen other coaches with pencil & paper, drawing up plays in their huddle during a game. But what stood out during one game is one coach had a whiteboard and a dry erase marker. This gave me an idea. I quickly learned how to develop a view to interact with a finger touch and draw on the screen. I created a whiteboard feature in the app that allowed me to pick a formation and draw routes for each player. It worked well and I was excited to show it to the kids. They of course were mesmerized by the route drawing and wanted to draw their own plays. It proved to be a great tool for coaching practice and teaching kids concepts of route combinations and why they worked against certain defenses. But my app still needed to be better.

I worked really hard to take the whiteboard feature and convert it into a view for drawing and saving plays. The route colors had to match the player's position color. They also needed to end with an 'arrow'. Writing an algorithm to convert a series of grid points into lines and calculate angles for drawing the arrow was a fun challenge. I added this to the app and used it for another coaching another season.

I now had two apps, one with the imported play images developed with UIKit and another I was developing with SwiftUI. The latter eventually being the version available in the app store, allowing a coach to create their own playbook, draw their own plays and create wristband layouts.

Both of these apps were really fun to create and I know they really helped me coach and teach the kids to play flag football. My kids are now at a level where calling plays will either be done from the sideline or wristbands. It will continue to be valuable tool for me as I can use it to create wristband play cards and coach concepts during practice.

I intend to add additional features such as the ability to capture and record game stats in the app, improvements to play design such as motion and additional customization for coaches who may already have their own style/color scheme.

I know this app would have helped me much more when my kids were younger, easily replacing those flip cards. If you are a youth flag football coach, I'm sure it will help you too.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story!