CoachesEDG
What is CoachesEDG?
CoachesEDG is a sports education app for baseball teams that allows coaches to build a digital playbook, test their players' strategic knowledge, and gain insights on their players to gain a competitive advantage.
Creating Educational Value for Coaches & Players
Our client, a long time baseball player and coach, was seeking to launch a product into the baseball coaching marketplace. He initially came up with the idea in his assistant coaching experience when he had watched a player get benched for missing a sign. He continued to notice 50% of his players missing signs and realized that there was a knowledge gap on the team. Players had no way to practice the team's signs off the field. He made paper flashcards with all the signs and gave them to the players to study in between practices. The team instantly improved.
From that moment on, he was committed to bringing his idea of a digital study guide to baseball teams to enable players to learn their playbook both on and off the field. The Headway team was tasked with the evaluating his concept idea, as well as providing a foundation for how he might build the product and launch it into the marketplace.
Idea Validation through Problem Set Interviews
Throughout the first several sprints of this engagement, I worked alongside our product strategy team to identify the core audience and validate the client's idea. We performed a series of activities such as creating Personas, Opportunity Mapping, and Jobs To Be Done. We collected data during a series of Problem Set interviews with baseball coaches currently coaching middle school or high school level players. Using this research we were able to establish an outline for our core jobs to be done as well as map critical assumptions and risks for the product.
A Customizable Playbook Experience
It was important for us to design an experience that would allow larger baseball organizations operating multiple teams to be able to customize their playbook across the organization as a whole as well as on a team by team basis. In some instances we found that managers of multiple teams used the same signs for all of their teams, but the plays would vary in complexity based on the level of the players.
A core feature of the app is the digital Play Creator which allows coaches to build play schematics. Once plays were created, the coach could categorize them into offensive or defensive buckets. In addition, the coach could also create videos of sign demonstrations to add to the playbook.
Once created, the coach could leverage quiz functionality to test their players knowledge. When off the field, players were able to study their playbook using the digital flashcard system.
Leveraging the power of AI
In addition to the Play Creator for coaches and Flash Card experience for players, we created an AI driven experience in which coaches could leverage AI as a rule checker for in-game calls and ask AI questions about situational baseball. The AI will provide answers for coaches for play scenarios (ie. I have runners on 1st and 3rd, we have 2 outs, what defensive play will work best?) as well as rules questions / lookup. This tool could be a game changer for coaches who are great with young players but may not have played a ton of baseball themselves.
The Result
Following our initial engagement in 2020, the CoachesEDG beta shipped and gained usage from local Wisconsin baseball teams at the high school and college level. A few years later in 2023, the founder approached Headway for a follow-on engagement to upgrade the user experience and build new features such as the Play Creator and AI Assistant Coach to continue to bring innovation to the sports education space.
