Built by a coach, for coaches

The coaching journey behind CoachCraft

My coaching career started in South Africa and has since taken me through different rugby environments in China and the Netherlands. Over the years I have coached across youth, school, club, academy, and representative rugby, working with players at very different stages of their development and in very different environments.

Alongside coaching, I have worked as a university teacher specialising in didactics, pedagogy, mentorship, and digitalisation. That academic background has shaped how I think about coaching, with a strong focus on how people learn, how environments influence development, and how structured systems can support both individual growth and team performance.

I hold a World Rugby Level 3 coaching qualification and currently serve as Head Coach and Director of Rugby at RC Spakenburg in the Netherlands. My coaching background includes work in South African schools and clubs, international school rugby in China, Dutch Premiership rugby, and a short period with the Dutch U20 national programme.

A coaching career across three countries

Why CoachCraft was built

"What has always driven me is player development. Coaching is not just about sessions, drills, or match-day decisions. It is about helping players understand the game, take ownership of their growth, and develop the mindset needed to perform consistently."

After years of coaching, teaching, planning, analysing, communicating with players, tracking development, and managing team processes, I kept running into the same problem: valuable information was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Coaches are expected to make better decisions, give clearer feedback, support player welfare, manage squads, track progress, and build a strong team culture, often without one clear system to help them do it. Development notes lived in notebooks. Session plans lived in spreadsheets. Player data lived in someone's memory. Squad availability came via WhatsApp at 10pm on a Tuesday.

CoachCraft was built to bring those pieces together, not to replace the human side of coaching, but to remove the friction that gets in the way of it.

What CoachCraft is built to do

Who CoachCraft is for

CoachCraft is designed for any level of rugby, from a grassroots club coach planning a Saturday morning session with fifteen players, to a professional Director of Rugby managing multiple squads and a full support staff. The tools are the same; the scale adapts to where you are.

Schools, academies, clubs, and national programmes are all welcome. If you care about developing players properly and want a system that supports that, CoachCraft was built for you.