Get Your Squad Onto CoachCraft In One Week

Most clubs lose the first month of a new platform to half-connected accounts and a physio who never got the link. Here is the order of operations that avoids that.

Day one: the workspace code does the heavy lifting

Everything in CoachCraft hangs off a single 6-character workspace code. Coaches, physio, S&C staff and players all join the same team by entering it at signup. Get the code right and the rest of the setup is mostly automatic.

Two things worth doing before you share it. First, add your staff yourself in Team Members and set their role explicitly. A physio who signs up without a role assigned lands in the portal with nothing visible, and you will spend an evening working out why. Second, decide who is a player and who is staff before anyone registers. Roles set at signup and roles set in Team Members can drift apart, and the mismatch is what usually causes an empty portal.

Send the code out in one message with the portal link. Players go to the player portal, staff to the coach portal. Same code, different door.

Day two to three: session plans before people, not after

Build two or three sessions in the planner before the squad logs in. An empty portal on first login is the fastest way to lose a player who was already sceptical about "another app".

Once a session is in the calendar, players see it, can mark availability, and get the reminder if they have not answered. That single loop, plan the session and let availability collect itself, is where the platform pays for itself. You stop chasing numbers in a group chat on a Thursday night.

Keep the first sessions simple. Drills, timings, focus points. You can layer in load tracking and RPE once people are logging in without being asked.

Day four onward: physio slots

The physio portal is worth opening early, even if injuries are light. Set the check-in slots for the week and players can book themselves in from their own portal. No triage by text message, and the physio walks into a morning already scheduled.

A booking sends an email with a calendar invite when it lands, so nothing depends on someone remembering to check the portal. If your club uses its own SMTP, configure that first so the emails come from your address rather than a generic one.

Check it as a player, not as a coach

Before you declare setup done, log in as a player on a phone. Staff accounts see more than players do by design, so the coach view will always look complete. The player view is the one that tells you whether the roles, the sessions and the booking slots actually landed.