About Teach Playbook
I played football from around 10 years old through high school. I love football, but after having three kids, I had very little time to sit down and watch games every week.
This past summer, my son decided he wanted to try football camp, a local clinic that ran for a week. He left that camp telling me:
“Dad, I LOVE FOOTBALL!!!”
So we found the local 8U program and signed him up.
Not being one of his coaches on the field, and trying my best not to coach from the sidelines, I started looking for other ways to help him learn. I recreated his team’s plays in PowerPoint and Freeform and walked him through what he was supposed to do at his positions on offense and defense.
The diagrams and my explanations weren’t the most engaging thing, and I think it was genuinely hard for him to conceptualize what was happening based on arrows alone.
Eventually I got fed up and built the tool I wanted. I loaded in the team’s plays and let my kids loose on it. They loved it. More importantly, they wanted to change things. They wanted to experiment with the plays:
“What happens if this guy goes there?”
“What happens if he misses a tackle?”
Then they started giving me product feedback:
“Why didn’t it say touchdown?”
“Can it say ‘sacked’ if I get him behind the line?”
That was when I knew I had built something different. They weren’t just looking at their plays anymore. They were playing with them and learning how football works.
I shared it with other parents and with some coaches and got positive feedback there as well. Teach Playbook is far more than just circles following a pre-drawn line. Blockers engage, defenders read the play and pursue. You can change one player and the outcome can be completely different. I couldn’t find anything else like that, let alone something priced for a youth team.
That’s how Teach Playbook started.
Now I’m making it available to coaches looking for a better way to share and teach their players the playbook. Rather than printing out slides with arrows, coaches can build their plays in Teach Playbook and share them instantly with the whole team, from the first day of the season, or even before, once families sign up. With a Team pass, families get access, at no added charge, to an interactive tool designed to teach assignments and why each job on the team matters.
What we believe
- One team, one price. A coach buys a Team pass, and the other coaches and families join at no extra cost.
- Your playbook belongs to your team.
- No ads. No selling your information.
- Built with privacy in mind. All anyone needs to join a team is an email address and the team’s code. Nothing about a child is ever required.
- Players learn better when they can see the play happen.
Teach Playbook is built by Teach Playbook LLC, a small, independent, U.S. Marine Corps veteran-owned company.
Questions, feedback, or an idea that would make Teach Playbook better? Email support@teachplaybook.com. You’ll reach the person building it.