This guide walks you through creating and sharing your first session plan. You'll have a structured practice ready to go in about five minutes.
1. Complete your profile
After signing up, you'll land on the dashboard. Click your avatar in the bottom-left corner and go to Settings. Set your primary sport -- this determines which playing surfaces, drill categories, and equipment options appear throughout the platform. Planner.coach supports 20+ sports, so pick the one you coach most often and the rest of the app adapts to match.
You can also add your coaching level and age group. These help the AI assistant tailor its suggestions to your context.
2. Create an activity
Activities are the building blocks of sessions -- individual drills, exercises, or small-sided games. You have two ways to create one:
With the AI coach: Open the AI assistant from the floating button in the bottom-right corner. Describe what you need -- for example, "a 1v1 defending drill for U14 soccer players" or "a fast-break shooting drill for U16 basketball" -- and the assistant will generate a complete activity with instructions, setup, and a diagram. It works the same way for whichever sport you've set as primary. See Getting Started with AI for more on what the assistant can do.
Manually: Go to Activities in the sidebar, click New Activity, and fill in the details -- name, description, duration, equipment, and setup instructions. Use the Canvas Editor to draw a visual diagram on a playing surface.
3. Build a session
Go to Sessions in the sidebar and click New Session. Give it a name, date, and duration.
A session is organized into phases -- timed blocks that structure your practice. Common setups include:
- Warm-up (10 min)
- Skill work (20 min)
- Game play (15 min)
- Cool-down (5 min)
Add phases, then drag activities from your library into each one. Adjust durations as needed. The session timer automatically tallies total time so you don't overrun.
For a deeper walkthrough, see Building a Session.
4. Share your plan
Once your session is built, click Share in the top-right corner. You can:
- Copy a public link to share with assistant coaches or parents
- Export to PDF for printing
- Export to PNG for quick sharing via messaging apps
Shared links are read-only and don't require the viewer to have an account.
Next steps
- Browse the Activity Library for community-created drill templates
- Add your athletes under Athletes to start tracking attendance and progress
- Explore the AI assistant to generate full session plans from a single prompt
- Learn the keyboard shortcuts so you can jump to any session, athlete, or activity with Cmd/Ctrl-K
For more coaching tips, read our guide on planning effective practice sessions.