James Whitfield has been coaching youth football for eleven years. For most of that time, his session preparation looked the same: a notebook, a whiteboard at the club, and a lot of WhatsApp messages to his assistants.
"I'd spend an hour and a half on a Sunday designing the week's sessions," he says. "Drawing them out, photographing the whiteboard, sending them to Sarah and Marco. Half the time they'd message back saying they couldn't make out the arrows."
When he started using Clubroom in January, the first thing he did was recreate his existing drill library on the pitch canvas. It took a weekend. The second thing he did was invite his assistants — Sarah O'Brien, who runs the women's first team sessions, and Marco Diaz, who handles four age groups in the youth programme.
Within a month, all three were building drills directly in Clubroom and sharing sessions from the same club workspace.
"What used to take me an hour to sketch by hand now takes five minutes. The drill library is a game changer for session planning." — Sarah O'Brien, Assistant Coach
The Shift in Workflow
Before Clubroom, session prep was individual. James would design the plan, photograph it, and distribute it. Sarah and Marco would adapt it for their groups — sometimes on paper, sometimes by memory.
"There was no single source of truth," James says. "We had three separate notebooks essentially doing the same job."
With a shared club library, that changed. Any coach in the club can now browse the full drill collection, duplicate a drill to modify it, and build their session from what already exists. New drills go into the shared library so everyone benefits.
"Marco runs U10s through U16s. He is building drills constantly. Now when I need something for a pressing session, I check what he has first. Half the time it is already there."
The Numbers
- Session prep time: Down from ~90 minutes per week to ~40 minutes
- Drills created in first 3 months: 47
- Coaches on the platform: 3 (full club staff)
- Shared sessions: 31
What They Use Most
James uses the drill builder and session planner for every training week. Sarah relies heavily on the print-ready session export — she brings a physical copy to every session. Marco uses the AI assistant to generate starting points for drills he then refines on the canvas.
"I describe what I want — something like 'a transition drill for U14s focused on counter-press, eight players, ten minutes' — and the AI gives me a starting point," Marco says. "I change the layout, adjust the timing, add my own coaching points. It is not doing the thinking for me. It is just saving me the blank canvas problem."
Advice for Other Clubs
James's advice for clubs considering Clubroom: start with one coach, build a small drill library, then invite the rest of the staff.
"Do not try to migrate everything at once. Pick your ten most-used drills, put them in Clubroom, and run one session from there. You will see immediately whether it works for you."
For FC United, it worked.