Creating a friendly or tournament match

Friendlies are the dress rehearsals of your season — and administratively they are usually ghost matches: played, won, forgotten. A shame, because that is exactly where you test lineups and players. Creating one takes a minute.

Why you record friendlies too

In a friendly you try what you dare not try in league play: the young setter for a whole match, the new starting rotation, the outside hitter at opposite. Those are precisely the experiments you want to look back on — otherwise you are testing without learning. A recorded friendly gives your experiments numbers.

Creating one in a single form

1. Open the schedule and create a new event of the type Match.
2. Fill in the opponent and date/time. From two typed letters onwards the app suggests clubs you have played before — "Did you mean …?" — so you don't end up collecting three spellings of the same club every season.
3. Choose the match type. There are four — League, Cup, Tournament and Friendly — as four buttons in two rows of two. For a friendly you pick Friendly: it is a type of its own now, with its own colour, so you no longer need a note to recognise it later. The same four buttons appear under Edit as well, in case a match changes category after all.
4. Set home or away. Your starting lineup is set on match day, when you start the match.

The match now sits in the calendar and on match day it starts with one tap in live mode. If something shifts along the way — a different hall, a different time — open the match and tap Edit in the top right; starting and editing are two separate buttons.

Do you play in the Dutch league and use Koach in Dutch? Then you do not have to enter your league and cup matches by hand: link your pool and import the schedule in one go. Matches you had already planned yourself are recognised and never added twice. Everything outside your linked pool — a friendly against the neighbours, a one-off tournament — you create as described above.

The second route: starting right away

Not every friendly is in the calendar in advance. For the knockabout that happens spontaneously after practice, the Match tab has the button Start a friendly match — it used to be called 'Start new match'. The new name is more honest: that button begins a match at this very moment, it does not plan one. So the form has no date picker, and the app says so as well: This match starts now, so the date is today. Plan league and cup matches ahead in Schedule.

A match started that way automatically gets the Friendly type. That saves a choice, and it keeps a league label off a knockabout that counted for nothing.

The type is the label, the note is the thinking

The label does the recognising. In the calendar the date block of a friendly turns green, and on the match itself the label Friendly sits next to the opponent — in the calendar and in your match list. So you see at a glance which numbers came from a friendly.

What that label does not do is strike numbers out: the points, blocks and serves from a friendly count towards your players' season statistics just like those from a league match. The label is there so you can read those numbers properly — 'that 3-0 was against the fourth team' — not to filter them away.

The thinking goes into the match note on the match detail, which is only visible to coaches: that is where you record what you were testing, so three months later you still know why Lars set the whole match that evening. Playing a tournament with several short matches in one day? See planning tournaments.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

Planning a tournament and tracking every match Preparing your lineup before match day Opponents the app remembers: never three spellings of one club again Importing the match schedule from your pool

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