Giving players homework: sending a volleyball drill home
You say it to that one player at the end of practice: work on your toss this week. He nods. At the weekend he serves exactly the way he did last week, and honestly, you are no longer sure whether you said it to him or to the lad next to him. A remark on the sideline has no shelf life. A drill on his own screen does.
Why a remark evaporates and a drill stays put
What you say in the hall has to survive three things: the ride home, the rest of the week and the memory of someone who was mainly tired at that moment. Usually it survives none of them. That is not the player's fault. You gave him a sentence with no picture, no name on it and nowhere to find it again.
Homework in Koach solves precisely that, and nothing more. You take a drill that is already in your library, tick who is going to do it at home, and send. From that moment the drill sits on that player's dashboard, with a diagram and an animation, and his parent knows something is waiting too. No new system, no separate app: the same drill you use at practice, now with one name on it.
The feature handles more than one player at a time. So you can give three passers the same thing, or the whole group during a holiday week. But the strength is in the small use: one player, one drill, one thing to work on.
The route: from library to homework
It all starts with a drill that already exists. Go to the Practice tab and tap the Drills button at the top of the screen. You land in the library with your own drills; the Show Koach drills switch adds the collection that comes with the app. Find the drill you want to send and tap it.
The drill opens in a window with the diagram, a play button and the phases underneath. Scroll down in it to the Assign as homework button. That button is only there for a coach or team owner — a player and a parent do not see it, even though they can view the same drill.
If you have assigned this drill before, it says Edit homework instead, with the number of players who have it right now in brackets. So the button itself tells you whether you are doing something new or changing something.
After the tap on Assign as homework, a list slides up asking who is going to practise this drill at home. At the top is Everyone, below that your players with their shirt number and name. Only players who are active in your team appear in that list; anyone you have set to inactive stays out of it.
Tap the names you mean and tap Save at the bottom. You get a short confirmation that the homework has been saved, and that is it. The chosen players get a notification on their phone with your team name above it; their parents get their own version of it. Anyone not ticked notices nothing — homework for three players makes three phones buzz, not eleven.
A practical limit the app does not impose on you, but which you would do well to impose on yourself: one drill per player at a time. Two is already a list, and a list gets put off. The homework block on his dashboard should be an assignment, not a diary.
What the player sees
A Homework block appears on the player's dashboard, with a line underneath saying his coach has set it for him to practise at home. In that block is the drill with a thumbnail of the court, the name and the category it falls under.
If he taps it, the same drill opens that you see: the name, your description, the diagram and below that the phases with Previous and Next. If the drill has more than one phase there is a play button in the middle of the diagram. So he can actually watch the drill run instead of having a still picture explained to him. He closes it with Back.
Worth knowing: a player has no access to the library. This block on his dashboard is his only way in to that drill. So choose something that makes sense without you and that can be done alone — a wall, a garage door, a patch of grass. Wall drills are the most rewarding material for this: they need one ball and no second person. If there is nothing usable in your own drill library, that is the real job for this week, not the sending.
What the parent sees, and what they do not
The parent of a chosen player gets their own notification, in their own language and in the third person: it says their child has been given new homework, with that child's name in it. So they do not get the player text that says "you" to them. That sounds like a detail, but it is the difference between a message that fits and a message a parent has to decode first.
On their own dashboard a block appears with their child's name above it. In it are the things scheduled for that child and the homework, recognisable by the same little court thumbnail. If they tap it, the same drill opens with the same animation. They cannot change anything about it: ticking who gets homework stays with the coach.
And then the distinction that is often misunderstood: a parent sees their child's homework, but no statistics. A parent account has no team, practice or match tab. Figures on attacking, passing, serving or minutes played do not appear on that account — not for their own child and not for anyone else's. What a parent does see is what is practically being asked of them and their child. How such an account is created and what else is in it is in adding parents to your team. If both parents are linked, they both get the message and both see the same block; that works as described in two parents per player.
The "Just for you" switch
Your profile has a row of switches under the heading Notifications — calendar changes, team messages, reminders — and one apart from those: Just for you. Homework falls under that last switch, and that has been a deliberate choice.
Team messages are noise to anyone who is not waiting for them: every poll, every announcement, every call. There are players and parents who turn that channel off, and that is allowed. But anyone who does should not miss their own homework as well — a message attached to one name is not noise. That is why "Just for you" is a switch of its own that stays on when someone mutes the team noise. The rest of the notifications page, and what does and does not produce a notification, is in the piece on push notifications.
In short: if you change the same drill again on the same day, whoever already had the notification does not get a second one. A player you add later in the day does get one.
Withdrawing it with the cross
Homework has no end date. It stays until you remove it, and that is on purpose: a drill that disappears by itself usually disappears at exactly the moment the player was finally getting round to it.
You withdraw it in the library. Above the search bar is a Homework block with everything that is out at the moment: the name of the drill and the number of players who have it. To the right of each row is a cross. Tap it and the homework is gone, for everybody at once. If you only want to take one player out, open the drill and untick that name in the list. Untick everyone and save, and the whole row disappears.
One thing to know: withdrawing sends no notification. For the player the block simply stops existing. So say something about it in the hall — "you can tick that serving thing off, I will be watching for it" — otherwise the only sign that anything has happened is that something has vanished from his screen.
Homework is an assignment, not a goal
Finally, the distinction that makes the difference between a feature that works and a feature that lasts two weeks. Homework is a concrete assignment with a shelf life of a week or two: this drill, this number of balls, until I want to see it back. Where a player is heading this season is something else; there is a personal goal per player for that, which lives somewhere else and moves at a different pace.
Three things make the difference. Set homework right after the session where you saw it, not three days later from the sofa — then it is still a reminder for the player and not a surprise. Choose something he can do alone, because a drill that needs a second person is in practice not homework but an appointment. And come back to it at the next session, even if it is one sentence. Never ask about it and your team learns within a month that the homework block is a suggestion.
If the drill you need is not in your library yet, that is no obstacle: you draw it yourself in a few minutes. How that goes, and how to write a description a player understands at home without you, is in creating drills with the drill editor. It is worth it, because a drill you make once you can give to every player who has to work on the same thing, season after season.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see whether a player has done his homework?
No. There is no box the player can tick and you get no message back. The app only shows you who has been given the drill and who has not. So the feedback goes through the hall: ask about it at the next session and you know straight away whether he understood it.
What happens to the homework if I edit or delete the drill itself?
Editing is safe: the homework points at the same drill, so a changed diagram or description shows up with the player immediately. Delete the drill from your library and the homework block disappears for the player and for his parent too, without a notification. If you only want to stop the homework but keep the drill, use the cross in the homework block above the search bar.
Does the player get it if he has no account of his own?
No. The homework block appears on the dashboard of his own account, so without a linked account he sees and notices nothing. If a parent is linked, the notification and the block do arrive there, and the parent can show it at home. Without a player account and without a parent account, assigning homework is pointless.
I coach two teams with the same player in both. Does the homework count for both?
No. Homework hangs on the team you assign it in, and on the player's name within that team. Do the same in your other team and you assign it there separately. That also means a fellow coach in that other team cannot see what you have assigned.
