“I just wanted to coach volleyball, not wrestle with four different apps”“I just wanted to coach volleyball, not wrestle with four different apps”

Was volleyball an obvious choice at that height?

“Inevitable, more like. [laughs] I was head and shoulders above everyone else as a kid, and at some point everyone starts asking you the same question: ‘Don’t you play volleyball?’ I stepped onto a court for the first time when I was twelve, and it clicked straight away. For a tall kid, volleyball is the perfect place to land. Your height stops being awkward and becomes a weapon. I never left. That is 16 years now.”

And at some point you stopped just playing and started analysing.

“Yes, I noticed that early on. I enjoyed thinking about the game at least as much as playing it. Why isn’t that rotation working? Why is the block always half a beat late? I was the one still standing there talking it through after the match while everyone else was already in the shower. Looking back, becoming a coach was only a matter of time.”

Two years ago you took over a youth team, am I right?

“That’s right. A team in the first class, a regional amateur division, here in the ’s-Hertogenbosch area in the south of the Netherlands.”

“Enormous potential. Players who have really got it in them, it just needed to come out. That is the best thing about coaching and the hardest thing at the same time. You can see where they could be, and your job is to make that path visible. Not on gut feeling, but with a plan. And that is exactly where I hit a wall.”

What kind of wall?

“Administration. I just wanted to coach, not wrestle with four different apps. I wanted to build line-ups, track development, adjust during the match. Instead I was juggling a group chat for team messages, a spreadsheet for attendance, a notepad for my observations and my phone for keeping score.”

“Four systems that knew nothing about each other. Tuesday’s attendance told me nothing about Saturday’s line-up, because they lived in different worlds. I was spending more time keeping records than coaching.”

Surely there are apps for that?

“There are. And I tried them, I really did. But I kept running into the same thing. Either an app did one function really well, say attendance or statistics, and I still needed three others alongside it.”

“Or an app was fully stocked with features, but came with a price tag that made my eyes water. Prices that are fine for a professional club with a budget, but not for an ordinary coach doing this in the evenings on top of a full-time job. I thought: I don’t want to pay a fortune just to coach my own team.”

When did it turn into ‘fine, I’ll build it myself’?

“It wasn’t a lightning bolt, more a slow realisation. I had started making lists. Just for myself: what would my perfect app do? That list kept growing. One evening I looked at it and thought: this isn’t a wish list any more, this is a design. Why am I waiting for someone else to build it?”

You built Koach feature by feature. How did that work?

“I deliberately didn’t think ‘I’m building an app’. I took it one problem at a time: what am I actually solving here? Take the line-up. I didn’t want to drop six names into boxes. I wanted to pick a 5-1 or a 4-2, assign the setters and the libero, check that the rotation works out, and save a line-up that worked so I could reuse it the following week. That became a feature.”

“Then live scoring. During a match there’s no time for messing about. I wanted to record a point in two taps, who scored and how, and have it feed straight into each player’s stats. And it had to work without wi-fi, because half the sports halls in this country have no reception. And so it went on. Attendance that feeds straight into your season overview. Player-by-player development, so that in a one-to-one I don’t have to say ‘I feel like you’re improving’ but can actually show it. A drill editor where I can draw a drill instead of describing it. Every feature started as something that frustrated me on one of my own coaching nights.”

So think first, build later.

“In that order, yes: think, design, build, never the other way around. I worked everything out in detail first: what should it do, for whom, at what moment in a training session or a match. Only once that was clear did I start designing.”

“How does this feel in your hand when you’re sitting on the bench with 30 seconds until the serve? I wanted it to feel calm, not like a spreadsheet. And only when a screen was right did I actually build it. I wanted to get every detail right, every one I’d run into as a coach. That is how Koach came about.”

And now you coach your own team with Koach.

“Every week. With that same team full of potential where it all started. And I’ve noticed I’m coaching again instead of doing admin all the time. I can see a player’s progress on a graph, and I can actually act on it.”

“I can see in the numbers where we need to be sharper. That is what it was always about: not the app, but what the app gives you back, time and attention for the players. Everything in one place, and affordable, because that was a matter of principle for me.”

What is the current state of Koach?

“It’s live in the App Store and the Google Play Store, and has been since August this year. Honestly, that was the hardest part. I already knew loads of coaches who wanted to try it out, and I talked about it on platforms like Reddit.”

“It has over 600 active users now. It’s crazy to see how fast it is growing, but I take it as a good sign. It’s definitely not perfect yet, I get loads of feature requests, but also great reviews from enthusiastic coaches all over the world. That honestly keeps me going: helping other coaches with their team management without them paying more than a bottle of water a month.”

Finally: one piece of advice for the volleyball players reading this?

“Look after your knees. [laughs] I mean that seriously. Knees take a beating in volleyball, with all that jumping and landing, and I’ve had my share by now, so I’m allowed to say it. Stretch, build strength, take the warning signs seriously. You only get one pair of knees and you want to be walking into that hall every week, teaching others what you have learned over the years.”