Why I built Cheat Code.

Hey, I'm Brad.

I've spent most of my life on a football sideline in some form or another. A while back, I took a team, with my son on it, and we won the championship. That season taught me a lot. A lot of what to do, and a lot of what not to do. But most of all, it taught me that coaching is so much more than X's and O's. Primarily, it's being able to communicate effectively.

I paid for the apps everyone uses, and every one of them had clearly been built by somebody who has never coached a day in their lives. Whoever shipped those screens never installed a new play on a Tuesday and needed assistants, parents and players to have it by Thursday. Has never hand-typed an entire season's schedule, one form at a time, on a phone, after work. Has never looked at the roster, known exactly which player could take a step this month, and had no real way to communicate that to their parents. I was managing logistics instead of developing players.

About midway through that season, I realized our season was never going to be decided by my best few players. It was going to hinge on whether my other players could improve over the course of the season.

Watching those kids grow over that season was so much fun. Seeing them have something to be proud of, that they worked hard and saw the results on the field, that is why I coach. But the truth is, I coached those kids in spite of the tools I had, not because of them. I was never able to find a sports team software that met my needs as a coach.

So I built it. A draft board instead of paper notes. A practice builder with a loaded drill library instead of a notes app in your phone. A parent chat and a coaches chat that exist all in one place. And a development plan, weekly tasks and game reports for every player on the roster, each one visible to that player's own parents and nobody else, so the work keeps going on the nights they are not with me.

I have a full-time job and a family, and I still coach. This was built in that life, by someone in it, for the people running practice on a week night and wondering if there is a better way to do this. There is. I use it with my own team every week.