When a scout says send me something, it should not take four days.
Semi-professionals and serious amateurs: a third-league footballer trying to be seen a level up, two competitive climbers, a handball player coming back from a knee, an esports player whose team folded, a triathlete self-coaching because the coach costs more than the entry fees. Almost all of them run their own career as an unpaid second job with worse tools than their employer has.
Two hours break, usually. The first is footage — 90 minutes of a match on a phone, from which four usable clips must be extracted, and it takes an evening every week. The second is outreach: emails to clubs, scouts, agents and sponsors, each rewritten from scratch, each unanswered, none of them tracked.
- Cutting a long recording into tagged events — every touch, set, round, rep
- Assembling a reel from selected tags at the right length, ratio and captioning for the platform a scout actually opens
- Logging sessions — load, duration, RPE, sleep, soreness — and surfacing a sharp seven-day trend
- Keeping a scout-ready one-page profile that regenerates itself
- Tracking every club, scout and sponsor contacted, with the follow-up due
- Turning a coach’s spoken feedback into a written, searchable note
- Whether the body is right today
- What to do about a niggle
- Which club, which contract, which level
- Technique correction
- The tagging pipeline
- You upload the match or session; it comes back segmented by event type with timestamps. Selecting six tags produces a finished reel in the right format with name, position and date burned in. What was an evening becomes about eleven minutes.
- The training log
- Deliberately dull: a phone form with five fields, ten seconds after every session. It draws the acute-to-chronic load trend and flags sharp jumps. It flags. It does not prescribe.
- The profile page
- One page, always current: position, age, height, season minutes, key stats, three clips, contact. The single reason players do not get seen is that when a scout asks for something, it takes four days to assemble and by then the interest has cooled.
- The outreach tracker
- The same architecture as the job-search tracker, because it is the same problem wearing a tracksuit: a list of targets, a message built from real material, a follow-up date, and a record of what came back.
- The comeback log
- For anyone rehabbing: the physio’s instructions written down once, sessions logged against them, and a weekly summary the physio can read in thirty seconds.
It never prescribes a session and never assesses an injury.
It shows the trend and puts the number in front of the athlete and, where there is one, the coach or physio. I have refused three requests to add a recommended load for tomorrow. The consequence of being wrong is somebody’s season, and the machine cannot feel the knee.
It also does not talk to clubs. Drafts wait for the player to send.
Minutes from the final whistle to a reel a scout could open. Clubs contacted with a follow-up actually sent. And whether the log is still being filled in eight weeks later — that one is the real test, and it is why the form has five fields.
When the athlete’s problem is that they are not good enough at this level yet. That happens, and no highlight reel changes it. The honest version of the conversation is worth more than the system, and I have had it twice.
Ten seconds after every session. Twenty minutes after every match.
Every Sunday I lost an evening cutting four clips out of ninety minutes of phone footage. Now I upload it after the match and by the time I have eaten it is tagged, and I pick six moments and have a reel in about ten minutes. The part that actually changed something was the profile page — when a scout said “send me something” in August I sent it that hour, and previously that would have taken me four days by which time nobody cares.
I self-coach because a coach costs more than my entry fees, so I was tracking my load in a notebook and lying to myself in it. Five fields on my phone after every session, ten seconds, and the seven-day trend is drawn for me. It flagged a jump two weeks before an event and I backed off. It never tells me what to do, it just puts the number in front of me, which turns out to be enough.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.