KickForward
A proposal for the committee. One page: what it is, what it costs, what the club is agreeing to, and what happens if we stop.
The problem it solves
Parents leave when they cannot see that their child is getting better. They do not say that is why; they say the sessions are too far, or the subs have gone up, or football has stopped being fun. The coaching is usually fine. What is missing is any record of it that a family can see.
A club of 200 families losing 25 a year is losing a fifth of its income every season and replacing it with recruitment. Keeping half of those is worth many times what this costs.
What it is
- Every player has a private page: what they are working on, in their coach's words, with a stage that moves as they do.
- Every claim carries evidence: the match moment, the clip, the numbers behind it.
- Every family sees their own child and nobody else's. Nothing is public, nothing is a league table, and no child is ever compared to another in a family's view.
- Coaches get the record back: squads, line-ups, match pages, and reports that start from last term's grades instead of a blank form.
- It is the club's address, badge and colours. Parents sign in with their own email.
What it costs
Capped at £129 a month for the whole club, however many teams. No setup fee, no charge per parent.
Or £150 a team. One invoice, one approval, fits a season’s budget. There is no VAT to add.
At a club of 20 teams and 280 players, the capped price is £4.60 a player a year, about one month's subs for one child, for the whole club.
What the club is agreeing to
- A season at a time. Monthly can be stopped at the end of any month.
- The data is the club's. One button exports every moment, player, match, objective and coach note as a spreadsheet, at any time, including after you leave. Nothing is held hostage.
- Who sees what is set by the club. Families see their own child. Coaches see their own squad. The club's admins decide who is a coach.
- Children's footage is never public. No YouTube, no link anybody can forward. Video is served only to people the club has approved by name.
- Nothing to install. It is a web address. Phones, tablets and laptops.
What we need from the club
- A squad list and a fixture list for each team that is coming on.
- One person per team who will set two or three objectives a term. That is the work, and it is the work a good coach is doing in their head already.
- An email address for each family, which the club already holds.
How it starts
One age group goes on first, free for the rest of this season. The committee sees it working with its own players, its own parents and its own fixtures before the club pays for anything. If the parents in that age group do not ask for it, we have not earned the rest of the club.
Founding clubs
The first ten clubs keep their price for as long as they stay, whatever the price becomes later, in exchange for an occasional call about what to build next and permission to say their name.