Guides / Once the habit holds

Connecting a coach

Once your athlete has logged a week, their coach can read it, and from the next lesson on, write into it. Send one invite from the app, the coach signs in at coach.tierbreak.app, and the week shows up on their screen. After each lesson you get their note. Everything a coach writes about your athlete is visible to you, and a coach can never see more than the family can. Two minutes to set up.

Still looking for one? Choosing a coach covers credentials, the questions to ask, and how to judge fit after a month.

How to connect

1. Parent sends the invite. In the app: tap your avatar on Today, then Manage family accounts → + COACH. Pick the players this coach will follow (one invite can cover every player in the family), and the share sheet hands you a link to send by text, email, or anywhere else. Or on the web: sign in at app.tierbreak.app and open the Coaches panel. Enter the coach's email and send. Six areas start shared and one, live score, starts off; the panel has the switches, and you can change them before the coach even accepts, or any time after.
2. Coach accepts. They open the invite link you sent and sign in at coach.tierbreak.app. No app to install, no password to invent: sign-in is a link emailed to the coach's address. Their console shows only the athletes whose families invited them.
3. The week starts arriving. The coach opens your athlete and sees Today (the brief before the lesson), Lessons, Matches, Plan and Brief. A digest email comes daily by default; the coach can switch it to every other day, weekly, or off.

Under 18, only a parent or guardian can send a coach invite; athletes cannot connect or disconnect a coach themselves. A player who is 18 or over connects their own coach from Manage family accounts.

What the coach reads

What the family shares, seven switches per athlete: training (sessions, duration, what was worked on, quality), matches (results and scores), analytics (the point-level detail behind those results, its own switch so a family can share results and keep the deeper numbers private), mental progress (phase and step counts only, never the content of any exercise), schedule (the season plan and the next event), goals, and live score (the score as it moves while you track a match, off until you turn it on). Before a lesson the coach sees a three-line brief: what happened since last time, how your athlete is (shared reflections only), and what is open.

What the coach writes, and what you get back

A coach who holds the training area can log the lesson: the minutes, the focus, the drills, a rating on your athlete's own 1 to 5 scale, a line for the family, and one to three pieces of homework. You get the note by email, written from what they logged. On Today your athlete sees the homework as a card beside their own plan and ticks each item done, which counts as training; the lesson itself waits for an acknowledgment, and once acknowledged it joins the week as a verified session with the coach's name on it. On a match you tracked, the coach can write three lines, which show on Today as "Coach, on the match". In the Plan, the coach writes where your athlete is in four areas (technical, tactical, physical, mental), each line resting on a lesson, a match or a week of training, and you see the same lines and what they rest on. Every so often the coach can publish a brief for the parents: the period's lessons, homework, matches, goals and a note, by email and on Today, never to the athlete's own login. The coach can also propose a goal, a tournament, a training block or rest, which lands as a proposal your family accepts or declines, and can mark a session they ran as coach-verified.

Everything a coach writes about your athlete is visible to you. There is no private line from a coach about a child. The coach's own things, their drill library, their groups and their record across their roster, are theirs. TierBreak is deliberately not a messaging app: there are no direct messages between a coach and an athlete in either direction, ever. The athlete can attach one short note-to-coach to a day, and like everything else in this channel, the family sees it.

What the coach can never see

Some things are not switches; they are walls:

• Journal words. An athlete's journal and reflection text is private by default. A 13+ athlete can choose, entry by entry, to share a reflection with family, and separately, that shared entry with the coach. The coach can never see writing the family can't see, and for an athlete under 13, athlete-written free text is never coach-visible at all.
• Wellbeing check-ins and safety flags: never shared with a coach, not configurable. The same safeguarding list that reads your athlete's own words also reads what a coach writes about them; if something matches, Today tells you a coach's note needs your attention, with the coach's name and nothing else, and nobody outside the family is told.
• Parent observations and private documents.
• Siblings: a coach sees only the athletes they were invited to follow.

The rule underneath all of it: a coach can never see more than the family can. Family visibility is the ceiling, always.

The family stays in control

• Every console visit is logged. The Coaches panel shows the family how often the coach has looked and when they last did: trust through transparency, not trust by promise.
• Change the switches any time. They take effect immediately.
• Revoke any time. Disconnecting is immediate; re-invite later if things change.

For coaches

Nothing to install and nothing to pay: the console is free, in the browser, and shows your players' weeks without anyone having to report to you. Paste your own calendar and Today lists the day's lessons with a brief on each athlete; log the lesson in thirty seconds and the parents get the note; read the match you missed in points; write the plan and the brief with the evidence on the table. Sign in to the app with the same login for coach mode courtside. More on the coaches page.

TierBreak is free on the App Store, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Want to work directly with the founder? Ask for an Inner Circle place.

See it on one lesson: what a coach opens before a lesson. A story with the real numbers.

Next: Give the coach something to read: Getting started → Already logging? The Weekly Review is what the coach's week view is built from.