Sideline SideKick Tracker
The Booth is a shared notepad for your staff during a game. Whatever you'd shout down to the sideline, you type once, and the whole staff sees it. At halftime it files itself into a card you can actually walk into the locker room with.
What it is
It's built around three things.
- Fast. A coach with a thought between plays has to be able to get it down and look up again.
- Who said it. Every note carries a name, a post (booth or field) and a quarter. A note with no name on it is a rumor, and a coordinator deciding whether to slide protection needs to know which of his coaches saw it and from where.
- It works with no signal. Nothing on the screen waits for a server, and no signal is normal in a press box.
It's game-scoped. What the safety did on the second series is about tonight, so notes belong to one game and stay there.
Turning it on or off
The Booth is on by default. The owner can turn it off in Team Settings → The Booth. When it's off, the feature isn't in the app at all for that team. When it's on, every coach has it.
It's never shown to fans, under any setting. A parent can't reach it.
Once it's on, The Booth appears under the game card on your home screen during a game. The picker at the top switches between its three screens: Feed, Report and Scout.
The Feed
Everything your staff has written tonight, newest first. Each note shows who wrote it, whether they were in the booth or on the field, and which quarter it came from.
A strip of filter chips sits above the feed showing only the tags actually used tonight, so you never waste a tap on a chip with nothing behind it.
Posting a note
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Tap the compose bar at the bottom. It's one line until you touch it, and the extra controls only show up when you want them.
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Type it, or tap the microphone and say it. Dictation writes into the same box, and speaking adds to a half-typed thought without wiping it.
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Tap Post. It shows up right away, on your screen and everyone else's.
To fix one, use Edit note from the note's menu. The compose bar itself becomes the editor, so there's no second screen to learn in a press box. Delete note is in the same menu, or swipe the note left. A deleted note comes off the halftime report too.
Tags, post and quarter
All three have sensible defaults and stay hidden until you tap into the compose bar, so they cost nothing when you don't need them.
Eight tags
Front · Blitz · Coverage · Box Count · Protection · Matchup · Personnel · Spec. Teams
Eight and no more, because the strip has to be readable at arm's length in the dark and easy to hit without looking. A tag helps file the note, and it's never required. Anything that isn't one of these goes in the text.
Booth or Field
Where you were standing when you saw it. It's set on each note because it changes during a game. A coordinator is in the box for the first half and on the grass for the second, and "what the safety did" means something different depending on where he was.
Quarter
Stamped from the game automatically. Change it when you're writing at the break about something from the first half. A note about the second quarter belongs in the second quarter, whenever you got around to typing it.
Agreeing and pushing back
Every note has two buttons, and only two: "I saw it too" and "Not what I saw". Between series a staff has time to agree or push back and that's it. A longer list would turn a glance into a decision.
These feed straight into the report, below.
The Report: your halftime card
The Report screen is your staff's notes, put in order. There's nothing to wait for. It's built on the phone from what's already there.
It files everything into five sections:
| Section | What lands here |
|---|---|
| Fronts & Box | Front and box-count notes: what they're lining up in. |
| Pressure | Blitz and protection notes: where it's coming from and what you called against it. |
| Matchups to Attack | Matchup and personnel notes: the ones that turn into calls. |
| Staff Disagreement | Where your coaches didn't see the same thing. It's flagged in orange so it doesn't get buried, because it's the most useful two minutes of halftime. |
| Also on file | Everything without a tag. Nothing gets dropped for being untagged. |
Each section has a headline callout, and under it What your coaches wrote. Tap that for the actual notes with the actual names.
What the report won't do. It only files your staff's own notes. It doesn't grade play calls, judge what's working, or add anything nobody wrote. Every line opens onto the coach who said it. For a read on your own calls, use Coach's Read. It's a separate screen on purpose.
The header tells you what it was built from: "Compiled on this phone · from 23 staff notes by 4 coaches".
The Scout pack
The third screen is your scouting on tonight's opponent, carried into the stadium.
You chart during the week, somewhere with a connection. Friday you're in a building without one. So whatever you finalize for the week gets packed down and lands here, and it reads with no signal at all.
If it's empty, it says so and tells you why: chart the opponent, then finalize the week.
No signal in the press box
A note shows up the moment you post it and syncs when the phone finds a bar. Nothing on the Feed spins, waits or fails because the stadium has thick concrete. Your staff can work a whole half with no service and everything syncs up afterward.
Try it before a real Friday: put your phone in airplane mode and use the Booth for ten minutes.
A word on the rule book
NFHS 1-6-2 allows coaches and non-players to use devices; it never allows communicating with a player during live play. The Booth is coach-to-coach. That sentence is in the app too, under the setting that switches it on, so nobody has to take a website's word for it. Check your own association's rules — they are what governs your Friday, not this page.