Sideline SideKick Tracker
The Booth is a shared notepad for your staff during a game — whatever you would shout down to the sideline, typed once where 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
Three things shape it and nothing else does.
- Eight seconds. 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. An unattributed observation is a rumour, 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, which is the normal state of a press box.
It is game-scoped. What the safety did on the second series is about tonight and nothing else, so notes belong to one game and stay there.
Turning it on
The Booth is off by default. The owner turns it on in Team Settings → The Booth. Off, the feature is not in the app at all for that team; on, it is there for every coach.
It is never shown to fans, under any setting. That is not a preference — a parent cannot reach it.
Once it is on, The Booth appears under the game card on your home screen during a game. The three screens — Feed, Report and Scout — are the picker at the top.
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 — a chip that matches nothing is a tap wasted finding out it was empty.
Posting a note in eight seconds
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Tap the compose bar at the bottom. It is one line until you touch it — the extra controls appear only 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 rather than wiping it.
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Tap Post. It appears immediately, 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 — a press box is not the place to learn a second screen. 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 all three sit below the fold of an unfocused compose bar, so they cost nothing when you do not want 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 hittable without looking. A tag is a filing aid, never a required field — anything that is not one of these is said in the text.
Booth or Field
Where you were standing when you saw it. It is on the note rather than on your account because it changes: 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 which.
Quarter
Stamped from the game automatically. Change it when you are writing at the break about something from the first half — a note about the second quarter belongs in the second quarter, whatever time you got round to typing it.
Agreeing and pushing back
Two buttons on every note, and holding it to two is the point: "I saw it too" and "Not what I saw". A staff between series has time to agree or to push back and nothing else — 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, compiled. Nothing to generate and nothing to wait for — it is built on the phone from what is already there.
It files everything into five sections:
| Section | What lands here |
|---|---|
| Fronts & Box | Front and box-count notes — what they are lining up in. |
| Pressure | Blitz and protection notes — where it is 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 did not see the same thing. Flagged in orange rather than buried, because it is the most useful two minutes of halftime. |
| Also on file | Everything that did not carry a tag. Nothing is dropped for being untagged. |
Each section has a headline callout and, underneath, What your coaches wrote — tap it and you get the actual notes with the actual names.
What the report will not do. It only files your staff's own notes. It does not grade play calls, judge what is working, or add anything nobody wrote — every line opens onto the coach who said it. If you want a read on your own calls, that is Coach's Read, and it is a different 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. Your scouting on tonight's opponent, carried into the stadium.
The logic is simple: you chart during the week, somewhere with a connection. Friday is a building without one. So whatever you finalize for the week is packed down and lands here, and it reads with no signal at all.
If it is empty it says so and tells you why — chart the opponent, then finalize the week.
No signal in the press box
A posted note appears on the tap that wrote it and syncs when the phone finds a bar. Nothing on the Feed spins, waits or fails because a stadium has thick concrete. Your staff can work a whole half with no service and everything reconciles afterwards.
Worth proving to yourself before a real Friday: turn on Simulate no network 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.