Why We Built RugbyCoach

If you coach rugby at club level, you already know the Sunday evening drill. You sit down with the video. You watch a passage of play. You rewind it. You watch it again to confirm what you thought you saw. You open a spreadsheet, type in some numbers, and try to remember whether that carry was in the first half or the second. An hour later you're still going, and you haven't even started on set piece yet.

It's not that coaches don't work hard enough. It's that the tools they've been handed were never built for them.

The expensive option and the DIY option

Professional analysis software exists. It's genuinely powerful. It's also priced for professional clubs — the kind with a budget, a performance analyst, and a dedicated film room. That's not most rugby. Most rugby is run by coaches who volunteer their time, pay their own expenses, and do the analysis at the kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed.

So clubs default to the DIY option: spreadsheets, paper notes, voice memos that never get transcribed. These things work well enough until you actually try to get something useful out of them. By the time you've consolidated your notes into a format you can share with players, Monday training is already over.

The assumption nobody questioned

The assumption baked into every existing tool is that coaching analysis is a technical task — that you need to learn the software, tag events through a complex interface, and invest weeks of time before you get anything back.

But coaches are sports people. They know the game. They can watch a passage of play and tell you immediately what happened, who did it, and why it mattered. That knowledge exists — it's just never been captured in a way that's useful.

The easiest thing — the most natural thing — is to just say what you see.

Watch once. Talk through it. Done.

That's the premise behind RugbyCoach. You upload the match video. You watch it back — which you were going to do anyway. As you watch, you hold the spacebar and say what you see.

"Walsh carry." "Lineout won — throw tight." "Murphy missed tackle." The app transcribes what you say, matches the player name against your squad, and logs the event with the video timestamp. You watch the game once, talking through it the way you'd talk through it with another coach, and by the end the analysis has built itself.

No rewinding to count carries. No scrubbing back to find timestamps. No learning a complex system. If you can watch rugby and describe what you see, you can use this.

What you get out the other end is real: tackle percentages, carry counts, set piece win rates, individual player grades, a full coaching plan for each player, and a downloadable match report. Not because you spent three hours building a spreadsheet — because you watched the video and described what happened.

Where we are now

RugbyCoach is in active private beta with real clubs and real matches. It's free to use while in beta, runs entirely in your browser, and doesn't require an account or any installation. Everything stays on your machine — no data goes anywhere.

It's built for coaches at every level — club, academy, school — who know the game and want the analysis without the admin. If you can describe a rugby match, you can use it.