You watch the film every Saturday. You grade every rep, you clip the mistakes, you build the cut ups for Monday.
You do not have a single record of what your staff actually said to each other while it was happening.
That gap is where most of the useful information lives. The film shows you the play broke down. It does not show you that the call went out late, that two coaches were talking over each other on the same channel, or that the adjustment you thought you made never actually reached the field. Coaches reconstruct that from memory on Sunday morning, and memory is not a great system.
We are testing something that closes the gap. Here is what it does today, what it does not do yet, and how to get on it this season.
What gets captured
When recording is turned on for a session, The Headset App captures audio for each coach individually rather than one merged pile of noise. After the game you get:
- A written transcript for every coach on the channel, timestamped
- Attribution by speaker and by channel, so offense, defense, and special teams stay separated
- Full text search across the whole session
- Individual audio for each coach, so you can listen to one person at a time instead of a crowded room
That last part matters more than it sounds. Merged sideline audio is usually unusable because everyone is talking at once. Per person capture means your coordinator’s channel is legible on its own.
What coaches are actually doing with it
Finding the moment a call broke down
You know which play went wrong. Search the transcript for the down and distance, or jump to the timestamp, and read what was said in the fifteen seconds before the snap. Late call, wrong personnel, a check that got stepped on: it is right there in plain text instead of reconstructed from three different memories.
Pulling the call sequence back out
Search the transcript for what your coordinator actually called, in order, across a drive or a half. Most staffs have a rough sense of their own tendencies. A written record of the calls turns that into something you can look at instead of argue about.
Settling the Sunday argument
Every staff has the conversation that starts with “I called that” and ends with nobody being sure. The transcript ends it in about ten seconds, and it ends it without anybody having to be wrong in front of the room.
Teaching the young guys
A first year assistant learning to work a channel benefits enormously from hearing his own audio back. Not the play, the process: when he talked, how long he took, whether the information he gave was usable. That is hard to coach in the moment and easy to coach on Sunday with the recording in front of you.
Who is recorded, and who is not
This is the part we want to be direct about, because it is the first question every AD asks.
- Coaches only. Students are not recorded. Player audio is not part of this at any tier.
- Nobody is recorded without knowing it. Anyone joining a session sees a recording indicator and gets a notification they have to acknowledge before they can join. Declining means they do not enter the session.
- Coaches can keep a room private. A room can be set so nothing is captured or transcribed at all, for the conversations that should stay in the room.
- Combined session audio is not kept after the session ends. Individual coach audio is retained for 30 days unless you ask otherwise. Transcript text is retained so you can search it later.
- Deletion is available on request. Call us and we remove it.
Participation runs through a recording addendum signed by the team owner on the account, so the program decides, not an individual coach clicking through a screen.
Where this is headed
To be straight with you about what exists and what does not: everything above is live and in beta this season. The following is the roadmap, not a promise for this fall.
- Lining your staff audio up against your game film, so the talk sits alongside the play
- Post-game breakdowns built from the session rather than from memory
- Charting plays from the voice channel and handing you a chart you can take into Hudl
That last one is the reason we are doing this. If a coordinator’s call and the result of the play can both come off the channel, the chart builds itself while you coach. We are testing that with a small group of teams separately. The transcripts are the foundation it sits on, and they are useful on their own in the meantime.
Get on the beta this season
The beta is free and it is open to any team on The Headset App this fall. There is nothing to install and nothing to change about how your staff already works: turn it on for a game, then read what your staff said.
Send us an email and we’ll get you added!.
