How ProtocolHQ works

Getting started as a club

We set up your club with you. After that, the club admin runs it from the Club page, where a setup checklist shows what's left, each step with a Do it button.

1. Set up the clubName, logo, city and the email domain your staff use. Choose kg or lbs and km or miles.
2. Create your teamsEach team has a sport (football, basketball or other), positions, a head coach and its staff. Switch on Youth team if everyone in it is under 18.
3. Invite your staffSend each person an invite link with their role and teams. Someone who does two jobs gets both roles. Open invites can be copied, sent again or withdrawn.
4. Bring in your athletesShare the team's athlete link; athletes join from their phone and choose their consents. Under-16s don't have their own account: staff add them to the roster and a parent gives consent through a link.
5. Start planningCoaches build workouts and plan the week, medical staff set up return-to-play templates, the team manager plans the next trip. Bring existing spreadsheets in with the upload hub.

Roles and who sees what

Your role decides your tabs and what you can see. One person can hold up to four roles; their access is everything those roles allow together.

Web and phone

Staff get the full desk on the web and what they need on the go on the phone. Athletes use the phone app.

Coaches

Plan training, build workouts, prepare games and keep an eye on your athletes.

Home

Your day at a glance: this week's progress, what needs you (athletes who are out but still planned, check-ins waiting for a reply, suggestions to review), today's sessions and your own list of reminders. With Ask HQ on, Home opens with a written summary of the day and a chat box.

Planner

• My plan shows your own sessions by week or month. Drag a workout onto a day or use + Add; drag a session to move it.
• Team view: pick a team to see every coach's sessions in their colour, games and events, trips, and who is out or training with changes.
• Session panel: click any session to see its exercises and every athlete with Done, Missed, Planned or Out. Your own sessions have Edit, Assign, Delete and Start workout with an athlete. Another coach's session is view only, with a Message button.
• Public or private: public sessions show to your team's staff; private ones show only as a busy marker. New sessions are public.
• Events (club, web): games, meetings, travel and other events for an athlete, group, team or the whole club.
• Warnings appear when you plan for someone who is out, or a session clashes with an appointment.

Builder and exercise library

• Exercises have how to track them, tags, cues, photos, video or a link, equipment, movement tags and what they're used for in rehab.
• Library tabs: My library, Club and Shared with me. Cards or a list view with Equipment and Owner columns.
• Workouts: rounds, reps, per side, rest, notes, supersets and blocks, or a practice plan with a start time and minutes per part.
• Backups: pick up to three backup exercises per exercise. Athletes can swap to one if they have pain or no equipment, without asking.
• Share with the club: one item, a selection or your whole library.
• Suggestions: edit someone else's item and choose Suggest to …. The author sees the changes side by side and accepts, asks for changes or declines. You can keep your own copy meanwhile. Each suggestion has its own conversation and history.
• Tidy with HQ: fill in missing movement tags and equipment, and check every change before it's saved.

Workouts and programs

• Assign a workout to athletes, a group or a team, once or weekly. Change one athlete's copy without touching the others.
• Programs run over several weeks: name the weeks, copy a week, make a deload week. Mark a draft ready, then assign it from a Monday. Running now shows where each group is; Stop takes the remaining sessions off.
• A program assigned to a team also covers athletes who join later, from the day they join.
• Run a session with an athlete from the planner; the live team view (web) shows a whole group training.

Players and availability

• The Players screen shows every athlete's week in squares (done, missed, planned, out) and who needs you first.
• Availability: Out, Modified or Available. Medical staff decide; you see the result and what the athlete can't do, never the diagnosis.
• An athlete's report (sick, pain, something else) waits for a coach to confirm or reply.
• Staff notes on an athlete, with @mentions and attachments. Each athlete can have a main coach.
• Profiles show sessions, load, check-ins and lift progress.

Games

For coaching staff and the club admin, on club teams (football and basketball).

• Game folder per game: Overview, Scouting, Video, Game plan, Week, Squad and Review, with staff notes, threads, pins and @mentions.
• Game plan: a line-up board and a role line for each player; each athlete sees only their own.
• Squad: availability, starters, bench and who's not in.
• Video: upload clips or link full games, draw on them, add notes at a time and send clip packs to players.
• Review: notes, stat sheets, minutes per player (counted in their load) and the result.
• Opponents remember their history, how they play and their plays, with how you defend them.
• Playbook: plays drawn as steps on the court with the standard symbols, with a quick check for players.
• Tasks: a board for the staff's game-week jobs.

Analytics and reports

• One, four or eight weeks or the season, by team or group: compliance, RPE, load and minutes, check-ins, availability. Lowest compliance first.
• PDF reports for an athlete, a plan or the club (a page per team), and an 8-week CSV per athlete.

S&C coaches

You get everything a coach has, plus the performance side of medical.

• Plan strength and conditioning next to the team's practices; the team view shows every coach's sessions.
• Logged sets, RPE and load per athlete, and lift progress on their profile.
• In the Medical tab you see return-to-play stages, criteria and rehab sessions, tests and questionnaires.
• Testing: build a test, run it for a team in a grid and export the results as CSV.
• You never see the clinical layer: diagnoses, medication or the athlete's medical documents.

Physios, athletic trainers and team doctors

The Medical tab on the web keeps clinical detail with medical staff and tells everyone else what it means for training.

Three layers

What you can do

• New reports: coaches flag an athlete for medical (with a body chart); athletes report pain or illness in their check-in. Assess or dismiss.
• Injury records with a body chart, a re-injury warning, diagnosis, medication, treatment notes and files.
• Return-to-play templates: stages with minimum and typical days, allowed movements and criteria. Plan the stage's rehab sessions onto the athlete's schedule; coaches can't change them and get warned about exercises the athlete can't do.
• Nothing moves on by itself: when a stage is due, staff get Confirm or Not yet.
• Appointments with your free and busy times, places the club uses, and Done, No-show, Move or Cancel. Coaches see a busy block, never the reason.
• Watch list (medical staff only), updated every night: worsening sleep or soreness, rising questionnaire scores, test asymmetry and recent returns.
• Questionnaires: scheduled, intake forms and team checks. Testing with results to CSV.

Team managers (Operations)

Operations is the team manager's desk. If Operations is your only role you get a trimmed view: Home, Planner, Operations and Chat.

Requests

Anyone in the club can ask Ops: coaches and medical staff from the web or phone, athletes from their app. Each request has a number, labels, a status, who's on it and a due date, plus a thread the asker sees and notes only Ops see.

Week board

A board per team for match week (MD-5 to MD+1), started from your own templates, with tasks to tick off.

Trips

• A day-by-day plan, who travels (athletes who are out drop off by themselves), suppliers and budget.
• A packing list built from the club's kit, which athletes tick off on their phone.
• The trip shows in the planner and in the athlete's app.

Contacts and suppliers

People and companies with a timeline, documents that warn before they expire, spend, and ratings only Ops see.

Kit

Sizes per athlete and item with totals, a PDF or CSV for the supplier, stock and what was handed out. Athletes fill in their sizes in their app.

Receipts

Staff and athletes snap a receipt; you approve, reject or ask a question. Budgets per team and a CSV export.

Match tickets

• Open requests per game with an allocation, a price (free is the default) and a closing time; names optional.
• Approve, decline or approve fewer; put people down yourself.
• Who owes what across games, Mark paid, and an Excel file for payroll. Payment happens outside the app.

Club admins

The Club page has Overview, Teams, Staff, Season and Activity.

• Teams: click a team for a panel with its numbers, staff and athletes; Edit for the head coach, sport, youth switch and the rest. Make or copy the athlete link, announce to the team.
• Staff: change roles and teams, give someone a second role, see open invites.
• Seasons: start a new season and choose who stays, moves or leaves. Past seasons stay readable.
• When a coach leaves they hand over their athletes, the next two weeks of sessions, programs, events and the head-coach role.
• Activity: a log of what changed in the club.
• The club overview shows each team's totals (compliance, sessions, RPE, games, check-ins, out and modified), never an athlete's sessions.

Athletes

Your phone app has four tabs: Today, Schedule, Messages and Profile.

Today

• Today's session, or a rest-day card on days off with your week so far and when the next session is.
• The for you strip: announcements, your next game with Game info, answers to your requests and ticket requests, a trip to pack for, questionnaires to fill in. It opens by itself on days off.
• Coming up: your next sessions, one line each.

Morning check-in

Sleep, soreness, stress, energy and mood, and “Anything stopping you from training today?”. If you're sick or in pain, your coach and medical staff see it, and you see who has seen it and their reply.

Workouts

• Guided set by set with video, a rest timer and logging. Download a workout to train offline.
• Swap an exercise to one of your coach's backups if something hurts or the equipment isn't there, with Undo. No backups? Ask your coach.
• Form checks: send a video of an exercise and get feedback (age limits apply).

Club life

• Game info: your role, three things to remember, clips and plays to learn.
• Trips with the plan and a packing list to tick; appointments with a reminder.
• My kit sizes, My receipts, Ask Ops and My tickets.

Profile

Your training history, form checks, medical folder, your staff, your consents, who your other coaches may see, and Download my data.

Ask HQ

Ask HQ is the assistant built into the app. Ask it what's going on or tell it what to do. It prepares changes, and you decide.

How it works

• One conversation across Home, every screen, the builder and the phone. Ask on Home, carry on anywhere. It's kept for the day; New chat starts again.
• Proposes, you decide: changes come as a card listing every step. Nothing happens until you press Do it, and everything can be undone.
• Voice: talk instead of typing; answers can be read out, and you can confirm by saying yes or no. Speech is turned into text on your device; no audio is kept.
• Open in Builder: ask for a workout (supersets and all) and open it unsaved in the builder.
• Think harder asks the same question again with a stronger model.

You set how far it goes

In Settings, per area (messages, calendar, training, availability and more): Ask me first, Do it and tell me, or Never. Everything HQ does is listed under What HQ did, with Undo.

Working in the background

• Morning summary on Home: who's out, who hasn't checked in, what's on.
• HQ noticed: things like a session planned for someone who's out, or a check-in that needs a reply, each with a ready fix.
• Standing rules you write in plain words, and jobs that run over several days, such as a match week.
• For Operations and medical staff it reads their areas too: trips, requests, receipts, appointments, return to play.
• Outside lookups: web search, places, weather and travel time. Searches that would include an athlete's name or health details are refused.

What it never does

• Record consents, delete accounts, export or hand over data.
• Look at photos of athletes who haven't agreed to photos with AI, or work out who someone is.
• Send messages outside the club; those are only ever drafts.

Use is counted in AI units against your plan, shown as a meter under the chat.

Upload hub

Bring your existing files into the app. Find it in Settings, drop a file anywhere on the web, or share it to the app on your phone.

1. ReadThe file is read: spreadsheets by the app itself; for the AI step only the column names and three sample rows are used.
2. What it isThe hub says what kind of file it thinks this is and where it would go. You can change both.
3. MatchNames are matched to your athletes or staff; check the ones it wasn't sure about.
4. CheckEvery row before anything is saved. Fix a value or leave rows out.
5. ImportThen, for 7 days, Undo takes out everything the import added.

It understands: fixture lists (they become games in the planner), exercise lists, workouts and training plans, testing results, kit sizes, contacts, invoices and receipts, ticket information from another club, doctor letters (only for medical staff) and pasted emails. Up to 20 files of 50 MB each.

Research papers

Upload a paper to get a summary with page references, ask questions about it, and turn it into an exercise, a program draft or a protocol suggestion for your medical staff to approve. Papers go into your own research library, which you can share with a coach.

Messages and announcements

• One-to-one chats between coaches and athletes (from 18), and between coaches.
• A staff channel per team for the staff.
• Team announcements to the whole team or only the under-18s.
• @mentions and handovers between colleagues, with notification settings for each.

Coaches outside the club

Athletes sometimes have a private coach too. If the athlete allows it:

• Their other coaches see their club training as load only: the day, done or not, how long and how hard. Never the workout.
• Club game and travel days show as “Busy”.
• “Not available until …” shows only if the athlete switches it on, never the reason.
• Outside coaches never see availability details, medical information or staff notes.

Privacy, consent and your data

Consent

From 16 athletes give their own consent; for under-16s a parent does, through a link, or the club records consent it has on file. Consent can be changed at any time in Profile.

Who sees what is enforced

Access follows your role and consent and is checked on the server, so a screen can't show what your role doesn't allow.

Your data

• Download my data: a ZIP with your sessions, check-ins, availability and consents. The file is removed after a week.
• Delete account from Profile. Coaches hand over their club work first.
• A club's copy of a leaver's data is deleted after 12 months; an archived club after 90 days, with an export first.

See the privacy policy and terms of service for the details.

Questions

Can one person have more than one role?

Yes, up to four. Their access is everything those roles allow together.

Do parents need an account?

No. Parents give consent for under-16s through a one-time link from the club.

Can coaches see medical details?

No. Coaches see whether an athlete is out, modified or available and what they can't do. Diagnoses, notes and documents stay with medical staff.

Does Ask HQ change things on its own?

Only where you've set an area to “Do it and tell me”. By default it asks first, and everything can be undone.

What about payments for tickets or receipts?

The app keeps track of who owes what and what's approved. Money is handled outside the app, for example through payroll.

How do we get started?

Talk to us and we'll set up your club with you.