How do I respond to player check-ins and clips?

When a player or parent logs a check-in or attaches a clip against a goal, they are showing you they've done the work. A reply is what turns that into coaching — and what makes them do it again next week.

Open Development Plans. The To do list is one queue across all your squads, newest first. Rows under Needs your reply show you the submission itself: the clip's thumbnail, the words the family wrote, and the player's own 1–5 rating if they gave one — so you can tell at a glance which ones need thought and which need a sentence.

Tap a row and the plan opens on the Activity tab, already scrolled to the entry waiting on you.

The composer sits at the bottom of the thread, the way a messaging app does.

1. Tap Reply on the entry (or tap the entry itself). A chip appears above the composer naming what you're answering — "Replying to Daxton's clip on 'First touch'".
2. Clips play in place: tap the poster to watch without leaving the thread, and Expand for full screen.
3. Type your reply and tap send. The button counts who will be notified, for example Send to 3 people, and the row clears itself from your To do list once it's gone.

The chip has an ✕ if you'd rather post a general message to the plan instead of answering that specific entry. Half-written replies are kept if you switch tabs and come back.

When you've cleared everything on that plan, Clubhouse offers the next player waiting at the bottom of the thread, so you can work the queue without going back and forth.

The pattern that works, and the one the starter chips are built around:

Name one thing they did well, then one thing to try next.

• "Great to see you shifting the ball early there — next time try opening your body before it arrives so you can see the far side."
• "Two sessions this week on your weak foot is exactly the commitment we're after. Add ten reps under pressure and it'll start showing up on match day."

A few things worth knowing:

• Be specific about what you saw. "Good work" tells a 12-year-old nothing. Name the moment.
• One next step, not five. They can only work on one thing between now and the next session.
• Speed beats polish. A two-line reply within a couple of days is worth more than a paragraph a fortnight later — by then they've stopped checking.
• You're writing to the family too. Parents read these, and it's often the clearest evidence they get that their child is being coached as an individual.

In reply mode you'll see a few tappable openers above the composer. They insert editable text — they never send on their own. They're there to get you past the blank box; the observation has to be yours.

Nothing breaks, but the row stays in your To do list, and once it's more than 48 hours old it escalates to your Technical Director's queue, flagged as "No coach reply in N days". Programme-wide, unanswered check-ins are the clearest signal a plan has gone quiet.