Manage and develop your coaching staff

The training you set up, the plans you roll out and the match weeks you oversee all reach players through a coach, so the quality of your coaching staff sets the ceiling on everything else. FNSW sees it the same way: coach development and qualifications carry real weight in the club standards. Coaches in your programme's sidebar is where you bring coaches on, keep their records current and run their development across the season.

Building a programme's coaching staff for the first time? Coaches reads No coaches assigned yet until the first one is on a squad. Work through it in this order.

1. Set up your squads first. Every coach is added to a squad, and Add coach only offers your programme's squads. See Build your squads.
2. Add each coach to their squad, under Add a coach, with a setup link so they can sign in.
3. Check Access a few days later, under Read the staff table. A coach who still shows Invited hasn't set up their account.
4. Record their qualifications, under Keep qualifications current. A new coach's Compliance reads Incomplete until their paperwork is in.
5. Start their development plans from the band at the top of Coaches, as Run coach development plans shows. Until you do, every coach's Development plan reads Not started.

Then move on to Set up training for the season.

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• Adding a coach from Coaches depends on your club's plan and your access to coach recruitment. If the button reads Upgrade to add coaches, your club's plan doesn't include it yet, so talk to your club admin.
• A coach needs an email address on their record before they can be invited to set up their account.

Coaches lists everyone coaching in the programme. The Squads column shows which team each coach is on (in a Mixed JDL or Girls JDL programme it's Age Groups), Role is their coaching role, Compliance shows whose paperwork is still incomplete, and Development plan shows whose move it is in each coach's plan, such as Ready for you or Waiting on Steve. If you can add coaches here, a Retention column also shows where each squad coach stands for next season: Retain, Release or TBC. Access, the last column, tells you whether they are actually using Clubhouse: Active with when they were last in, At risk once they've been away for two weeks, Dormant after a month, or Invited, Never logged in or Not invited. If you can add coaches here, Not invited reads Not invited · Send invite and opens that coach's profile at their Clubhouse access, so you can invite them. A coach whose staff record has been made inactive stays on the list for the seasons they coached, marked Deactivated.

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Tap a coach to open their profile. Its tabs are Overview (contact details, Clubhouse access and the squads they can see), Development Plan, Qualifications, Compliance, Contract and Activity.

There are two ways onto the table, depending on whether you hired the coach through the recruitment pipeline.

Add coach takes a first and last name, an email and phone number, their role, the squad (only your programme's squads are offered) and a start date. It creates their staff record and assigns them there and then.

With an email address entered, Email them a setup link is ticked and the button reads Add and invite. Before anything is sent you see the invitation exactly as the coach will get it, and the button reads Add and invite 1 coach. The coach receives an email inviting them to your club's Clubhouse, welcoming them by first name, naming their role, and with a button to set up their account. Once they have, they can open their squad straight away. Untick the box, or leave the email blank, and the button reads Add coach: the record is created and nobody is emailed.

If the email already belongs to someone at the club, nothing new is created. The form tells you that coach already has a staff record here and offers Assign to this squad, or Reactivate and assign if they had been made inactive. That keeps one coach's working with children check and qualifications on one record.

A staff record isn't a login, so the form also tells you where they are with Clubhouse. If they have never been invited and Email them a setup link is ticked, the button reads Assign and send invite: you see the invitation first, and Assign and invite 1 person assigns them and sends it. If they were invited but haven't set up their account, it says when, and you can resend from their profile. If they already use Clubhouse, no setup email is needed.

The coach hiring board is the Coaches tab of your programme's recruitment page, with columns for Shortlisted, Contacted, Evaluating, Offer and Signed. Declined and withdrawn candidates move to the archive. A promising applicant from the club's coach expression of interest form can be sent there with Add to coach pipeline.

Moving a candidate to Signed opens Add to staff with their name, email, phone and the role you were hiring for already filled in, and the squad matching the age group where there is one, from the season you were recruiting for once it has that squad. Any qualifications you recorded while evaluating them move across to their staff record. The same Email them a setup link box is there, so Add and invite finishes the hire in one step. That includes a candidate who already had a staff record at the club but was never invited: they get the setup link too. If you closed it without adding them, Add to staff stays on their candidate panel until you do. See the coach recruitment pipeline.

Either way, check Access a few days later. If a coach still shows Invited or Never logged in, the link may have expired.

A coach can be on your staff without ever having been invited, for example one brought in from your league's team sheets, or added with the setup box unticked. Their profile's Overview tab has a Clubhouse access card: Status reads Not invited, Invited, not yet set up or Uses Clubhouse, beside when they were Invited (or Not yet) and when they Last signed in.

If you can add coaches, the card's header has Send invite, or Resend invite once one has gone. Clubhouse asks Send their invitation? (or Resend their invitation?), shows the address and the email word for word, and sends it when you select Invite 1 person (or Resend to 1 person). Not yet sends nothing. It's the same email a new coach gets. A coach with no email address can't be invited yet, and the card says to add one in Contact Details.

Unqualified coaches in mandatory roles cost the club points on the FNSW scorecard and can bring a fine, so the Qualifications tab is worth keeping current as coaches complete courses rather than reconstructing at the end of the year. Add Qualification records one licence at a time: the coaching diplomas, goalkeeping, strength and conditioning and video analysis qualifications, with the certificate number and the issue and expiry dates. Tick Has JDL Certificate where the coach holds FNSW's JDL course.

To keep the certificate itself on file, drop the PDF or a photo of it onto Certificate (optional) in the same form, or choose browse to pick a file (PDF, PNG or JPG, up to 10MB). A licence without one shows Add certificate on its row, which opens the form at that slot, and once one is attached View certificate opens it. Coaches can attach their own from their settings, so you don't have to chase paper.

The tab ends with What FNSW requires: the minimum licence for each role in your league this season, with the league and year on the right, such as GYL2 · 2026. Once the coach has a licence recorded, a line above the list counts how many of the roles their licences already cover, and those roles are ticked and listed first. It's a reference, not a warning. For a youth programme it shows your exact division once it's known, from your fixtures or from the division on your CCB register. Until then it reads GYL · 2026 (or BYL · 2026), lists every division's minimums together, and reminds you to set the division on the CCB register.

The tab holds licences, not attendance at workshops or conferences, so keep your own register of those if you fund them. Every league's table is in Coaching qualifications.

Two details on the Contract tab also count, both entered with Edit. PlayFootball ID is the coach's registration for the season, and FNSW checks every coach is registered. Also plays at the club is for a junior coach who plays here too: in a Mixed JDL or Girls JDL programme, FNSW gives them extra qualification points. Tick it and the scorecard adds them.

Each Technical Qualifications criterion on your scorecard opens on the coaches in that role, what each one's qualification scores and which course would lift it, with a link back to their Qualifications tab.

Coaches deserve the same structure you give players, and FNSW scores a development plan for every coach in the programme. Each plan is three conversations a season, a pre-season plan, a mid-season review and an end-of-season review, and each goes the same way: the coach prepares, you complete it, and they agree. Start them from the band at the top of Coaches, complete each one on the coach's Development Plan tab, and Clubhouse sends the reminders. The full walkthrough is Run coach development plans, and the coach's side is Grow as a coach.

Your role at training and on match days is to observe and develop coaches, not to coach their teams. Write it down while it's fresh:

• At training: what the session asked of players, and how the coach's interventions matched the club's methodology.
• At matches: the bench, the substitution pattern, the half-time reset. Every match has a Coach Notes panel shared by the programme's coaching staff. You can read what the coach wrote mid-match and add your own notes, each under the author's name, so your observation sits beside theirs.

Notes like these turn a feedback conversation into evidence, and they're what a fair appraisal is built from.

• Induct every coach at the start of the season: your development model, how training and match weeks run, and what their plan asks of them. Put the session in the club calendar as a Coach Induction event, because that entry is what the scorecard reads.
• Hold each coach's review in the same weeks as player reviews, and complete it on their plan. The conversations take their dates from the coach development dates in your Season Plan, which the templates put alongside the parent-meeting windows.
• Fund development where you can, and record each completed course on Qualifications.

• Appraisals: the End-of-season review on each coach's plan, drawing on the season's notes.
• Surveys: if Surveys is in your sidebar, the club's survey results are the other half of the picture your observations paint.
• Next season's staffing: who returns, who moves up an age group, and where the gaps are. Record it in the Retention column, then appoint them to next season's squads, as Carry your coaching staff into next season shows. Gaps go onto the coach hiring board.

• Every coach shows Active under Access.
• Every coach's pre-season plan and mid-season review are completed and agreed, not just goals written in March.
• Every coach has their PlayFootball ID on the Contract tab.
• Qualifications are current, with expiry dates you're not about to miss.
• Each coach could tell you what they're working on, and your feedback points to things you actually saw.