Write your club’s football identity
Write the club’s mission, values and technical framework once, in your own words. Clubhouse builds the FNSW documents every programme is graded on from them, and keeps the club’s evidence in them current.
FNSW asks every licensed programme for the same foundation documents: a mission, vision and philosophy, a player development model, a coaching methodology, a long-term development framework, a talent development philosophy and a player wellbeing programme. They belong to the club rather than to one programme, because a club has one way of developing players whichever age group it's coaching, and between them they carry a large share of every programme's Football Criteria points.
Clubhouse keeps them in two Settings pages, Club Identity and Technical Framework. You write the thinking. Clubhouse builds each document from it, adds the club's own evidence, and grades it for every programme's scorecard, so nobody writes, formats or uploads a separate copy.
- Your name at the bottom of the sidebar opens Settings. Both pages are in its Club group.
- Agree the words with the club's other technical directors first. There's one set of documents for every programme, so a sentence written for the Mixed JDL has to hold for the Boys Youth League too.
- Key Documents, in the same group, does a different job: it grounds the wording of player development plans. See Shape your development curriculum.
Club Identity opens empty, with every field blank. The Technical Framework opens with a first draft wherever the club's records have something to say, and blank everywhere else, so a club new to Clubhouse sees mostly blank prompts and the scorecard marks the documents behind them Document needed. That's the normal starting state. Start with Club Identity, because the rest of the framework builds on it, then work through the Technical Framework a section at a time. Nothing has to be finished in one sitting: each save is kept, and the document is rebuilt from whatever is there.
Why the club exists and where it's going is the first thing an FNSW advisor asks, and the one document every other one should agree with.
Club Identity has three parts, each field with a one-line prompt under its name:
- Mission, Vision, Philosophy and Our role in the community. The mission says why the club exists and who it serves, the vision where it wants to be in three to five years, and the philosophy how it develops players and plays the game.
- Values: the few words the club lives by, each with a line on what it looks like in practice.
Add a valuefor each one. - Multi-year goals, in three areas: Technical, Operational and Financial.
Save changes when you're done. The panel at the top, Your FNSW Mission, Vision & Philosophy document, is the result. Preview PDF shows it exactly as FNSW will receive it, and there's nothing to upload.
The Technical Framework is how the club turns its philosophy into football: what it develops, how coaches teach it, and how it looks after players along the way. Each section is its own FNSW document.
The sections run along the top: Player Development Model, Coaching Methodology, Long-Term Development, Talent Development and Player Wellbeing. Each opens with what FNSW asks for, in its own words, then a handful of prompts.
These two documents are built from your Methodology: the principles of play, the four corners, the stages and how coaches build a session, written once for the club and again for any programme that coaches differently (Write your programme methodology). So their tabs ask only for what the Methodology can't hold.
- From your Methodology has a row for the club default, marked with the club's crest, and one for each programme, marked with its sidebar icon, saying what it holds. A programme that uses the club default is greyed. Select a row to open that Methodology, where
Editchanges it. - Gold checklist shows what a Gold document needs: the Methodology's coverage across every programme, then the five prompts on these two tabs, each ticked once it's written. A prompt Clubhouse has drafted counts towards the total too, shown in blue and marked Drafted by Clubhouse, and the bar above the list shows how much is done, drafted, partly there and still to do. Select a prompt to go straight to it. A full checklist isn't a grade, because the assessor still reads what you wrote.
- The prompts: How it links to IDPs and Keeping it living for the development model; Evidence base, How and when it is delivered and How it links to the Coach Development Plan for the methodology.
The documents print the club default first, then Variations by programme, so an advisor sees the club's way and where each programme differs from it. Position profiles appear in the development model as its player profile.
A prompt you haven't written yet shows what Clubhouse can say from the club's records, tinted blue and labelled Written by Clubhouse from your data. It covers what the club actually does: how many players have an IDP and an IDP meeting, when each retention window ran and how the decisions went, who the MPIO is, how many wellness check-ins and injuries were recorded, the phases each programme works in. A draft never says more than the records show, and a prompt with nothing to draft from stays blank, with a line on what it needs from you.
A draft stays up to date on its own until you edit it, and the document prints it exactly as you see it. Under each one, For Gold names what only you can add, such as the research your approach draws on or how a released player is supported. A draft is a strong start, not a Gold document: the assessor still looks for the club's own reasoning.
Once you type in a prompt it's yours, and Clubhouse stops updating it. Use Clubhouse’s draft puts the live draft back.
Below the prompts, Added from Clubhouse lists what the document takes from the club's own records, kept up to date automatically: the Methodology, position profiles and published IDPs for the development model; the Methodology, curriculum nights by stage and session plans for the methodology; your retention policy and offers for long-term development; the pathway and the birth-quarter spread of your players for talent development; and wellness check-ins and your MPIO for wellbeing. That's the part of each document you don't have to write, and it's also the part an advisor trusts most, because it shows the framework being used.
Save each section with its own button, such as Save Player Development Model. A dot on a section's name means it has unsaved changes, so you can move between sections without losing an edit. If you've already uploaded your own version of a document, its empty section offers Use it as a starting point to bring its text across.
The Referral process prompt under Player Wellbeing matters beyond the document. It's what a coach does when they're worried about a player, and the wellbeing criterion on the scorecard links straight to it.
Saving rebuilds the document and grades it again in the background. Open the matching criterion on a programme's scorecard to see the grade, what scored well and what's missing. If a programme has also uploaded its own version, the better of the two grades counts. Clubhouse re-grades each generated document weekly as well, so evidence that grows over the season (more IDPs, more session plans) keeps counting without anyone saving again.
Preview PDFon each page shows the document you'd be happy for an advisor to read.- On each programme's scorecard, the Youth Development Plan criteria no longer read Document needed.
- Added from Clubhouse shows real numbers. A zero, such as no position profiles, is the next piece of work.
- The Gold checklist on the two Methodology tabs has nothing left unticked that you meant to write.
Last reviewed 21 Oct 2026
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