Getting started

Everything in Hobbit grows on a team: sessions are generated for your team, previews read your philosophy, debriefs land in your timeline. So the way in is not to try features first, but to set the team up first.

After you sign in, a draggable "finish setup" checklist appears in a corner of the screen. The eight steps below are its eight steps. Complete one anywhere in the app and it ticks itself; once every step is done it disappears.

Step 1: sign up

Sign up with an email address, or sign in with your Google or Apple account. On the phone app, use the same account: teams, sessions and chats are all there.

Sign-up takes an optional 8-character invite code. If a friend already uses Hobbit, ask for theirs: when someone they invited subscribes to Pro, they earn a free month.

Step 2: create a team

Open Team and click "Create team". Three fields deserve care:

• Age group takes one number, U8 for example, never a range. Session generation and format constraints depend on it.
• Public page address cannot be changed after creation, so the link you share with parents stays valid forever.
• Badge and colour: upload a badge and Hobbit picks its main colour as the team colour; the team shows in that colour on the calendar.

The free plan includes one team with its full team brain and public page. More teams is Pro.

Step 3: add players

Add players by hand on the team's "Roster" tab, or use "AI import" (Pro): hand it a spreadsheet, a sign-up sheet or a list pasted from a group chat and it recognises names, numbers, birthdates, parent phone numbers and more. Review the preview and import in one go, even several teams at once.

A child who is already on another of your teams comes over with "Import from other teams", no retyping.

Step 4: fill in the team brain

On the team's "Team brain" tab, write the team's philosophy and introduction. This is not only the front of the public page: Hobbit reads it before every session plan, preview and recap it writes.

The same tab holds "Team notes" (Pro): a sentence you mention in passing, such as "Thursdays we only have half a pitch, plan for 30×20", which Hobbit keeps and follows when it plans sessions and writes previews.

Step 5: complete your coach profile

Open Account and set a nickname and avatar. The public page's "Contact the coach" shows this, and the coach signature at the foot of player certificates comes from here too.

Step 6: put the first session on the calendar

Open Calendar and add a training event. For a team that trains every week, tick "repeat weekly" and it fills the season in one go. The venue has to be a saved venue (the first time, you create one); the public page shows the training ground with a map.

Step 7: decide on your session standard

Hobbit ships five session structures: its own DGC five blocks (warm-up, technical, skill, conditioned game, plus a free small-sided game to close), and the shapes the English FA, US Soccer, the DFB and the KNVB each publish, all 60 minutes. If your club runs its own structure, open Session standard under Session design and upload a plan you use today; Hobbit reads the structure out of it in 30 seconds. See Session standards.

Skipping this step is fine: generation then uses a built-in structure.

Step 8: generate the first session

Open "Session design", or just tell the chat "plan Wednesday's training". Hobbit shows a confirmation form to check age group, player count, pitch, duration and standard, then generates, usually in two to three minutes. Keep the page open while it works.

The finished plan is saved to your library and attached to that day on the calendar.

Then: share the public page with the parents

Every team has a public page where parents see the schedule, the preview of the next session and the recap of the last one, without an account. The link is under "Public team page" at the top right of the team page. Send it to the group once; it keeps itself current.

The page looks better once the team has faces: open the team photographer for a matching set of player cards, and the public page, lineup images and certificates pick them up by themselves.

That closes the loop of one training day. Next, read Coach workspace for what happens before, during and after a session.