Almost every coaching staff starts monitoring load in a spreadsheet. It is free, flexible and everyone knows how to use it. The trouble comes later: with more players, more data and more people looking, the spreadsheet stops helping you decide and starts eating the time that should go into coaching.
Signs your spreadsheet is no longer enough
- Entering data takes hours every week. Copying RPE from a form, pasting GPS exports, sorting columns. That is time not spent deciding.
- Several people edit the same file. Versions multiply ("final_v3_good.xlsx"), formulas break and nobody knows which copy is right.
- You have several data sources: GPS, RPE, wellness, gym, injuries. Joining them by hand is where errors creep in.
- You find out too late. You learn that a player was overloaded when the week is already over, because the data gets processed afterwards.
- Players have no way to report from their phone, and daily wellness ends up abandoned.
- Health data in files that travel by email or WhatsApp. In Europe, the GDPR treats health data as a special category with stronger protection, and in many other countries data protection laws also treat it as sensitive. A shared spreadsheet does not control who sees what.
If two or more of these sound familiar, the spreadsheet is already costing you more than it saves.
The real problem: data that never reaches the decision
A good monitoring system is not measured by how much data it collects, but by whether it returns simple, valid information in time to make a decision [1]. A spreadsheet can hold every number in the world and still not warn you of anything before tomorrow's session.
Red, amber and green cells are not enough either. Traffic-light systems are very common in team sports, but there is no standard for how they are built [2]: without a clear, consistent rule behind each light, the traffic light gives a false sense of control.
What athlete management software solves
- Players report from their phone: RPE for every session, daily wellness, areas of pain. Nobody types it in again.
- Everything in one place: the training plan, what players report, GPS and testing, with no files to cross-check.
- The information arrives before the session, not the following Monday.
- Role-based permissions: the medical staff sees medical data; the rest of the staff sees what they need.
- One version of the data for the whole coaching staff.
What changes with CTBrain
CTBrain is AthleteOptics' platform for soccer coaching staffs:
- Plan the week and each session.
- Players report RPE, wellness and areas of pain in the player app, in seconds.
- See each player's load alongside GPS, testing and what they reported.
- Alerts in time: wellness that stays poor, players who stop reporting, high load combined with poor wellness.
- The squad's reporting rate, so you know whether the data is complete.
- Medical data stays visible only to the medical staff the club approves.
The switch does not mean dropping everything at once: you can start with session RPE and add the rest later. To understand what to measure, read the guides to training load monitoring and session RPE.
References
- Thornton HR, Delaney JA, Duthie GM, Dascombe BJ. Developing athlete monitoring systems in team sports: data analysis and visualization. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2019;14(6):698–705. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2018-0169
- Robertson S, Bartlett JD, Gastin PB. Red, amber, or green? Athlete monitoring in team sport: the need for decision-support systems. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2017;12(Suppl 2):S273–S279. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2016-0541