You’ve worked with some of the best coaches in the world — what role has feedback played in your development?

I feel like feedback is so important. I've worked with many coaches in my life, some great coaches, and always the best coaches give me the best feedback, especially when I was a younger age, and I wanted to develop. I think feedback is so important for clarification of what you want to work on and what you want to improve on because the long-term goal is to improve your game, and make it as simple as possible, and giving feedback and going away from football and working on things is so important if you want to improve your game and become a successful footballer.

What do you think is usually missing in feedback for young players coming through academies or grassroots football?

Feedback is often verbal, and I think when it's verbal, it's quickly forgotten, especially when the players go home, and the young lads go home and don't really remember what the coaches have said. I think if it gets wrote down or spoken in a report, it's a lot easier to follow, it's a lot easier to learn from. Also with the parents as well at a young age, they're such an important part of the development and supporting, I think it's so important that the parents get good clarification of what they want their child to improve on and work on, and I think by it coming down as a report, it's so important that the parents can see this, and, I think feedback's so important to build the players' confidence, it's not criticism, it should be normality in terms of being used to improve the confidence of players and it becomes normal that they go home and work on things and I think that'd be vitally important to improve as a player.

When you first saw Feedz, what stood out to you about how it helps coaches give feedback?

The first thing that stood out was that it's so simple and easy to use for coaches. I think every coach has so much on their mind, and so much that they need to do for it to be so simple to make a report for the player is so important. I feel like for the player as well, it's so easy to access and to read and to take home to the parents, which is such an important part of any player development, using the parents who understand what the player's trying to work on and what they need to improve on. The main thing that stood out for me is how simple and easy it is to use.

Why do you think a platform like Feedz is valuable for coaches working with lots of players every week?

I think it's valuable for coaches working with lots of players to use because, first and foremost, it saves time. Coaches have so much on their mind and they need to focus on coaching rather than the admin side of daily reports, writing it all down, and speaking to each individual. I think it's so quick and easy to use. It's massive for coaches from that aspect. I think that the clarification it gives to the player, to the parent, and the support. It all aligns together, and makes it so simple for the coaches to use, obviously saving time and making the coach's life a lot easier in that aspect and whilst saving time, but making the development a lot better, that's the most important thing.

If you’d had something like Feedz when you were younger, how do you think it would’ve helped you?

I think it would really help develop my game if I had this when I was younger. The most important thing is reflection of the session, going home with clear ideas and clarification of where I need to improve, and having the enjoyment of going home, improving on those type of things, and coming back to the session and showing my coach how much I have improved at those type of things. Also, I think it gives great clarification to the parents or the support of the player. When I was younger, my parents gave me so much advice, but it probably wasn't aligned with the coach, and I think if you have Feedz who who can send reports after the sessions and the parents can read these reports, it's so important that they can work together in terms of developing the child and make the child feel comfortable. I think that's so important that the coach, the parent, and the player are all aligned, especially when you're a bit younger, and you need that support growing up.

Why is it important that feedback to young players is constructive, positive, and age-appropriate?

It's so important for young players to receive constructive, positive feedback because, for me, growing up and playing football, the most important thing is to enjoy it. When you enjoy playing football, you want to learn, you want to listen to your coaches, and you want to improve. So of course being constructive, positive, and age appropriate is so important. I feel like Feedz can can help do this with the reports, and like I said, it can align with your parents, it can align with the support of the player, and you can all be on the same page and help that together and make sure, like I said, the most important thing of for any footballer, even at my age now, but especially when you're growing up and you're wanting to develop, is making sure you enjoy the training, enjoy working, enjoy improving, and it brings so much energy to the game and love for the game, and that will make you improve. Be a better player, better environment, and bring much more improvement.

What would you say to a club or coach who’s thinking about using Feedz?

I think using Feedz brings better communication across the club; it brings everyone aligned, the coach, the player, the parent. And I think it helps develop players. I think it's really important that you receive positive feedback, not just positive but constructive and ways that you can improve and work, but of course, I feel like Feedz is the most important thing, the communication and the alignment from the player, the coach, and the parents all the support, is really important to all be on the same page. I think that's massive, and why it's so important to bring something like Feedz into the game.

Why did you personally want to be involved with Feedz?

I personally wanted to get involved with Feedz, because I feel like feedback is such an important part of the game, it's something that I do now, every game, I go back and analyse my game, and when you're experienced and been in the game as long as I have, you're still wanting to improve and you're still wanting to learn. So if you could get this sort of feedback and daily reports from your coaches at a young age, the improvement would be massive. I think that's the main reason why I believed in Feedz. I think that feedback on the game and the way that you train, and the way that you play, you can always improve, no matter the age.

Before you started using Feedz, what pain points were you facing?

Before we started using Feedz, we were struggling with the sheer volume of written reports and doing them from scratch to the extent that we were really being quite generic when we very much wanted to be specific about our responses and our feedback; they're kind of different from school reports, which can be very, very generic. And the sheer volume of 270 players, 3 or 4 reports a year, doing them manually, it was just, it just wasn't possible, and also the overlay of trying to make it look professional, coming from our own company with our own branding, the whole process was taking maybe up to an hour per player per report, and that was quite clearly unsustainable.

How has Feedz elevated the overall experience within the club?

The difference we've found from using the app is that we've managed to get more coaches involved because it's so simple and you know we have coaches who are maybe a little bit dyslexic, but the verbal feedback just makes it open to everybody, so instead of just a handful of us doing the reports, now any coach can do it, and the output is so slick, it's professional, it's individual and it goes straight off to parents as well, so there's no tarting up that we need to do to, to brand it. We don't have to fiddle around trying to find email addresses. It's a simple case of verbalising a report, generating a report, approving a report, and sending it off, and in some cases, that whole process takes barely a minute.

What kind of feedback have you received from parents and players since you implemented Feedz?

All of our interactions are with parents directly because all our players are under 18, and I think many parents have been shocked at the level of detail they're getting. One of the failings of sport and sports coaching, I think, is that any feedback has always generally just been verbal, and often quite brief, just the very nature of players in, players out, it's very hard to give much more than that in that environment. And the very fact that they're now getting regular feedback written with a huge level of detail is massively appreciated. I think there's a degree of shock really that we're even able to achieve that and it looks as though we've spent hours and hours on it. And as much as the thinking about it may have taken hours and hours and the experience of the coaches to be in a position to produce good reports, it's the Feedz app that actually facilitates that and helps us deliver that experience level in a way that is easily accessible for parents and then hopefully players, it's obviously down to the parents to pass that on to players afterwards, but it's just it's been a game changer.

In what ways has Feedz helped your club stand out?

Written feedback in the first place was one of the key areas where I wanted to differentiate our business from others. As I said earlier, quite usually in cricket coaching and then other coaching, short verbal reports are very much the standard and people think nothing of that because it's just what's done, and I was always very clear that what I wanted our members to get was something well over and above what they might be getting from somewhere else. So, I very much hope that the very fact that we're churning out so many of these reports with so much detail on such a regular basis helps us to stand out from the crowd as much as the standard of our coaching.

What has surprised you about Feedz?

I think the biggest benefit of the app from our perspective is that parents wouldn't know which coach has produced the report, whether it was our level 3 head coach or one of our more junior level 2 coaches. I don't think the output, the parents would have a clue which level of coach has produced it. You know, we're very fortunate that all of our coaches are very professional about the way they go about it, but the app kind of helps the younger coaches in particular to be in a position where they can get confidence that they can give really good feedback, and this has been an unexpected benefit of using the app.

If you were speaking to an Executive Director who is on the fence about implementing Feedz, what would you tell them?

I think this is a no-brainer for any sporting organisation. It doesn't matter what sport, I think this is one of the other great things we're obviously just doing it for cricket, but it's transportable to any sport, and it's so simple to use, so accessible both for the coaching end and the parents' end, and hopefully for the players as well. I think it's a no-brainer for organisations.

Before you started using Feedz, what pain points were you facing?

Before the club started using Feedz, player feedback was an area which was pretty much overlooked. Coaches were provided with a piece of paper to fill in for players on an annual basis. Most of the coaches didn't fill in the paper and provide feedback to parents and players, and for those that did, the quality of the feedback was not at the level it should be. We scored players based on tactical, technical, and physical, and there was a lack of qualitative feedback, or real depth and substance, to the reports. So, a scenario whereby 50+ coaches were being asked to provide feedback and probably less than 10 were actually doing it. This obviously provides a lack of engagement with parents, and in some cases, a lack of motivation for players who were not receiving the right feedback, whether positive reinforcement or constructive criticism, on a regular basis.

Because we operate multiple teams at each age group level, at the end of a season, players were also being moved up and down between the teams within the club. These conversations were hard, parents often citing the lack of feedback during the season, and therefore were surprised that their son or daughter was being moved down a team. So using the app mitigates against this; regular feedback can provide parents with a good, a better, sense of how their child's doing on a more regular basis, and therefore managing these conversations at the end of the season can be a lot more straightforward.

How has Feedz elevated the overall experience within the club?

As one of the few coaches at Dulwich Village who was providing feedback to parents, I'd resorted to offering telephone calls to parents at Christmas and at the end of the season. These telephone calls, of which maybe half the squad, maybe 10 of the parents would take up, tended to last about 20 minutes to half an hour for each call. Therefore, [this] took up quite a substantial period of my time alongside all the other duties with volunteering to manage and coach football teams.

The biggest benefit for me with Feedz has been the time-saving factor. The fact that I can create these half-seasonal reports in about 90 seconds per player, and also the quality of these reports, both in terms of the depth that we can go into very, very quickly, and the level of professionalism, how the reports look, and how they soun,d and the extra value that parents and players feel that they receive. I've also noticed that players are reading and responding to the reports and responding to the points made in the reports at matches and training sessions following the distribution of the reports to them. So, beyond the word in the ear on the touchline, which happens sporadically across seasons, there's now a sort of comprehensive and structured report which players are looking at and thinking about how they can address both in training and in matches.

Feedz is big for saving time, but also it looks like players are motivated by these reports and actually, it's having an effect on their development as footballers as well, which is really, really important. It's just a more professional service. And a service that is engaging with parents and players and having an impact in terms of their motivation as young footballers as well.

What kind of feedback have you received from parents and players since you implemented Feedz?

Since producing the reports, I've had great feedback from parents, thanking me, saying they'd never seen anything like this before, and also parents agreeing with the points that I've made in relation to their child and their child's football development. And advising me that they'd be looking to reinforce these points over the coming days and weeks with their sons. So really great feedback from parents, but the best examples have come back actually from players themselves. So two examples, one relates to a player who plays as a centre back and plays as a leader the way he plays, but he's very quiet around the team and the squad. So one of the constructive points I made to him in his report was that I wanted him to become more vocal because I felt that the way he played was as a leader, and I felt that he had the respect of his teammates and could become a leader in the team. After the next match when we actually lost, it was our first defeat in quite a few games, and at the end of my post-match debrief, when I asked the team if anyone had anything to say, he stepped forward and gave a 45 second overview of the game and how the team shouldn't feel too despondent because they'd all played really well and we could look forward to next week because there are so many positives to take out of the game. The boy is 14 years old, so he really stood up, and he looked at the report and decided he was going to act on it.

And in a similar manner, there was another boy who continued to shoot from outside of the area using his instep as opposed to his laces for extra power. The controlled shots you were taking were not troubling goalkeepers in any way. So I was encouraging him to shoot with more intensity and aggression. In the next match we played, he took a shot from outside the area, and he used his instep again. At the end of the game, I looked at him, and I was like, "That was a shooting opportunity", and he said, "I know, coach, I should have just smashed it with my laces." And I was like, "Ah, you read the report, did you?" And he said, "I did, and you're right."

So again, just a sign that players are looking at these reports and trying to act on them and understanding the feedback that's given so clearly to them and trying to incorporate it into their games.

In what ways has Feedz helped your club stand out?

First and foremost, Feedz provides players within the club with comprehensive and deep reports on their performance and their development as footballers. This builds trust and engagement with the players and with the parents as well, and this is a real core benefit. Other clubs in the area simply aren't using innovations such as these, so it will give the club benefits in terms of attracting and retaining talent and players, and the best talent and players within the region, with other sporting organisations, it's a competitive marketplace. I do think it establishes the club as a leader in using technical innovations. But not just using them for the sake of using them, using them for the benefit and the development of the players that sign up for the club.

What has surprised you about Feedz?

I think the feature, if you like, of the Feedz app, which has most surprised me, is the quality of the reporting. And not just the accurate representation of what you've said, but the app's ability to embellish and amplify what you say, but doing that in a way that still accurately reflects the meaning behind the feedback that you provide. In the case of football, it might use words that you don't use in your report, such as versatile or consistent to describe a player or a player's performance, words that you haven't used in your voice note, but that absolutely accurately portray what you want to say. So, you're creating a 32-second voice note, and you're receiving a detailed, comprehensive report that looks like it's taken 30 minutes to write, and this is hugely impressive and powerful in terms of providing the players and the parents with the feedback.

If you were speaking to an Executive Director who is on the fence about implementing Feedz, what would you tell them?

For sports organisations that aren't supplying their academies and junior players with feedback, they should be. Feedback is absolutely a must-have in all forms of education, and yet sports coaching is an area where it doesn't exist. If it's not happening, it should be happening. And if it is happening, it's probably taken your organisation a lot of time, and there's a massive utility with Feedz in the huge time saving, the huge saving in administration that the app can generate for you and your organisation. It's really easy to set up, really easy to use, and like I said, it saves a whole lot of time and creates a really professional perspective and image for the organisation that you work for.