Getting Started as a Coach
Your coaching platform, simplified. Here's how to set up your team, invite your athletes, and push your first workout — all in about 20 minutes.
Beyond the Blocks replaces spreadsheets, group texts, and five different tools. Your roster, workouts, practice timing, attendance, meet entries, and family communication all live in one place.
Your first 20 minutes
Follow these steps in order. You can pause and come back anytime.
- 1
Sign up and pick the Coach role
Go to beyondtheblocks.io and tap 'Get Started Free'. Pick 'Coach' when it asks what kind of account you want. Coach accounts get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.
You'll know it worked when
You land on the coach onboarding wizard.
- 2
Finish the 4-step setup wizard
The wizard walks you through creating your first team, picking your course (yards, meters, or both), adding athlete names, and selecting a starter workout template. Takes about 5 minutes. Everything is editable later.
You'll know it worked when
You see your team name at the top of the dashboard and a welcome message.
- 3
Invite your athletes
Go to the Athletes tab. You can bulk-upload a CSV with names, emails, and USA Swimming IDs — or add them one at a time. Each athlete gets an email invite with a link to join. Under-13 athletes don't need their own email — you add them with their parent's email instead.
You'll know it worked when
Your roster shows every athlete with 'pending' next to unclaimed invites.
- 4
Build your first workout
Tap Workouts → Create New. Add sets one at a time: distance, reps, interval, stroke, intensity zone (easy / moderate / threshold / sprint). Save it. You can duplicate it for the next day and tweak. If you get stuck, use the AI Workout Assistant in the bottom right — describe the goal and it drafts a full workout for you to edit.
Full workout builder guide - 5
Push the workout to practice
From the workout page, tap 'Push to Team' and pick the practice date. The workout now shows up on every athlete's home screen for that day. They can check off sets as they complete them.
You'll know it worked when
Your athletes tell you they see today's workout when they log in.
- 6
Mark attendance on day one
During or right after practice, open the Attendance tab. Swipe through your roster and tap Present, Absent, or Excused for each athlete. Takes less than a minute for a team of 30.
Key features, explained
Building workouts
The workout builder handles sets, reps, intervals, strokes, intensity zones, and drills. You can save workouts as templates, clone them across days, and push a single practice to multiple teams at once.
Read the workout builder guideRunning practice mode
Practice mode turns your phone or tablet into a pool-deck terminal. Start a session, see every athlete by lane, time sets live, and capture per-athlete per-rep data. Supports multi-team practices — just pick which teams are in the pool and each swimmer shows up color-coded.
Read the practice mode guideTracking attendance
Attendance takes under a minute per practice. You get a report per athlete over any date range — great for 'who's been missing training?' conversations with parents. Integrates with the Red Flag Alerts so chronic absences ping you automatically.
Sending emails (Communications Center)
One compose screen, six audiences. Blast your whole team, parents only, one athlete, or your entire organization. Preview-to-me sends a test copy to your own inbox before you fire the real one. Every send is logged.
AI weekly digest
Every Monday morning you get a personalized team briefing — athlete spotlights, attendance dips, performance concerns, and a week grade. No manual review required. It arrives in your inbox, so you can read it on the way to the pool.
Reviewing meet predictions
Before any meet you've declared entries for, you get AI predictions for every athlete — expected time range, trend direction, and confidence score. Great data to warm up with and set realistic goals. After the meet, you see prediction vs. actual side-by-side.
Collecting meet fees (if you handle billing)
If you bill families for meets, connect Stripe and declare your meet entries — BTB auto-calculates per-family fees from the event count and lets you invoice with one click.
How Stripe Connect works