Release Notes for January 28, 2020
This document describes the recent updates made to the CoachApp. These all fall under the category of enhancement. No significant new features have been introduced.
Driving Forces
We are in the very early days of the CoachApp, and much of this project remains aspirational. I thought it might be useful context for you if I occasionally explain how these code changes are supporting the goals of the system in addition to describing new features.
I hope this explicit connection to goals arms you with information to enable you to push back when a set of features do not actually support the goal (from your perspective), or when the goal in question is “off the mark” or the goal is not useful for how you want to coach.
To get started, I believe we have a shared goal, which I’ll phrase as a question:
- “How can coaches keep the athlete’s season on track?”
Navigation metaphors are useful, so I’ll stick with one. In order to navigate, you need three things:
- A destination
- A current location
- A map
The focus of today’s release is aimed at the first two, an athlete’s destination and an athlete’s current location (in the season).
Connecting the features to the goals
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An Athlete’s Destination
The destination for this season is most clearly captured in the Season Canvas, and is rolled up into the contents of the North Star. To make it easier for a coach to stay connected to the athletes destination, the athlete’s North Star is no more visible in the system. Mechanically, the North Star has been added to additional pages within the CoachApp. (Details below.) This should allow coaches to “keep one eye on the destination” as they navigate the season with the athlete.
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An Athletes Current Location
For some athletes, “where are they at”, is a simple question, but for others, figuring out where an athlete is, relative to their season long plan, is a difficult question. The athlete’s current location is more nuanced than just the hours trained, or miles covered, or some score on a fitness tracker. In the wilderness with a compass and a map, you need multiple landmarks (bearings) in order to find your location on the map (called “triangulation.”) For some athlete seasons, a coach needs multiple perspectives to “get their bearings” for that athlete.
To enable coaches to connect to the athlete from multiple perspectives within the CoachApp two things have been done:
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“sticky” athlete navigation to make it easier to jump to many different pages for a single athlete
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Cleaning up some data displays and adding additional data to more pages
Hopefully these enhancements will help you navigate the season with your athletes by keeping the destination more present and by making it easier to evaluate where an athlete is at. Let me know what you think.
As always, I could not do this without you, so thank you so much for all your help.
Enhancements and bug fixes
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“Sticky” Athlete Selection on all navigation
Once you select an athlete on any screen (e.g. click on roster list name, select an athlete from a drop down on a page, etc) the athlete you selected remains “sticky”. That is, as you navigate to other pages, that athlete will be pre-selected on each new page and the relevant data will be fetched. The selected athlete will remain sticky, until it is changed by selecting a new athlete in a drop-down list or clicking on a new athlete from the Roster. This allows the coach to jump around the app without having the select the same athlete on every single page.
As support for this feature, a permanent link to the Athlete Profile has been added on the left Navigation Menu. The result is you are now able to jump to the Athlete Profile from anywhere in the app.
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Improved Data Usage: North Star on most pages
The Athlete’s North Star from the Season Canvas has been added to the following pages: Planning, Analysis
The North Star, is now visible on Athlete Profile, Season Canvas, Planning, and Analysis pages.
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Improved Data Usage: Revised Weekly Display, added to Analysis
The Athlete Weekly review form are displayed in summary form on the Athlete Profile screen. The format of this display has been changed to show the coach’s internal Quick-Take commentary, and the color-coding to reflect the level of concern has been removed from the “week-of” date label and added to new label specific for level of concern. The level of plan impact for a given weekly has also been added to the new display.
This revised Athlete Weekly Summary View Panel has been added to the Analysis Page. The coach can now scroll through the notes to themselves from each week without having to hover on each annotation.
As always, please let me know if you notice anything strange with the system.
There was a minor system outage at our hosting company on Sunday 19-January-2020. As a result I have built a new system status page. I anticipate it will mostly be for my usage, but I am including it, in case you are interested.
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