Press Play.
Put the Phone Down.
You should not have to read instructions off a screen while your child waits. Every drill in the curriculum carries a written coaching track — setup, corrections, the countdown, the finish — and the Audio Coach speaks it on the clock, so the person watching your child is you. The voice on the clock is Coach Spatrian — the same coach the chat button opens, doing the part of the job that happens outside.
It is one tool in the box, and you never have to use it. A coach or a trainer with their own way of running a session can plan, score and log it by hand, and it lands in the same record.
Hear a real minute of it
Both registers and the Coach and Robo scene, with every line printed beside the player. No account, nothing logged.
Press play to hear what a drill sounds like.
Every spoken line is printed on screen as well, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing player follows the same session. Where a voice recording has not been made yet, the player falls back to your device’s own voice and shows a note saying so, rather than going silent.
Three ways to be spoken to
The same drill, delivered for the person who needs to hear it. You pick per session, and the choice sticks per child.
Across the backyard
Loud, energetic, addressed to your child. Phone on speaker on a step, and you are free to watch rather than narrate.
Inside of the foot. Nice and easy — don’t smash it.
One earbud, just for you
Quiet and terse, addressed to the teacher of record. It tells you what to look for, so the coaching in the backyard is still yours.
Watch the plant foot. It should point where the ball is going.
A scene, not a list of instructions
Two voices — the coach and Robo, an excitable sidekick who gets it wrong first. A player who tunes out an instruction will still follow a conversation.
Coach: Nice and easy — don’t smash it.
Robo: Aw. Smashing is my favourite part.
It keeps the clock, so nobody is watching a stopwatch
A track is not a list of instructions read out. It is a timeline: coaching lands where it is useful, and the furniture every drill needs — the start, the halfway mark, the one-minute warning, the finish — is placed automatically rather than written by hand.
- Change the length and the track re-times itself Authored cues are stored as fractions of the drill, not as absolute seconds. Shorten a ten-minute drill to six and the coaching redistributes instead of running off the end.
- Every drill has audio the day it is written The seeded drills have hand-authored timelines. Anything else — a custom drill, a lesson activity — gets a serviceable one built from the words already on it, so nothing is silent while it waits for an author.
- Whole lessons, not just drills A lesson is a sequence of activities, so its track is segmented: each activity gets a spoken transition, and the audio clock drives the activity stepper on screen. The page moves because the coach moved.
On four drills, it can hear the ball
Where one rep is one sound — a pass off a wall, a shot, a touch, a keepie-up — the phone lying on the grass can listen for the ball. The coach counts the touches, notices when the rhythm starts to wobble, and says so while there is still time to fix it, not at the whistle.
- Nothing is recorded Listening happens on your phone. What it keeps is the moment of each touch, as a timestamp. No audio is stored, sent anywhere or turned into words.
- It checks it can hear before it counts Before the whistle it asks for three touches. If it cannot pick them out, it says so out loud and you tap to count as usual. If it loses the ball halfway, it tells you that too.
- It learns your balls, and hears past its own voice Each phone learns up to four of your balls by their sound, so a ball it knows well can start from a single touch and a new one is not refused for being different. The coach’s own voice is taken back out of what the microphone hears, so a touch under a cue still counts, and on a wall drill the kick and its thud count once. Once the phone knows a ball well, your child earns a stamp for it in their Surface Passport, drawn from its sound and named by them. What it learns stays in that phone’s browser.
- It says where the phone goes Before every drill, one line: on the ground two big steps (1.5 m, 5 ft) out from the wall, one to two metres (3 to 6 ft) from the ball, or held by whoever is helping. Never in a pocket, never in the hand of the child with the ball.
- You confirm the number At the end it shows what it heard and you change it if it missed some. A session you corrected is recorded as corrected, not as measured.
- Against their own rhythm, never anyone else’s After a few listened sessions it can play a soft beat at your child’s own best tempo and nudge it up when they hold it. Your child’s record shows each drill’s first and latest session side by side, with no averages and no rankings.
It checks whether the skill held
Practice is easy to count. What a child kept is not. On a listening drill your child has done before, the coach opens with “Just start. I’m only listening for the first bit,” and says nothing else until it has heard twenty touches. Those twenty, played cold, are compared with your child’s own steady rhythm from earlier sessions — and the answer changes the rest of the session.
- Each drill gets its next check A skill that held is checked again after a longer gap; one that faded, sooner. The schedule recommends a day — you decide what your child actually does.
- A Retention Record, kept over the year Beside the Rhythm Record, your child’s record shows each check, whether it held, and the longest time away a skill still held — counted on your own phone before any coaching, and confirmed by you.
- One child’s curve, and faded is not failing There is no typical forgetting rate, band average or sibling comparison: the reference is always your child’s own earlier rhythm. A run that breaks before twenty touches says nothing at all rather than guess.
Head up, a bet with the coach, and a switch
Once a child’s rhythm on a drill has settled, the listening drills grow three more games. Each is answered with the ball, so the phone still keeps nothing but the moment of each touch, and each compares your child only with themselves.
Is the skill automatic yet?
Mid-drill the coach makes short calls — “Double!”, or a stream of colours where only one counts — and your child answers with a quick double touch. The less the calls disturb the rhythm, the less the skill needs their attention.
The result is a 0–100 Automaticity Index and a stage per drill: Thinking about it, Getting there, Automatic. The research behind it is cited on the screen and in your child’s record.
The coach bets on the rhythm
Before the whistle the coach guesses how long your child’s rhythm will stay steady, a little past last time. Your child calls it with the ball: two touches for “I’ll beat it”, one for “I won’t”.
Only that one word is stored. Over the year their record shows how often their own call came true, and the coach quietly learns which of its cues actually helps this child.
Two drills, eight minutes
Once two drills have each been checked twice, the coach can pair a wall drill with a foot drill and call “Switch!” at moments nobody can predict.
What it measures is recovery: how many touches the rhythm takes to come back after each switch, against the last time that pair was played.
Try it before the first drill. The Sound check, a short guided page linked from every listening drill, shows a live picture of the sound, listens the way a drill does and says what it decided about each sound, in words — “the ball”, “too quiet to be sure”, “went on too long — a voice?”, “didn’t sound like your ball” — so you can see what it will and will not count on your own phone, in your own garden.
And it counts toward the standards, not just the hours. A drill the device heard is evidence of measured skill work; a scored Head-Up block is evidence of decision-making under load; your child’s call on the Wager is a self-assessment. Each is claimed only from a measured session, and each is labelled with its evidence in the session log you hand an evaluator.
What the coach tells you, before and after
The person beside the ball is usually a parent, not a coach. So on top of what it says to your child, the coach writes to you: what to look for before a drill, what it heard after one, and a short note in your Monday email. The coaching points come from a library our staff approve one by one; the numbers come only from your child’s own record.
Coach’s eye: Watch for, and Say
Beside a drill, two short lists for the grown-up: the mistake to watch for at your child’s stage, and the words a coach would use to fix it. A drill with nothing approved simply shows nothing.
Three sentences on what it heard
When the phone counted a drill, Coach Spatrian writes you a note: what it heard, what that usually means, and one thing for next time. It may only use the session’s own numbers. For a child under 13 without your consent to the AI coach, the note is written from those numbers alone and no AI model is asked.
The coach’s note in your week
Your weekly summary email carries, per child, what the phone heard last week, which skills held, the check coming this week, one thing to work on, and the latest debrief. Every figure is one the record already holds; a week with nothing in it sends nothing.
And in the ear, during the drill. The same coaching reaches your child mid-rep: the coach says up to two approved lines from the Coach’s eye in the drill’s own voice, each in place of one of the drill’s own lines, so it never talks more. Your child hears what to do (“standing foot right beside the ball”); in the earbud mode for you, you hear what to watch for. If a video report says to practise a skill, or your own form check says “not yet”, the drills that train it keep all their coaching and carry a third line — and nothing is said during a check of whether the skill held.
It obeys the accommodation plan
A child with an IEP used to get the same whistle, at the same volume, on the same clock as everyone else — through the one channel nobody can look away from. Three things change when a plan says so, and nothing else does.
No plan, an unreadable plan, or a standard plan all return the track exactly as it arrived. The accommodation is something your child’s plan turns on — never a different product you have to go and find.
Pick the voice, the pace, and how much it talks
Thirty voices exist. Nobody standing in a backyard wants to audition thirty, so each register gets a shortlist chosen for its job — and the one your child hears is grouped by their age, because a thirteen-year-old should not be coached in a voice pitched at a seven-year-old. You can hear any of them before you keep it.
A voice per child, per register
Bright and carrying for the child in the backyard; calm and unhurried for the earbud. The choice is stored against the child, so a voice they picked is theirs and it is there again next week. Picking a voice does not pick a different coach — it is the same coaching, spoken the way your child likes to hear it.
Younger kids
Older kids
In the earbud, for you
Slower, or quieter in the sense of less
Speaking rate is adjustable, because a spoken line is read at whatever pace it was given and some children need the words to arrive more slowly.
How much it talks has three settings. Turn it to light and the coach keeps the structure and the targets and drops the chatter — for a child who finds a busy soundtrack harder than no soundtrack at all.
It works where PE actually happens
Which is a park with one bar of signal, or a backyard where somebody cannot hear the phone.
Downloaded, not streamed
Save a drill’s audio before you leave and it plays with no signal at all. The button tells you when the whole track is on the device rather than leaving you to find out in the car park.
Every line is also on screen
Nothing is spoken that is not printed. A deaf or hard-of-hearing student follows exactly the same session, reading the same coaching, on the same clock. Every cue is listed with its timestamp and a button to hear that one line again.
It never goes silent
Where a line has not been recorded in the coach’s voice yet, the player falls back to your device’s own voice and says that it has, rather than playing nothing and leaving you to guess.
Two children, one parent, one drill
Coaching siblings together is the normal case at home, not an edge case.
Roles up front, and the swap called halfway
Run a drill as a pair and the track assigns the working role and the resting one, then calls the change-over, so one child is not left standing while the other is coached. The technique advice itself is untouched — it is the same whoever is passing.
Names arrive the way they do everywhere else here: the first run says “attacker”, and the version that says Maya is rendered behind you for next time. A clip naming two children is a clip per pair of names, which does not end.
Two children, two records
Siblings are rarely the same age, so only the spoken layer is shared: the session is logged against each child separately, on their own record, under their own rubric. Each child’s progress stays their own.
And the second child is authorized against your account rather than taken on the browser’s word — a session logged against another family’s child would be worse than no pairing at all, so an id that fails the check simply runs the drill solo.
The drill ends with three questions, out loud
The rubric is the most valuable thing a parent produces — it is how a session becomes a record of what your child can actually do. It is also the thing least likely to get filled in, because it lives on a form you reach later, indoors, after the moment has gone.
Asked while you are still on the grass
Three questions, about twenty seconds, each answered with one tap. You are already wearing the earbud and the session you are assessing happened ninety seconds ago.
Three, not six: ask all six criteria and a drill turns into paperwork, and honesty drops off around the fourth. The three that carry the most signal are asked, and which three rotates, so a term still covers the full set.
Words, not a number out of four
The spoken answers keep the rubric’s own bands — “did it with little help” rather than “3”. A parent tapping a number is guessing at a scale; a parent tapping a description is reporting something they just watched.
And when the drill is finished, the session is logged on your child’s record — the date, the minutes and the answers — with no form to fill in later.
Fifteen seconds is enough to judge it
There is a real minute of coaching at the top of this page — both registers and the Coach and Robo scene, with the script printed beside it. No account, nothing logged.
Hear the sample Join the BetaOn what is measured. The player records a small, fixed set of moments — a drill started, a mode switched, where in the track somebody stopped — so that a drill everybody abandons at eight minutes can be found and fixed. It is a closed list of events with nowhere to put free text, it is stored on Spatrian’s own servers, and no third-party analytics service is involved. Children use this product under parental consent; their session behaviour is not something to hand to an advertising vendor for the sake of a nicer dashboard.