Your Phone Calls It. They Have to Read It.
A child on their own can build a first touch, a weak foot and a clean strike — technique does not need anybody else. Decisions do. Nothing in a solo drill ever makes a child scan, choose and execute against something they did not pick, because they set the pace of every repetition. Scan & React is the part of the game that was missing from the backyard.
Your browser’s own voice, reading three real calls. In the app the lines are recorded in advance and downloaded before you go out.
Your phone becomes the thing they react to
Your child dribbles in a small square. The app calls one of four directions — left, right, forward, back — or one of six numbered cones, at a moment they cannot predict, and they have to find it and do it before the next call lands. You watch, and tap whether they got there.
An illustration of four consecutive calls. In a real session the order, the timing and which round you are in are drawn fresh each level, so nobody can learn the pattern. Every call the app can make is one of those ten words — four directions and six cones — so a child never has to translate before they move.
Before you press start
None of this is equipment you have to buy for it, and there is nothing to set up indoors. What it does need is ten clear minutes of your attention, because you are half of how it works.
What you need
- A ball.
- Six cones, numbered one to six — a marker pen on the side of each is enough.
- A small square of clear ground: a driveway, a garage floor, a patch of lawn.
- The phone’s sound turned up and propped where your child can hear it.
- Somebody to watch and tap. Usually you.
Somebody has to tap
This is not a drill you start and walk away from. After every single call you press Got it or Missed, and those taps are the whole of the scoring: they are what clears a level, what ends the session, and what the score is made of. The app cannot see the cone your child ran to.
It is two buttons the size of your thumb and nothing else on the screen, so you can keep your eyes on the square rather than the phone.
About ten minutes
Nobody decides when to stop: the session climbs until two levels fail in a row, and then it ends. Most run about ten minutes, and a child who is having a good day runs longer than one who is not.
A session under three minutes does not reach the minimum for PE minutes and logs nothing to the attendance record. Two quick levels and a stop is a warm-up, not a lesson.
Clear the square first
The whole drill is sudden changes of direction on a call your child did not see coming, which is exactly the movement that turns an ankle on a curb, a hose or a low step. Walk the square before the first call and move what is in it, including the phone’s tripod.
Cutting hard from cold is the other half of it, so run a warm-up first — the same one the curriculum opens every session with. Safety at home has the warm-up, the load limits and the weather cut-offs in full.
Twelve levels, and a definite place to stop
Each level calls faster than the last and widens the pool it draws from. Get three quarters of a level right and it moves up. Miss two levels in a row and it stops there — the same shape as the shuttle run in the Home Combine, the eight fitness tests Spatrian repeats four times a year, so it is one idea to learn, not two.
The score is the highest level cleared, never the highest attempted — reaching level nine and failing it does not make a child a level-nine athlete.
What it will not claim
It times your thumb, and says so
Beside the level reached, a session reports one more figure: the median gap between the call and your tap, in milliseconds. The app records it because watching this month against last is genuinely useful — and it labels that a tap latency. It is not a reaction time, because your own reaction is inside every reading.
So it is never printed beside the figures sports science publishes for elite players. A number is only worth having if it is honest about what produced it.
Your child, against your child
Every chart compares this child to their own earlier sessions. There is no ranking against other families here, and no leaderboard anywhere in Spatrian unless a parent turns one on, where a child appears under a made-up name.
Plenty of families want their children well away from exactly that, and a board naming other people’s children turns a roster into a privacy question.
It bends around the child in front of you
A sensory plan keeps the training
An unexpected shout is the thing a sensory accommodation exists to prevent. So when the accommodation plan you set up for your child asks for it, the calls arrive on a steady announced beat instead, counted in, one every few seconds. They know one is coming and still have to work out what it is — the thinking survives, only the ambush goes.
Seated, standing still, or purely tactical
This is the rare soccer drill that loses nothing when the running is removed. Your child can point at the cone, or simply call it, instead of dribbling to it, and every level stays exactly as long and as hard as it was.
Works with no signal
Every line the app can say is written down in advance and its recording is downloaded before you leave the house, so a field with one bar behaves the same as your kitchen. If a recording is missing, the phone reads the line aloud itself.
What an accommodation does not change
What an accommodation never does is make the ladder easier. The levels, the pace at which they clear and the number of calls in each are the same for every child, so a level reached means one thing — including against the same child’s sessions from before a plan existed.
And it counts as PE
A finished session logs its minutes to your child’s attendance record like any other drill, so the ten minutes they spent in the driveway chasing the calls show up in the hours your state asks about. The level reached goes on the record beside them. A session that ends under three minutes in does not count toward those hours.
It shows up in a match, too
A Scan & React round is one of the challenges a season match can call for, so a week of practice has somewhere to land on Saturday. The Season is the weekly match that draws it.
Still deciding
Three more answers — what it is, how hard it gets and what the score means — are on the FAQ, alongside everything else families ask before they start.
Scan & React is included on every paid plan, for U14–U18, alongside the curriculum, the compliance documentation and everything else. One subscription covers your whole family.