Frequently asked questions
The honest answers. Including the ones about price.
13 questions about what CORE Coaching is, who it is for, where your archetype actually comes from, and what stays free. If yours is not here, email support@corecoaching.soccer and a person will answer it.
Start here
What this is, who it is for, and what it costs.
Why CORE Coaching?
Because almost every coaching platform starts with the session and works backwards. You get a book of drills built by someone else, for a team that is not yours, with equipment that you don’t have, and you are left to decide which drills fit. The tool never understands who you are.
CORE Coaching starts at the other end. An identity assessment maps how you actually think about the game. Everything after that is built around your identity — your game model, your sessions, your matchday plan, the advice the assistant coach gives you back. All of it.
Coaches who can name what they believe explain it more simply, find their words faster on the touchline, and give players something consistent to hold onto week after week. That is the whole idea.
Who is it for?
Coaches who are responsible for how a team plays and want their own answer to that question rather than a borrowed one. Youth club coaches, academy staff, high school and college coaches, and volunteers running a single age group all use the same platform — nothing in it assumes a full-time salary or a performance department behind you.
It is built for the team that actually shows up to your sessions. Every prompt asks about their ages, their confidence, and the time you really get with them, so a coach of an U10 team and a coach of a senior side are answering the same questions about different footballers.
You also do not need a coaching license to use it. A volunteer with no licence gets the same assessment and the same tools as an academy coach.
What does it cost?
There are three plans. Free is $0 and stays free forever. Base is $89 a year, or $12 a month. Pro is $149 a year, or $15 a month. Paid plans start with a 7-day free trial and you are not charged until it ends.
A free account is a genuine portfolio rather than a teaser. It includes the full Coach Philosophy Assessment, your Identity Report and Coaching Shift, the complete Game Model Workbook, the Pitch Calculator, the Reflection Journal, viewing access to the community library, and 5 AI Assistant Coach messages a month. You can discover your archetype and write your whole game model without paying anything, and no credit card is asked for at signup.
What the paid plans add is the building. Base unlocks the Activity Builder, Session Composer, Game Model Builder, Game Plan tool, publishing and cloning in the community library, and PDF exports. Pro adds Player Profiles, the IDP Builder, Growth Tracking, The Film Room, unlimited AI messages, and your own badge on the activities you design.
Your coaching identity
Where your archetype comes from, and what it does and does not claim.
How is my archetype derived?
From 24 questions, each one a coaching situation with four possible responses. You pick the statement most like you and the one least like you — there is no scale to sit in the middle of, and no answer that is obviously the flattering one.
Designed using the leading DiSC personality assessment as a model, the questions are about how you plan and how you behave in the moment. The archetypes are not labels for your personality — they are a reading of your coaching identity, which is a different thing.
Your answers help determine which of the 17 archetypes you belong to.
What is the Coaching Shift?
The gap between the coach who plans on Wednesday and the coach who reacts on Saturday. Because the assessment asks about the office and the sideline separately, it can measure that distance instead of guessing at it.
You get two numbers: how far your communication moves between planning and the touchline, and how far your intensity moves. A large shift is not a failing — it is the single most useful thing to know about yourself before you write a game model that only the Wednesday version of you can deliver.
How long does it take?
About 10-15 minutes. You can leave part-way through and pick up where you stopped — your answers are saved frame by frame, so a session interrupted at frame 14 resumes at frame 14.
If the result does not sound like you, read the four axis positions under the archetype name before deciding. Coaches often disagree with the label while recognising every axis. You can also retake it from your results page — the usual cause of a wrong reading is answering as the coach you intend to be rather than the one who turned up last Saturday.
What if my coaching identity changes?
It should. Your archetype is a reading of where you are now, not a verdict on who you are permanently.
Growth Tracking on the Pro plan is built for exactly this: a separate growth assessment you retake over time, overlaid so you can see which axes have moved and which have held across a full timeline. The platform expects you to be a different coach in three seasons.
The platform
What you actually get to use.
What features are in the platform?
For your coaching identity: the Coach Philosophy Assessment, your Identity Report and Coaching Shift, the Reflection Journal, and Growth Tracking over time.
For your training: the Activity Builder for designing drills on a canvas, the Session Composer for building a full session from warm-up to cool-down, a community library of sessions from coaches whose football looks like yours, and the Pitch Calculator.
For your games: the Game Model Workbook and the Game Model Builder across all five phases, the Game Plan tool for matchday, and The Film Room for marking the moments that mattered in your own footage and attaching each clip to a player, a goal, or one of your principles.
For your players: Player Profiles, development tracking, and the IDP Builder for individual plans calibrated to each player’s stage.
Running underneath all of it is the AI Assistant Coach, which reads your identity and your game model before it answers anything.
What are the four pillars?
Four parts of coaching, built as one loop rather than four separate tools. Leading Oneself gives you your philosophy. Leading Training turns it into sessions that actually match it. Leading Games carries it to the touchline. Leading Players brings it back to the people it was always for — and what you learn there changes how you see yourself again, which is where the loop closes.
The order matters because each pillar feeds the next. The assessment feeds your game model, the game model calibrates your sessions and your matchday plan, and what you notice about your players feeds back into your identity.
Most coaches are running four disconnected tools and a notes app. This is one system, so it compounds. You can still jump straight to building sessions if that is what this week needs — the tools simply have less to work with until the pillars before them are filled in.
How does the AI Assistant Coach differ from a typical AI chat?
A general chatbot starts every conversation from nothing. Ask it how to fix your build-up and it returns the average of everything ever written about build-up — sound advice for a coach who does not exist.
The Assistant Coach reads your archetype, your four axis positions, and your game model before it answers. So the same question comes back in your terms: against your convictions, inside your six zones, for the age group you actually coach. If you believe in playing out from the back and your model says so, it will not quietly suggest you go long.
The other difference is that it is not a blank box you have to prompt well. It already knows what you are working on. Free accounts get 5 messages a month and Pro accounts are unlimited — and as with any AI, use your own professional judgement on what comes back.
Practical matters
Staff licences, billing, and getting hold of a person.
Can my club provide this for the whole staff?
Yes. A club licence covers every coach on your staff with the full Pro feature set and adds the club layer on top — the Technical Director dashboard, archetype distribution across the staff, alignment between each coach’s model and the club’s, and shared sessions your coaches can see and clone from each other.
It is priced by how many coaches you have and is self-serve through checkout up to 100 coaches; federations and leagues above that are quoted on a call. A TD sees coaching work, not coaches being watched — the Reflection Journal stays private to the coach who wrote it.
Can I cancel? What happens to my work?
You can cancel at any time from your account settings. You keep access for the rest of the period you have already paid for.
You retain ownership of the coaching content you create on the platform — your sessions, activities, game model, and player notes are yours. After cancelling you drop to the free tier, which means the building tools lock but your identity report, your game model, and your journal are still there.
How do I get help, or ask something that is not here?
Email support@corecoaching.soccer and a person will answer. If you are enquiring on behalf of a club and want a walkthrough, say so and we will set up a call rather than trading messages.
The Learning Hub is also worth a look — it covers the thinking behind the four pillars in more depth than a FAQ answer can.
The first 15 minutes cost nothing.
Take the assessment, read your report, and decide afterwards whether the rest of it is worth paying for. No card, no trial clock.