Laola - Your Coaching Assistant app review: a soccer coaching app

Introduction

It’s really difficult to find a football (soccer) coaching app online, while there are tons of different playbook apps for American football available on the App Store. Therefore today I am going to take a look at Laola – Your Coaching Assistant by Andre Griepernau. This app an easy way to manage your football team, create line-ups, set strategies and plays for every match, as well as keeping stats and substitutions for every match across multiple seasons.

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The app comes with an integrated stopwatch and will track any event during a match against the match’s time.

Using the App to Create Your Team

Starting the app, you will need to make a new team. You can easily add a new team and players in the menu, as the app is designed to do this quickly and without a hitch. You can fill in all kinds of information, with obvious field such as name and date of birth, but also height and shooting foot, which can be very helpful deciding on positions and set pieces. When you’ve got your team all set up, you can go into the formations team and choose a tactic that suits your need.

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On the formation page you can choose certain often used templates, but to suit your players, you can easily edit these and even draw on the formation to make sure everyone knows their task on the pitch.

 

Set Plays and Match Day

On the Set Plays page you can prepare all kinds of tactics for each kind of set piece, such as corners or free kicks. This way you can show your team exactly what to do in each given possible play, preparing them for a possibility to score or keep the opponent from scoring. As with the formation page, you can draw on these plays to show how the ball should move around and where specific players should be positioned. Lastly there is the match day page, where you can manage everything you should on the day of your matches.

You can keep scores, cards, injuries, and substitutions easily, while the built-in stopwatch will keep track of when exactly you have filled in each event during a match. One thing I couldn’t figure out was the attendance part of the app. I wasn’t able to set any of the options, nor mark a player attending or absent.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• In-depth football strategizing
• Tons of options
• Easy to use

 

Cons

• Attendance option was unclear

 

Conclusion

If I was coaching a football team, or many football teams for that matter, I would definitely welcome this app. It makes it very easy to set up formations and plays easy to understand for your team. Match days are easy to track and very handy to collect stats on your players. The attendance part of the app was unclear on how to use it, which was a bit of a minus point. The app is only compatible with iPad and requires just over 10 MB.