Frequently asked questions

About XO Gridmaker

What is XO Gridmaker?

XO Gridmaker is a football play designer for coaches. You draw plays on a field, organize them into playbooks, and share them with your team — on phones, tablets, or printed wristband cards.

Who is it for?

Flag football, youth tackle, middle school, and 7v7 coaches — plus anyone who coaches their own kids at the kitchen table. It was built by a coach for coaches who want a faster alternative to slide software, whiteboards, and napkin sketches.

How is this different from drawing plays in slide software?

XO Gridmaker understands football. Players have positions, routes are route trees, formations are formations — not just shapes. That means the app can animate plays, keep them legible at any size, share them as live pages instead of static images, and feed structured data to Coach Cal so its suggestions are grounded in real X's and O's.

Pricing & plans

Is XO Gridmaker free?

Yes, there's a free tier that gives you one playbook with up to 8 plays — enough to evaluate the editor. The Team Coach plan unlocks the full product: unlimited plays, team invites, wristbands, Game Mode, and Coach Cal — the AI coaching partner — included with a monthly message allowance. See the pricing page for current plan details.

Can my whole staff use one Team Coach plan?

Team Coach includes 3 collaborator seats — enough for a small staff. Beyond that, extra seats are $3/seat/month, billed to the head coach. If an assistant already has their own Team Coach plan, they don't count against your seats — they ride on their own subscription.

What's included with Team Coach?

Everything in Solo Coach, plus unlimited plays, Game Mode, wristbands, team invites, practice plans, and Coach Cal — the AI coaching partner — with 50 messages per month. Heavy Cal users can add message packs.

Plays, formations & print

What formations and play types does it support?

Both offense and defense, across 5v5 flag, 6v6 flag, 7v7, and 11-man formations. You can draw routes, blocks, motions, and zones. Formations and route semantics are preserved as structured data, not just lines on a canvas.

Can I print wristband-sized play cards?

Yes. Playbooks have a print view designed for wristband cards and sideline sheets. Plays scale cleanly so the drawings stay readable at small sizes.

Can I export my plays?

Yes — you can print playbooks and export the page to PDF from your browser. Individual plays can be shared as links that render cleanly on any device.

Does it work on the sideline?

It runs in the browser on phones and tablets, so you can pull up your playbook during a game without installing anything. Most coaches design on a laptop and reference on a phone at the field.

Is there a mobile app?

Yes — XO Gridmaker is available as a native app on iOS (App Store) and Android (Google Play), with offline playbook downloads for the sideline, Game Mode with screen-keep-awake and optional GPS venue tagging on game sessions, native sharing through the OS share sheet, and the same play-design editor as the desktop experience. Every feature also runs in any mobile browser if you prefer not to install.

Sharing & team

Can I share plays with players and parents?

Yes. Every play and playbook can be shared by link. Players and parents don't need an account to view — they open the link on any device and see a clean, animated view of the play.

What is Game Mode?

Game Mode is a sideline-first view included with Team Coach. Open a play full-screen, tap the field to run motion and the snap, then tag the outcome with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. When the game ends, save the session with score and notes — your call log becomes data you can use to see what's working and refine your playbook between games.

Coach Cal — your AI coaching partner

Coach Cal is the AI assistant included with the Team Coach plan. It knows football, knows your playbook, and can do real work — generate plays, review your playbook, plan practice, and answer the questions you'd otherwise text another coach about.

What is Coach Cal?

Coach Cal is the AI coaching partner included with the Team Coach plan. You chat with Coach Cal in the app — about a specific play, about your whole playbook, or about coaching in general — and it answers using a curated football knowledge base plus the actual contents of your playbook (when you give it permission).

What can Coach Cal actually do?

Coach Cal can: generate full plays from a description, draft a whole starter playbook for a variant (5v5 flag, 6v6 flag, 7v7, etc.), review your existing playbook and call out gaps or weaknesses, suggest counters to a specific defense, propose practice plans built around the plays you already have, adjust your playbook to your team's skill level, and answer coaching questions grounded in age-appropriate fundamentals.

Can Coach Cal really create plays for me, or just give advice?

Both. Coach Cal can write plays directly into your playbook — formations, routes, motions, tags — that you can then edit by hand in the same editor you'd use yourself. It's not a chatbot wrapper around screenshots; it speaks the same structured-play format that the editor uses, so generated plays animate, print, and share like any other play.

Does Coach Cal know about my playbook?

Coach Cal can be scoped to a specific playbook so it sees the formations, plays, tags, and notes you've created. By default the chat is general-purpose; when you open it from a playbook page or toggle the playbook scope, it pulls in that playbook's contents so suggestions are grounded in what your team actually runs.

Does Coach Cal work for my age level and football variant?

Yes. The knowledge base has age-tier-aware content (8u flag through middle school and high school) and is segmented by variant (5v5 flag, 6v6 flag, 7v7, 11-man tackle). When Coach Cal answers, it weights advice toward what's appropriate for your level — practice templates, drill suggestions, and play complexity all adjust.

How much does Coach Cal cost?

Coach Cal is included with the Team Coach plan at $9/month (or $99/year) — no separate AI subscription. The plan includes 50 Coach Cal messages per month.

What happens if I use up my 50 messages?

Two options: wait for the next monthly cycle (the cap resets automatically), or add a message pack — 100 additional messages for $5/month. Packs stack on top of your monthly allowance, so heavy users can add multiple. You'll see a meter inside the chat showing where you are.

Can Coach Cal help me plan practice?

Yes — practice planning is a first-class capability. Coach Cal can build practice plans with timed blocks, parallel activities (Skill / Line / Specialists), drill suggestions tied to the plays in your playbook, and equipment requirements. You can save the result as a Practice Plan inside the playbook.

Can Coach Cal review my playbook for weaknesses?

Yes. Ask Coach Cal to audit your playbook and it'll surface things like: "you don't have a counter to Cover 3," "your two short-yardage plays both attack the same gap," or "you're missing an underneath option from this formation." It can then propose specific plays to fill the gaps.

Are my conversations private? Is my data used to train an AI model?

Your chats are tied to your account and only visible to you. Coach Cal sends your messages to OpenAI or Anthropic (whichever the site administrator has configured) to generate responses; both providers' API terms forbid training on customer data by default. We don't share your conversations with anyone, and you can delete a thread from inside the chat. See the Privacy policy for the full list of sub-processors.

Which AI model is Coach Cal built on?

Coach Cal runs on top of large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic (Claude). The active provider is selected by XO Gridmaker — we choose whichever model we've found to give the best football answers at any given time. The football-specific knowledge base (KB chunks for fundamentals, formations, drills, game management, practice templates) is XO Gridmaker's own, layered on top of the underlying LLM.

Getting started

How do I get started?

Browse the example playbooks to see what's possible, then create a free account and start a playbook. Most coaches have their first play drawn within a couple of minutes. When you're ready for unlimited plays, team features, and Coach Cal, upgrade to Team Coach for $9/month.