Just a dadwith a notebook.
My dad coached me growing up at Howell Pop Warner in Central Jersey (yes, Central Jersey is a thing).
He's an HVAC guy. Never played sports growing up. But when I started playing, he wanted to get involved and help out however he could. The problem was he didn't know where to start. He'd work 12-plus hour days running service calls, then drive straight to Maxim Field for weeknight practice and try to teach a bunch of 10-year-olds how to run a sweep. No playbook. No football background at all. He'd grab a notebook at the kitchen table the night before and draw something up, hoping it would make sense when he got out there. Just a dad who wanted his kid to have a good experience and was willing to learn the game from scratch to make it happen.
I think about that a lot now. I worked in Football Operations for the Miami Dolphins, and before that I was the Coordinator of Coaching Operations and Analytics at Maryland. I've seen what coaches at this level have access to — film platforms, playbook software, scheme libraries that would blow your mind. And then I think about my dad with his notebook, and the thousands of moms and dads doing exactly that right now, and it honestly bothers me that nobody built something for them.
“I think about my dad with his notebook, and the thousands of moms and dads doing exactly that right now.”
Too expensive, or too simple
The stuff that exists is either way too expensive or way too simple. You can pay $250 a year for a platform with 35,000 plays — most of them irrelevant to your 8-year-old — or you can use a free drawing app that doesn't know the difference between a slant and a post. There's nothing in between. Nothing that teaches you why a play works while letting you build it at the same time.
So I built it. I'm not a software engineer — I taught myself to code by building tools I needed at work. Operations dashboards, travel logistics, scouting databases. Spiral AI is the biggest thing I've made, and honestly it started as something I wished my dad had when I was 10.
A one-stop shop
It's a one-stop shop. You can study 91 defensive and offensive schemes with real interactive diagrams — not static pictures, actual field views where you tap a defender and see their zone responsibility. You can draw up plays on a whiteboard, tap a receiver and pick from 30+ real routes, animate the whole thing with one button. You can build practice plans, print wristband cards for your QB, set up your depth chart, hand scout cards to your scout team.
And if you're a parent who's never watched a football game in your life? There's a Parent Mode that explains what your kid's position does in plain English. Because half the battle for these families isn't just coaching — it's understanding what's happening in the first place.
“Nothing that teaches you why a play works while letting you build it at the same time.”
Right now, everything here is free to use. No account required. No ads. It runs in your browser and your data stays on your device. I built it because I think the people raising the next generation of football players deserve better than a dry-erase board and a YouTube search.