When to Use Individuals, Teams or Collections to Stay Organized

With the release of Onform version 3.0, we introduced the concept of Collections in order to give you more ways to stay organized. Together with Individuals and Teams, you have many ways to keep your client list organized within Onform. This article covers when to use each method and some of the pros and cons of each.

Most coaching relationships can be summed up in two categories: 'Individuals' for when you are coaching a single person one-to-one, for example as a golf instructor or baseball coach giving private lessons, and also a 'Team' relationship, typical of a sport like football or basketball.

Adding an Individual

When you add an individual person into Onform, we create an individual workspace. This workspace contains the features that we provide like a library for videos and a chat thread for messaging back and forth. This workspace then has two users 1) the coach and 2) the student/athlete. For example, this is the most common relationship among golf instructors who typically work 1:1 with private lessons. Note that you can also invite parents, other coaches or other people to help collaborate on the coaching of this person. The 'Individual workspace' is the most common relationship between coach and athlete where you record video, provide feedback and maintain an ongoing relationship.

Adding a Team

A team workspace is used in a true team environment where a roster of players are all members of a team. A key differentiator of a Team is that all members of the team can see the roster of members and can communicate between each other. Videos/messages are always shared privately, so team members can't see any video or message that wasn't intended for them, but it's intended to allow team members to share between each other. Teams also support 'groups' which is similar to a group text message thread: any video or message shared into the group is seen by all members of the group. For example, a baseball team might have groups like 'pitchers' and 'outfielders'.

A unique benefit of using a team workspace is the ability to record multiple athletes one right after the other without having to leave the camera interface. Tagging and identifying 'who's in the video' is possible from the recording screen, as is the ability to denote what is happening with a descriptive tag, like '4-iron'. Because of this fast recording capability, you might use this when you have groups of athletes that regularly train together.

Using a Collection

Collections are basically just groupings of people and teams. For example, you can group all your individuals into collections like 'Juniors' or 'Bronze level clients'. When you put individual or teams into a collection, you are also able to broadcast messages to everyone in a collection, and unlike a group text, a broadcast is a way for a coach to send a message to a lot of people, but do it privately. That is, if a person replies to a broadcast message, the reply is private between the coach and athlete. Not everyone sees the reply. In addition, collections are only seen by the coach, your athletes won't actually know they are even in a collection.

Here's a great video that explains collections:

Camps and Clinics

A very common scenario for using Onform is when you are holding camps and clinics. In this enviornment, individuals attend for a day or perhaps a few days and receive specialized instruction. Collections are VERY powerful for this scenario because you can invite all your kids and their parents using an Individual workspace (add the athletes name initially, then use the 'add another person' feature to invite parents, grandparents etc). From here, you can organize your kids into collections like "Friday 14U Group". Since an individual can be in multiple collections at a time, they might also be in the "Pitchers" collection. As you record videos during the camp, you can always quickly find the athlete you are working with, and ensure that all their parents are included on each video you share.

In Summary

Anytime you are coaching a person or want to record some videos of them in the app, you will typically have them in either an individual or team workspace. You can certainly record an athlete in the 'All Files Library' and create their workspace at a later time.

At a higher level is a collection: a grouping of individual or team workspaces intended to keep you organized and give you the ability to bulk message people privately and find/sort them as needed. Much like a folder, you'll find that collections will help tremendously once you have more than 20-30 people to work with.

We've designed Onform for video analysis and coaching and we can grow with you to thousands of students and 100's of thousands of videos. If you'd like any help from our team at anytime, please reach out to our support team.

Thanks for reading!