Why we built Blocq

I run a volleyball club. For years I watched the same thing happen on every court, every week.

A coach would show up straight from a full day of work, ten minutes before practice, and run the session out of their head. Same warm-up, same three drills, same scrimmage at the end. Not because they didn’t care. Most of them care a lot. But because there was no time. Writing a real plan the night before never happened. Sharing one over WhatsApp got ignored. So the plan lived in their memory, and when the memory ran thin, so did the practice.

As a director, I was flying blind. I was paying coaches I almost never saw coach. I had no idea whether the passing progression we had agreed on as a club was actually being taught the same way on every court. And when a parent called about playing time, I had nothing to point to. I was taking the coach’s word for it, and sometimes the coach’s word was all there was.

I tried the usual fixes. Whiteboards. Smart boards, which were expensive and mostly went unused. Templates in Word. Group chats. None of it stuck, because all of it asked a tired coach to do more work at the worst possible moment of their day.

So we built the thing I wished I’d had.

Blocq lets a coach build a full, timed practice in a few minutes, pulling from a drill bank they only have to fill once. They run it from their phone on the court, drill by drill, with the clock keeping them honest. No whiteboard, no note buried in a chat, no starting from a blank page. And on my side, as a director, I can finally see what is happening across the club: what was planned, what actually ran, and who showed up.

That is the whole idea. Make the right thing the easy thing. A coach should not have to choose between a good practice and getting home at a reasonable hour. A director should not have to choose between trusting their coaches and actually knowing what is going on.

We built Blocq because we needed it ourselves. If you coach, or you run a club, and any of this sounds like your Tuesday night, come get early access. We are building it for you, and we would love your help shaping it.

— Carl, Founder of Blocq