What's new

Drill drawings look more like a printed drill. Lines, arrows and letters are now drawn at the size you'd see in a drill book, rather than about twice that on the sideways rink.

Coaches

• Padded blockers to drop on the ice, drawn to scale. Drag the handle on the end to make one as long as you need (6 ft and 10 ft are the usual), and turn it like the stick and net.
• Numbering a player (F1, D2) is easier to find. Tap the stamp and a Label box appears right beside it.

Coaches can draw drill diagrams on the site. No more sketching on paper and taking a photo. On a drill, press Draw a diagram for a blank rink and the usual drill symbols: skating, backward skating, skating with the puck, passes, shots, players, cones, nets and the rest. The drawing becomes one of the drill's pictures, so it shows in the plan and prints like any other.

Coaches

• Full rink, half rink or one zone. Drag to draw a line and it is smoothed for you, or tap points along the way.
• Edit drawing reopens a drawing exactly as you left it, and Copy as next stage starts the next step of a progression from it.
• It works on a phone, but a tablet or computer is easier.

Also, a behind-the-scenes update to keep the site current and secure. You stay signed in, and every plan, drill and picture is where you left it.

Coaches can ask for a team from the home page. Up to now a team had to be set up for you before you could see anything. There is now a "Request a team" link at the foot of the team list: tell us your name, your association and what the team is called, and we'll set it up and email you the codes. A person reads every request, so expect a reply rather than an instant login.

Coaches

• Request a team from the home page. You'll need an email address we can send the codes to, so check that one twice.

A practice plan can carry a picture of how the ice is laid out. Some practices run as stations, all at once, and a list of drills in order cannot show where anyone actually goes. A coach can now add one picture of the whole session, and it sits on the plan between the running order and the drills. Plans without one look exactly as they did.

Players and parents

• You will see the layout on the plan when your coach adds one, above the drills, so you know where your group starts before you step on.

Coaches

• Paste it, drag it onto the page, or pick a file, the same as pictures on a drill. A photo of the whiteboard works. It gets shrunk for you.
• It prints with the plan, on the first sheet beside the running order.
• Duplicating a plan brings the picture with it, so next week's version of the same session starts ready.
• More room around the edge of a printed plan, so a drill's border is not cut off by the printer.

• A drill's tags stay put in the plan editor. They could disappear depending on which page of the drill library you happened to be looking at.
• The practice plan list reads better in a screen reader, with a proper heading on the page.

A drill can take longer in one practice without changing it everywhere. A complicated drill might need ten minutes of teaching before it flows, so on the night it runs twenty five rather than fifteen. You can now add those minutes to that plan alone.

Coaches

• Add the extra minutes on the plan, and the running order, the start times and the total all pick it up.
• The drill in your library is untouched, so re-timing it later keeps the teaching time you allowed for that one practice.
• The plan says where a longer time came from, everywhere a drill's length is shown, so a number nobody recognises never appears on its own.

• Duplicate a practice plan. Start from last week's session and change what you need instead of building it again. The copy comes in as a draft, so nothing reaches the team until you publish it.

Practice plans print. A print view lays a plan out for paper: the running order with start times, then a card for each drill with its description and pictures, sized so a drill and its diagram stay on the same sheet.

Coaches

• Print, Share and Edit sit together at the top and the bottom of a plan, so you do not have to scroll back up to find them.

There is now a page explaining what this site is, for anyone who arrives without a team code and wants to know what they are being asked to open.

Players and parents

• How it works walks through the whole thing: tapping the link your coach sends, picking your name, watching the videos before practice, and reading the plan at the rink.
• A demo team you can open without a code, to see what a real plan looks like before you join one.

Coaches

• How it works covers tags and searching the drill library, which are the two things worth knowing before a library gets big.
• Tag suggestions open when you tap the box, not only once it has focus.
• The maintenance notice says what is switched off while the site is being worked on, instead of promising a time it might not keep.
• How it works and What's new sit side by side on the front page.

The whole site is now backed up off site every night, and can be put back in one action. On 7 September the site's stored files were lost. Teams, plans and rosters came back from a copy of the database, but uploaded plan PDFs and drill diagrams had to be added again. The backup now covers all of it.

Players and parents

• The bottom bar gets out of the way while you're typing. On a phone it no longer floats across the middle of the screen once the keyboard is up.

Coaches

• Publish is where you can reach it, above the drill library rather than below the whole library and its page buttons.
• Searching the drill picker keeps you at the picker, instead of dropping you at the top of the page.
• Picking a tag no longer adds the half-typed one beside it, with either the mouse or the keyboard.
• A run time is required when creating a drill, so plan totals mean something. Still optional when editing, so a typo fix isn't blocked on an older drill that hasn't got one.
• Scrolling over the minutes box no longer changes it.
• Re-extract links no longer errors on a plan that names the same video twice.

Behind the scenes

• A nightly archive of everything: database, plan PDFs, drill pictures and team logos, kept off site.
• Restore in one action, so a season of uploaded files never has to be put back by hand.
• A backup that fails can't take the site down, and a failed one gets noticed rather than passing quietly.

Tags now work properly on a phone. Adding a tag to a drill showed none of the tags the team already used, and the tag search box offered no suggestions. Both are fixed.

• The tag list opens when you tap the box, not only once you start typing, so you can see what already exists before making a near-duplicate. Typing filters the list.
• You can scroll the tag list with a finger without it picking whichever tag you touched.
• The drill library and the plan editor's picker are paged, 12 at a time, with Prev, Next and numbered pages. Filters and your place in the list survive adding, moving and removing drills.
• Pick drills to copy is deliberately not paged, so turning a page can't lose everything you'd ticked.

• The EB logo is on the site, on the front page and at the top left of every team page, where it links back to the team list. On a narrow phone it shrinks to just the emblem.
• A proper icon for the browser tab and the home screen, including the round and squared-off shapes phones crop it to.
• The practice date box no longer overflows the form on an iPhone.
• The code box limits how fast codes can be guessed.

Practice plans can now be built from a drill library. Coaches can keep a library of reusable drills, each with a name, how it's run, tags, an approximate run time, up to six pictures and a video link. A plan is then put together by picking drills from that library. Uploading a PDF plan still works exactly as before, so this is a second way to build a plan and not a replacement.

Players and parents

• Drill plans open right in the page, with the pictures and video links inline, so there's no PDF to pinch and zoom around on a phone.
• The running order is at the top. Every drill plan starts with a summary: each drill, how long it takes, and what the clock should read when it starts, counting down from 80:00.
• Drills can have more than one picture, shown in the order the coach added them.
• A way to send feedback. There's a Contact us link in the footer of every page.

Coaches: building drills

• Paste or drag a screenshot straight in. Clip a diagram out of a PDF or a video and paste it onto the drill form, with no need to save it as a file first.
• Approximate run time, totalled across the plan, so you can see whether practice fits the ice time you've booked. Leave it blank and the total says how many are unset.
• Up to six pictures per drill, added several at a time and kept in order. New pictures add to a drill rather than replacing what's there.
• Pictures keep their shape, rather than being squashed out of proportion.
• Saving a drill takes you back to the library, rather than leaving you on the form wondering whether it saved.

Coaches: finding things

• Tags are chips now, added one at a time with suggestions from tags the team already uses, each with a small x to remove it. The old comma-separated box is gone.
• Search by name as well as by tag, on both the drill library and the plan list. Use either on its own, or both together to narrow.
• A clear banner when a filter is on, telling you which filters are applied and giving you a Clear filters button.

Coaches: copying drills between teams

• Copy one drill from its own page, picking the team to send it to. The page also tells you which teams already have it.
• Or pick several at once. Pick drills to copy opens a page where you choose the team first, filter by name or tag, and tick what you want.
• Nothing gets copied twice, and nothing gets overwritten. Drills the other team already has are marked and can't be ticked, even if they renamed their copy. Each team owns its copy, so editing a drill afterwards doesn't change theirs.
• Copy the whole library at once is still there for the end of a season, and skips anything the other team already has.

Smaller fixes

• There's always a way back to the team list, from the menu and the footer of every page. Signing out of a team returns you there.
• This page. Changes to the site get written up here from now on.
• An Edit plan button at the top of a plan as well as the bottom.
• Adding a drill, or moving one up or down, no longer jumps you to the top of the page.
• Clicking the picture box arms it for a paste instead of opening the file dialog.
• On a plan built from drills the button says Add drills, not Upload plan.

• Practice plans can be tagged, like backcheck or breakout or PP entry, so past plans can be found by tag instead of scrolling back through the season.
• A kinder button for parents. The one that used to read “I'm a parent, just show me the plans” now says “I am a non-player”.

• Team playlist. A coach can link the team's shared Spotify playlist, and it shows as its own green card above the practice plans so players can add their songs before practice.
• The site is called EBHockey Plans, in the page heading and the browser tab. It used to say Practice Plans.
• Teams can be put in order on the front page, rather than sitting in whatever order they were created.

The site went live. Coaches upload a practice plan as a PDF, players and parents open a link and see the videos to watch before practice with the plan readable underneath, and everyone gets in with a single team code.

• Players pick their name from the roster, so a coach can see who has read each plan.
• Each team gets its own colours and logo throughout, with text colours worked out from those colours so they stay readable.
• The PDF reader zooms with the + and − buttons rather than pinching, which used to fight the page and trap the plan.
• A coach can swap a plan's PDF without losing the link already sent out or the record of who has read it.