DrillGrid Boxing started with a very simple problem.
A group of us were working towards our Level One coaching qualification, making the move from helping out around a boxing club to becoming coaches in our own right. And one of the things that quickly became obvious was just how useful it was to have good drills and decent lesson plans ready to go.
Because coaching does not happen in a vacuum.
You can have a full day at work, deal with everything else life throws at you, and then arrive at the boxing club in the evening expected to deliver a useful, engaging session. Turning up without anything prepared makes that job considerably harder.
At the same time, boxing clubs are full of experienced coaches with enormous amounts of knowledge. They have drills they have used for years, ways of teaching particular skills, combinations, progressions and little coaching ideas that have been developed over thousands of hours in the gym.
The problem is that much of that knowledge exists inside coaches' heads.
The rest is scattered everywhere.
You might find a useful drill buried in a YouTube video. Another might appear on TikTok. Someone might show you something during a session. You make a mental note of it, forget half of it, and six months later try to remember exactly how it worked.
What seemed to be missing was a central place for boxing coaches to collect those ideas.
A place where you could find drills, save them, share them and then actually use them when planning a session.
That was the original idea behind DrillGrid.
It was never supposed to become some grand technology project. In fact, the first version was considerably less ambitious. I started putting together a small ebook that could be shared between a few of us who were learning to coach.
There was only one problem.
I couldn't get the bloody jump links to work properly.
And that small frustration changed the whole direction of the project.
Rather than trying to force the idea into an ebook, I started building what became DrillGrid Boxing: a platform where drills could live in one place, new drills could continually be added, and coaches could quickly put together lesson plans without needing to carry folders of notes around with them.
Something useful that could sit in your pocket.
Initially, that was really all it was intended to be. A tool to help a few coaches solve a problem we were having ourselves.
But as the idea developed, it became obvious that DrillGrid could be useful to far more people.
And it could become more than a drill library.
Boxing has an enormous community of coaches, clubs and volunteers, but much of the communication between them now takes place through social media platforms. Those platforms can obviously be useful, but what you see is increasingly determined by algorithms deciding what they think will keep you scrolling.
DrillGrid is deliberately different.
It is not built around an algorithm deciding what you should see.
It is built around coaches, clubs and the boxing community itself. Posts can be liked and suggested, information can be filtered, and timelines can remain chronological. The aim is straightforward: make useful boxing information easier to find and make it easier for people within the sport to connect with one another.
Most importantly, the core platform is free.
You can add drills.
You can share drills.
You can save drills.
You can build lesson plans.
You can connect with other coaches.
And you can post notices on the community notice board.
That ability to share knowledge is an essential part of what DrillGrid is supposed to be, which is why those core features will remain free.
I genuinely don't know what DrillGrid Boxing will become.
Maybe thousands of coaches will eventually find it useful. Maybe it will remain something used by a much smaller group of people. Either outcome is fine.
If it helps a handful of coaches arrive at the gym better prepared, discover a new drill, deliver a more engaging session or learn something from another coach, then it has already done the job it was originally created to do.
But there is plenty more planned.
Over time, DrillGrid will feature articles from experienced coaches sharing their knowledge and ideas. More tools and features will be added to the platform, and paid functionality will eventually be introduced for areas such as boxing matchmaking.
The important distinction is that the foundations of DrillGrid will remain accessible.
The drill library, lesson planning tools and community notice board will always be free to use.
DrillGrid Boxing is still evolving. In many ways, we are building it in exactly the same way the original idea started: by identifying things that would genuinely be useful to coaches and trying to create them.
So have a look around.
Save a few drills. Add one of your own. Build a session. Put something on the notice board. Connect with another coach.
And if DrillGrid makes your next night in the gym even slightly easier or your next boxing session slightly better, then it is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Welcome to DrillGrid Boxing.
Andrew