Individual development plans are one of those things every club agrees with and almost no club does. Not because coaches do not care, but because writing a considered, personal plan for thirty players, and then rewriting it as the season moves, is simply more evenings than anyone has. Development plans on Framesports exist to remove that arithmetic. Each player gets their own, built from their own match data, and it rebuilds itself. Here is what is in one and how it is chosen.
One focus, chosen from the player’s own matches
A plan does not hand a player a list of twenty things to improve. It picks one focus skill, drawn from the areas we can measure in a match: tackle completion, tackle dominance, carry dominance, breakdown work, ball security, offloading, kicking, passing, lineout throwing and scrummaging.
The choice is made by comparing the player against two references. The first is their own squad, so the bar is the rugby they actually play rather than an abstract standard. The second is other players in their position, because a prop and a full back should not be measured against the same list of responsibilities.
Sometimes the focus is a strength, not a weakness
This is the part that surprises people. A plan does not only look for what is going badly. If a player is doing something genuinely well, it will sometimes pick that instead, and the plan becomes about sharpening a weapon rather than patching a hole.
That is a deliberate choice about how people improve. A season of being told what you are bad at is a good way to produce a player who dreads opening the app. Alternating between fixing and sharpening keeps the thing readable, and it is closer to how good coaches actually talk.
It explains itself in plain language
Every plan says why this skill and why now, in a sentence a sixteen-year-old can read: where their number sits, what the squad’s number is, and why that particular skill matters for the position they play. If a player has not played enough rugby for us to be confident, the plan says so rather than inventing a verdict, and leans on what the position demands until there is enough match data to be specific.
That transparency is doing real work. Advice a player understands the reason for is advice they might follow. Advice from a black box gets ignored, and it deserves to be.
Goals with a number, and drills with a reason
Under the focus sit two or three playing goals, each with a starting value and a target, so improvement is a thing you can check rather than a thing you feel. Alongside them come drills, each with sets, reps, a video to watch, and a line explaining what it is meant to fix. Not a generic library to browse: a short, specific set chosen for this player and this focus.
The drills refresh, so a player who has been working at the same thing for a fortnight gets new ways at it rather than the same three videos forever.
It rebuilds itself every week, and the player is told
A plan is not a document somebody has to remember to update. It regenerates on a weekly rhythm as new matches come in, and the player is notified when a new one lands. That cadence is the whole point: little and often is what changes behaviour, and a plan that arrives on its own is a plan that survives past March.
For the coach, the maths finally works. Thirty players get thirty personal plans, refreshed all season, for none of the evenings it would otherwise cost. That is time that goes back into the conversations that actually develop people.
Where it fits for the player
Development plans sit alongside the rest of a player’s own view of their rugby: their stats, their clips, and the highlights reel and CV they can build from them. For a player chasing selection or a place at the next level, the plan is the part that turns “I want to get better” into something with a number on it and a drill attached. For everyone else, it is the reason to open the app on a Tuesday.
If you want the wider view of how data feeds individual improvement, we have written about using AI for rugby player development more generally.
Hero photo: Joelflorentinpereira, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
