About PlayerRX
PlayerRX started in a rented office above a chip shop in Manchester. Four developers, one whiteboard, and a question that none of them could shake: why is there nothing built properly for coaches?
Not a question they'd read in a trade publication. A question from watching the people around them — coaches, trainers, academy staff — holding entire development ecosystems together with spreadsheets, group chats, and memory. Serious professionals running serious programmes on tools designed for someone else's problem.
The team had spent a collective decade building software for industries they didn't care about. Finance. Logistics. HR. They were good at it. But they'd had enough of solving the wrong problems well. So in 2023 they started mapping the right ones.
Six months of research. Hundreds of conversations with coaches at every level — private trainers, academy staff, college coaches. The same thing kept coming back. Individual development plans. Not as a concept — coaches had been running informal IDPs for decades. But as a living system. Something a player could access. Something that moved with them. Something the coach could build on, session by session, season by season.
The platform took shape. And then they hit a wall.
They could build the infrastructure. They could get the UX right. But they needed someone who had actually been doing this — properly, at the highest level, for long enough that the methodology had been tested against real careers — to make sure what they were building matched how elite development actually worked.
So they went looking.
The search
They built a list. Coaches with serious, documented development track records. Not coaches who'd had one player make it — coaches with a pattern. Longevity. Players who arrived at one level and left at another, consistently, over years. And specifically: coaches who were already running their own version of an individual development plan, even if they were doing it in a notebook or a Google Doc or their own head.
David Copeland-Smith came up early. He kept coming up.
Beast Mode Soccer. Two decades on the training pitch. Professional players across the NWSL, the WSL, the US national programme. Not one or two who got lucky — a documented, repeatable development pathway with a body of work behind it.
The team didn't reach out straight away. They did the work first.
They spoke to twelve former players who had trained under David. Not handpicked. Players they sourced independently, from different periods of his career, at different stages of theirs. The consistency was striking. The same words kept appearing across different conversations, different people, different years. Demanding. Detail-oriented. Genuinely invested. Ahead of what anyone else around them was doing.
One thing in particular kept surfacing. Multiple players mentioned that David had been running structured individual development plans long before the term became fashionable. Not just identifying weaknesses. Building a whole framework around targeted improvement — with timelines, milestones, honest feedback, and a clear line between where a player was and where the work was aimed at taking them. He'd been doing it for over twenty years. By hand. With whatever tools were available.
The choice was clear.
The partnership
The first conversation lasted three hours.
David didn't want a tool. He wanted the infrastructure he'd never had — the system that would let every trainer who took their craft seriously run their operation the way it deserved to be run. He pushed back on anything that felt like a nice-to-have. He added things the team hadn't considered. He told them exactly where coaches would abandon the platform if they got the details wrong.
It was the most useful product conversation any of them had ever had.
He wasn't there to consult. He was there to build something that worked. His players had been the test case for two decades. Every feature in PlayerRX traces back to a real problem he had solved, by hand, on a real pitch, with a real player.
Six months later, PlayerRX was live. The first digital IDP platform built specifically for private sports trainers — built from the inside out, by people who understood what the infrastructure needed to hold.
Twenty years of methodology. Finally, somewhere to put it.
The people who built the platform David couldn't find.
Tom Harwick
Co-founder · Technical Lead
Sunday league centre-back. Spent a decade building SaaS tools for industries he didn't care about — insurance, logistics, HR. Good at it. Hated it. Coaching his nephew's under-12 side on weekends was the only hour of the week that felt real. The spreadsheet he built to track the kids' development became the seed of everything.
Anya Vasquez
Co-founder · Product
Played collegiate midfield until her knee gave out at 20. Retrained in product design, spent years building sports software that coaches adopted for a month and then abandoned. She kept asking why. The answer was always the same: the wrong people were defining the problems. PlayerRX was the first time she worked backwards from someone who actually knew.
Dev Patel
Engineering
Self-taught. Grew up in Leicester watching his older brother grind through the semi-pro circuit. Built a habit tracker for footballers as a weekend project — it quietly became the architecture under PlayerRX's entire badge and progress system. Tom found it on GitHub and sent a message the same night.
Rosa Lieber
Design
Works from a flat in Vienna. Has never played football in her life and isn't particularly interested in starting. What she is interested in is the space between effort and evidence — how you make someone's development feel real when it's all data. Somehow she gets the training pitch better than most people who've stood on one.
The partner
Founder of Beast Mode Soccer. Over 20 years on the training pitch — from youth players finding their feet to professionals competing at the highest level of the women's game. Alex Morgan. Rachel Daly. Ali Riley. Kelley O'Hara. Players who went to the NWSL, the WSL, the World Cup. He was there for all of it.
He'd been running individual development plans long before the concept had a name. Goals, target areas, milestones, honest feedback — a whole framework built up over two decades of figuring out what actually moved players forward. The infrastructure was always in his head, or on paper. PlayerRX gave it somewhere to live.
If you're using this platform, you're using his methodology.
David Copeland-Smith — Founder, Beast Mode Soccer
One plan. Everything included. No feature tiers. No setup call required.
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