Rinkside v1.2 — The Practice Planner Is Here

Building a practice starts with slots — timed blocks that represent each segment of your session. Add a warm-up, a skating drill, a shooting drill, a small-sided game, a cool-down. Assign a duration to each slot, attach a drill from the library or leave it as a free-form segment, and watch the total time add up at the top. The plan shows you your time breakdown at a glance: total minutes, total slots, and how many drills you've attached. Set the age group for your team and Rinkside pre-populates the Gamesheet category so everything is organized correctly from the start. Need to tweak it later? Hit Edit from the plan detail view and adjust anything — duration, drill, order — without starting over.

Every drill in Rinkside comes from the Hockey Canada Drill Hub — a library of over 700 drills organized by category, age group, and skill focus. Each drill includes a full rink diagram showing player positioning and movement, step-by-step coaching cues, a category tag (Skating, Shooting, Defence, and more), and a photo from the source. When you're building a plan, the Drill Picker lets you browse and search the full library to find exactly what fits your slot. Not sure if a drill is right for the age group? Long-press any drill in the picker for a full preview — diagram, steps, and all — before you commit.

All your saved plans live in the Practice Planner tab — a scrollable list showing each plan's name, team, total time, and slot count at a glance. Tap any plan to open its detail view: the full slot breakdown, attached drills, timing, and a one-tap button to start the run. Your plans persist between sessions, so the work you put in on Sunday night is ready to go Monday morning without rebuilding anything.

Tap Run on any plan and Rinkside takes over as your on-ice timekeeper. Run Mode walks through your plan one slot at a time, showing the current drill name, its step-by-step coaching cues, and a live countdown timer counting down to zero. When time's up, Rinkside fires an alarm and an intense haptic pulse so you feel it through your gloves — then you tap to advance to the next drill. No more glancing at a clock, no more losing track of where you are in the plan. A Stop Alarm button appears the moment the alarm fires so you can silence it cleanly before moving on.

When a practice run is active, Rinkside puts a Live Activity on your lock screen showing the current drill name and the time remaining — so you can check the clock without unlocking your phone or taking your eyes off the ice for more than a second. On iPhone 14 Pro and later, the active timer also appears in the Dynamic Island, shrinking down to a persistent pill at the top of the screen so the information is always a glance away, even when you're in a different app. The session stays live until you end it, and the lock screen widget updates in real time as each drill counts down.

When you open the Practice Planner, an AI-powered banner at the top of the screen surfaces a suggested focus area for your next session — based on your team's age group, recent practice history, and gaps in what you've been covering. It's not a prescription; it's a nudge. Something to react to when you sit down to plan. Dismiss it, take it, or use it as a starting point for the AI generation path below.

The most powerful addition in v1.2: tell Rinkside what kind of practice you want, and Apple Intelligence builds the whole plan for you. Pick a focus area, set a duration, and the AI assembles a complete practice plan from the drill library — selecting drills that match your team's age group, fitting them to the time available, building the slots, and attaching the drills. It avoids duplicates, names the plan automatically if you leave the title blank, and delivers something ready to run in seconds. You can edit the generated plan just like any other, so the AI output is always a starting point you control — not a black box you're stuck with.

In the practice plan detail view, each attached drill now shows its rink diagram image inline. Tap a diagram to open it full-screen — the drill steps appear alongside the image so you can review the full play before stepping on the ice. Drill videos from Hockey Canada are also playable directly inside the detail view for drills that have them. Everything you need to brief your staff or remind yourself of a drill is in one place, without leaving the app.

After a session wraps, Rinkside prompts you to rate the drills you ran. A quick thumbs up or down on each drill takes ten seconds and builds a personal record of what actually worked on the ice with your group. Over a season, those ratings become useful — a signal that certain drills land well with your age group and others don't, without having to rely on memory. It's the kind of feedback loop that makes the next plan better than the last.

Sometimes the best way to explain a drill is to draw it. The Whiteboard gives you a clean rink diagram and a freehand drawing tool — sketch out positioning, movement, or plays with your finger, right on the ice surface. It's built for on-ice 1-on-1 coaching moments: when a player doesn't quite have the picture in their head, you pull up the whiteboard and draw it for them. No prep required. Just open it and draw.

Export any practice plan as a beautifully formatted image — a clean, branded card showing the plan name, team, age group, and every drill slot with its timing. Share it with an assistant coach before the session, post it to your team group chat, or keep it as a record of what you ran. The export card is generated on device and shared through the standard iOS share sheet, so it goes wherever your content already goes.