Frequently Asked Questions

Spatrian is a homeschool Physical Education programme built around soccer. It gives you a 36-week standards-aligned curriculum, an Audio Coach that runs the session out loud, a weekly match that scores itself, a fitness combine you run at home, and the paperwork — hours, grades, portfolio, transcript — written as a by-product of doing the work rather than as a second chore.

It is built for a parent with no coaching background. You are never asked to invent a session, and you are never asked to remember to write anything down afterwards.

• Homeschool parents — The primary users. No coaching background needed.
• Homeschool co-ops — Groups of families who meet weekly for PE, sharing a roster, attendance and group goals while each family keeps its own records.
• Umbrella schools — Schools overseeing homeschool families that need documented PE programs.
• Part-time homeschoolers — Even club soccer players can use Spatrian for academic PE documentation.

Three age bands, covering ages 13 to 18:

Band	Ages	Grades	Focus
U14	13–14	7th–8th	Tactical awareness, decision-making and performance analysis
U16	15–16	9th–10th	Position-specific play, conditioning and self-assessment
U18	17–18	11th–12th	Independent training design, leadership and a capstone project

The younger bands — U6, U8, U10 and U12 — are in development and not yet available. There is material for them, but it has not been finished to the standard the older three have, so it is not offered and not priced. We name them rather than give a date.

Absolutely not. Every lesson includes a Parent Teaching Guide with:

• Exact setup instructions with diagrams
• Word-for-word coaching phrases to say
• Visual cues showing correct technique
• Common mistakes and specific fixes
• Difficulty adjustments for different ability levels
• Sibling variations for mixed-age groups

If you can read instructions and kick a ball, you can teach with Spatrian.

Minimal equipment:

• Essential: 1 soccer ball per child (size 3/4/5 by age), 6–10 cones or markers, open space of at least 10m × 10m
• Optional: Pop-up goals or wall, training bibs, stopwatch
• Advanced (U14+): Larger field space, multiple players for tactical work

Every lesson lists specific requirements and alternatives. You'll never be stuck because you don't have professional equipment.

Not sure your space is big enough? Enter your measurements on the space & equipment page and it counts how many drills fit.

Lessons run 40–60 minutes depending on the session type. Each one has warm-up, main activities, game application and cool-down segments, and the Audio Coach can read the whole thing aloud so you can watch your child instead of a screen.

The weekly Season match is a separate forty minutes, if you choose to play one.

A 36-week programme, layered:

1. Age bands (3) — U14, U16 and U18
2. Units (9 per band) — thematic blocks such as "Technical Excellence", "Pressing Systems", "Game Management" or "Leadership & Captaincy"
3. Lessons (4–5 per unit) — progressive sessions: introduction → development → application → assessment
4. Activities (3–5 per lesson) — individual drills and games with step-by-step instructions

Total: 27 units, 120 lessons and over 480 activity descriptions across the three bands.

These are counted from the curriculum itself rather than typed into a page — the homepage reads the same figures from a public endpoint, so the site cannot advertise a lesson count the product does not have.

Yes — every lesson maps to:

• State PE Standards — Motor skills, personal fitness, responsible behavior, safety principles
• FIFA Grassroots Pillars — Fun, Technical, Tactical, Physical

Each lesson explicitly lists which standards it satisfies, making compliance documentation straightforward.

Within a unit: Lessons build on each other (1→2→3→4), so sequential is best.

Between units: Flexible. Choose units based on your child's interests or time of year.

Yes, in three places, because three different things need showing:

• Skill demos — a named technique such as a Cruyff turn, in the lesson's Resources tab.
• Lesson videos — attached to a specific lesson, and shown on the lesson page while you run it.
• Drill videos — attached to a training drill, on the parent training page.

Any of them may be a video Spatrian filmed itself or a link to a good one on YouTube. Where we made the file, it plays in the app without leaving for a video site, and without whatever that site decides to recommend next.

One match a week, played in your own backyard. Five challenges, about forty minutes, scored against a target for your child's age band, and a result that goes on a league table that keeps itself. Settling the match takes another five minutes, and then next week's match is revealed.

It is the part a curriculum cannot give you: a reason to come back on a particular day. There is a full walk-through on the Season page.

The app does, from your child's own record — a combine result that came in below the typical range, a corrective exercise you still have open, whatever went worst last week, plus whatever is next in the rotation. Every challenge tells you why it is in this week's match, so you can judge whether it chose well.

A match spans technical, physical and decision work rather than five variations of the same thing, and the rotation reaches all thirteen challenges over a term. If growth tracking says your child is in a growth spurt, the most demanding physical challenge comes out that week.

Every challenge has a target for your child's age band. Hitting it exactly is worth 100 points; beating it scores more. The match score is the average across the challenges you actually played.

Those targets are ours. They are set so a child has something to beat — they are not percentiles and not published norms, and no page in the product presents them as either. If you want your child measured against published reference data, that is the Home Combine's job, and it cites its sources.

Yes. Every match you settle writes its minutes to your attendance record as documented instruction — the same record your lessons write to, feeding the same hours total, the same portfolio and the same transcript. There is no second place to log it and nothing to re-enter.

Completed matches print in your portfolio as a Season Record: each week's date, target, score, result, minutes and your own note, plus your child's best mark on every challenge. A season record carries no grade and no credits — it is evidence of instruction, not an academic assessment. The transcript is still the document that does that job.

A challenge you skip is left out of the average rather than counted as zero, and nothing is ever filled in from a previous week to make a match look complete. An unfinished match is kept with whatever you played rather than deleted; come back the same day and it offers to pick up where you stopped.

The family head-to-head compares each child against their own target, which differs by age band and by how far up the ladder they have climbed. The winner is whoever beat theirs by most, so a thirteen-year-old having a good week can beat an older sibling having an ordinary one — and both of them can see why.

The opponent in an ordinary match is a fixed rung on a ladder, never another family's child. Spatrian does not rank children against each other and deliberately runs no leaderboard, here or anywhere else in the product.

The Audio Coach is Coach Spatrian out loud — the same coach the chat button opens, running the drill on the clock instead of answering questions.

You can hear it before you sign up — there is a free 60-second sample on the home page, in both registers.

Kid mode is spoken to your child, loud enough to carry across a backyard. Caddie mode is spoken quietly to you through one earbud, so you can pass on the coaching in your own words. A few drills also have a two-voice duo track.

Yes, per child, in Child Settings. You can pick the voice from a catalogue, set the speaking rate, and set the cue density to full, standard or light if your child finds a lot of talking distracting.

Every spoken line is also printed on screen, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing student follows exactly the same session.

Yes. Download a drill's audio before you leave the house and it plays in a park with no bars. If a voice recording has not been made for a particular line yet, the player falls back to your device's own voice and tells you it is doing so, rather than going silent.

No — and that is deliberate. Coach Spatrian can propose a session it thinks is worth recording, but it stops there. Nothing reaches your compliance log or your child's transcript until you tap the button to confirm it.

A number a model asserted should not walk by itself into a document you may hand to your state. Finishing a drill on the Audio Coach does log its minutes — but that is you finishing a real session, not an AI's estimate.

Once you are signed in, it reads your child's record from your account: their age band, your home state's PE requirement, and the hours logged so far. It does not ask you to retype any of that, and it cannot be talked into using different figures.

It also only recommends drills that exist in your curriculum, so “try this one next” is always something you can press play on. If your student chats with it directly, you can read the whole conversation from Coach Conversations in the parent menu.

Decision training for a child with nobody to play against. Your child dribbles in a small square and the app calls a direction, a numbered or coloured cone, or an action, at a moment they cannot predict. They have to find it and do it before the next call lands; you watch and tap whether they got there.

There are four kinds of round — straight, opposite (where the call is the thing to resist), double, and delayed (do the previous call). The order and timing are drawn fresh each level, so nobody can learn the pattern. Full detail on the Scan & React page.

Twelve levels. Each calls faster than the last and adds more things to choose between — five seconds apart and two options at level 1, just over two seconds and ten options at level 12. Get three quarters of a level right and it moves up; miss two levels in a row and it stops there, the same shape as the shuttle run in the Home Combine.

The score is the highest level cleared, never the highest attempted.

No, and the app says so. What it records is the gap between the call and your tap, so your own reaction is inside every reading. That is genuinely useful for watching one month against the next, and it is never printed beside the figures sports science publishes for athletes, because it is not the same measurement.

Yes. An unexpected shout is exactly what a sensory accommodation exists to prevent, so when a child's plan says so the calls arrive on a steady announced beat instead. They know one is coming and still have to work out what it is: the thinking survives, only the ambush goes.

It also loses nothing when the running is removed — your child can point at the cone or call it out instead of dribbling to it, and every level stays exactly as long and as hard.

A standardised eight-test fitness battery you run at home, about forty minutes, guided one test at a time with spoken cues and a countdown and one number to type. Most families run it about four times a year.

The tests are sit-and-reach, countermovement jump, standing broad jump, a 20 m sprint, the agility T-test, a cone weave with the ball, a plank hold and the 20 m shuttle run. Results carry into the portfolio PDF with their citations attached, and can feed an optional fitness component in the grade.

No. The app runs the protocol; a parent with a tape measure and a phone timer takes the measurement and types it in. That was a decision, not a shortcut — measuring from a clip would mean uploading a video per test, needing a signal in a field, and would be reliable for only two of the eight tests anyway.

A clip can be attached to a result as portfolio evidence. It is never the measurement.

Four of the eight tests are scored against peer-reviewed normative studies of youth fitness, reproduced as published. The other four have no widely published youth reference we could reproduce faithfully, so they are scored against Spatrian's own working scale and labelled provisional everywhere they appear — on the public checker, in the app, and with an asterisk in the portfolio PDF.

We say every band cites its source rather than that results are scored against national standards, because the second would be true of only half of them. A result is a position on a published population curve, never a placement against other Spatrian families.

It does not compute body composition and does not collect height or weight for that purpose. Feedback about body composition does measurable harm in exactly this age group, so the product does not do it.

Growth tracking is a separate, parent-only view. It takes optional measurements to estimate where a child is in their growth spurt, and what it changes is the training: weekly load caps scale down around peak growth, and the Season drops its most demanding physical challenge that week. The load moves, instead of a note telling you to watch out.

Yes — the free fitness-test checker scores one measurement against the same reference tables the app uses, with the study printed underneath it. It has no account, no identity and stores nothing on our side; anything you save is kept in your own browser so you can see the change at the next re-test.

Yes. Our curriculum is standards-aligned and generates all required documentation. Use our State Compliance Checker to see your specific state's PE requirements and how Spatrian satisfies them.

• Automatic hour logging with Carnegie unit credit calculations
• Rubric-scored assessments on a 4-point scale
• Formal PE transcripts with course codes and GPA
• Portfolio exports with video evidence links
• A Season Record — every match's date, target, score, result and minutes, with your own note beside it
• A Home Combine fitness section, with the reference study cited under each band
• AI-drafted progress narratives, which you edit and confirm before anything is saved
• State-specific compliance checklists, deadlines and required-document lists
• Attendance records and session logs

All 50 states, DC and four US territories — 55 jurisdictions. Every one has its regulatory summary, its checklist of what a family actually has to do, and its hours-per-credit figure. For 34 of them we have also researched the dated reporting deadlines and the required-document list; the rest carry the summary without a deadline schedule, and the page says which of the two you are reading rather than implying completeness.

Where each figure comes from. 12 states name the statute they rest on. Where a person has checked a figure against that statute we say so on the figure itself, and you can read the passage it came from. Where nobody has checked it yet, the figure is marked baseline — unchecked: it comes from our reviewed baseline table rather than from someone reading the law that day. Where we hold no source at all, it says so. We would rather show you a gap than a number you cannot place.

We do not fill an unresearched state with a plausible default. If we have not researched your state's hour requirement, the app says “not researched” and draws no progress bar against an invented target.

All of it comes from one registry the public pages and the app both read, so the credit figure you see before you subscribe is the one the product uses afterwards. Start with the State Compliance Checker or the state-by-state checklist. This is a homeschool PE reference, not legal advice.

Yes. An issued transcript or season record carries a fingerprint registered on our public verification page. Anyone holding your printed copy — an umbrella school, a district evaluator — can type it in and confirm that Spatrian produced exactly that document, without an account and without seeing anything else about your family.

Upload a video of your child's practice or game and our AI analyzes their movement, technique, positioning, and decision-making. You receive personalized feedback and coaching tips — like having a professional coach review the footage.

It depends on the plan: 30 minutes a month on Explorer and Starter, 60 on Family, 120 on Family+ and 180 on Co-op. Minutes reset on the 1st of each month, and they are only charged when an analysis actually succeeds.

We accept MP4, MOV, and AVI files. For best results, record in landscape mode (horizontal) with your phone mounted or held steady. A basic phone camera is all you need — no special equipment required.

Free monthly minutes do not roll over — they reset each month. Purchased token packs never expire and carry forward until used.

Each activity uses a 4-point rubric scale:

• 1 — Beginning: Still learning the basics
• 2 — Developing: Shows understanding with inconsistency
• 3 — Proficient: Demonstrates the skill reliably
• 4 — Exemplary: Performs with confidence and creativity

Parents observe and rate during lessons using clear criteria provided for each activity. No coaching expertise required — just follow the rubric descriptions.

Yes. Your dashboard shows:

• Total PE hours logged toward the annual goal, in Carnegie units for your state
• Activity completion grid (GitHub-style heatmap)
• Current streak and session insights
• Unit-by-unit progress bars
• Milestone achievements (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)
• Recent completions and grade history
• The Season table — played, won, drawn, lost, points and recent form
• Combine results trended against your child's own earlier attempts, and the Scan & React level reached

Every comparison in the product is your child against their own earlier record.

Yes — Spatrian generates formal PE transcripts with course codes, GPA calculations and Carnegie unit credits, formatted to be read by umbrella schools, colleges and state education departments. Each issued transcript carries a fingerprint the recipient can check on our verification page.

Students earn digital badges for completing lessons, mastering skills, maintaining streaks, and hitting milestones. These make learning fun and visible — students can see their growing collection of achievements and parents can share them with co-ops or portfolios.

Spatrian works in any modern web browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge — on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. No app download required. For the best outdoor teaching experience, we recommend using a tablet or phone you can carry to the field.

The parts you do outdoors are built for a field with no bars. Download a drill's Audio Coach track before you leave and it plays with no signal; Scan & React writes every line it can say in advance and downloads them; a Season match needs nothing downloaded and nothing printed.

Browsing the curriculum, saving a rubric score and syncing your records still need a connection — so the usual pattern is to open the session at the table, run it in the yard, and let it save when you come back in.

Yes. Starter covers one child, Family covers up to 4, and Family+ covers up to 10. Each child has their own progress tracking, age-appropriate curriculum, badges, and assessment history — all managed under one parent account. A plan covers one family; co-ops are a separate plan for groups of families.

Your parent dashboard shows all enrolled children. Simply select the child you want to view from the player selector at the top of the curriculum page. Each child's progress, assessments, and badges are tracked independently.

On the sign-in page, click "Forgot password?" and enter your email address. You'll receive a reset link within a few minutes. If you don't see it, check your spam folder or contact support.

Six tools, all free and none of them asking you to sign up:

• State Compliance Checker — your state's PE requirement and what satisfies it.
• state-by-state checklist — the steps, deadlines and documents for your state, with tick-boxes.
• PE Credit Calculator — when your child earns a half or a full credit, at your pace.
• Space & equipment check — enter your yard's measurements and see how many drills fit.
• Fitness test percentiles — one measurement scored against a published reference curve.
• Document verification — confirm a printed Spatrian document is genuine.

No — nothing reaches a server. The fitness checker is scored by a request that carries no identity and writes no record. Where a tool remembers something between visits — your fitness history, your ticked checklist, the hours already logged in the credit calculator — it is kept in your own browser and goes no further. Clearing your browser data clears it.

All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We don't use advertising cookies or sell data. Student data is retained only while your account is active, and everything is deleted 12 months after cancellation.

Spatrian is designed as a parent-guided program. U14 students can follow lesson guides fairly independently, while U16–U18 students can work almost entirely on their own. Parent observation is still recommended for accurate rubric assessments and compliance documentation.