A drawing is a diagram of an exercise on a pitch: players, cones, balls and arrows placed where you want them, saved with the exercise so anyone who opens it sees the shape rather than reading a paragraph about it. It can also animate, so a run or a rotation plays rather than being described.
This is the drawing tool in the training library. Video analysis has a separate one for annotating footage — see Create animations with the video analytics drawing tool.
Start a drawing
Navigate to Development > Training library
To create a new exercise: click the Add content, then Exercise
To edit an existing exercise, find it on the Training library page, click it, then click Edit
Towards the bottom of the exercise page, you will find the Drawings section.
Click Create drawing. You can create one or multiple drawings: one exercise can hold several.
Choose a background in the Select background window. You need to pick one to continue.
You can change the background later without losing anything you have drawn: on the Exercise / Edit drawing screen, open the Settings tab in the top right corner and click Select background.
Seeing the wrong sport in the drawing tool? Read a note on sports below.
How to use tools
The tools are on the left, in three groups:
Shapes: circles, rectangles, triangles, polygons, lines, arrows, freehand lines and text boxes. Pick a colour first if you want one. Many shapes also come in a dashed version.
Equipment: cones, poles, balls, goals, nets and other gear for your sport.
Player: players, and for most sports jerseys, in eight colours. Turn on Number new players to give each new player or jersey the next number automatically, counting from 1 for each colour.
Click a tool, then click on the canvas to place it. Lines, arrows and polygons take one click per point, and clicking an existing point finishes them. Freehand lines are drawn by dragging.
When you have a tool selected, it will be highlighted with a blue outline on the left sidebar, and with a blue banner at the top of the screen.
With no tool active, you can click an existing object on the canvas to select it, and the Preferences panel opens on the right, where you can change things like colour, line width, dashes, player text and whether a player shows its direction.
Animate it
The editor has two tabs, Steps and Settings. On Steps, use Add step to add a frame. The new step starts as a copy of the last one, so you only move what changes. Anything that exists in both steps travels between the two positions when the drawing plays, so a run needs two steps rather than an arrow.
Use the icons on a step to duplicate it (the copy goes right after it) or delete it. You cannot reorder steps.
Objects, their colours and their sizes are shared by every step. Only position, rotation and visibility change from step to step.
To hide an object in one step, expand the list of objects on the step, then use the eye icon to hide an object in just that step.
Deleting an object removes it from every step.
The selected step shows how many objects the drawing holds.
Click Preview at the top to play the animation. Use the arrows at the top of the screen to move between steps, and the play button to run through them once. Playback stops at the last step, and pressing play again starts over.
Note: When there is more than one step, the Settings tab has a slider for the time per step. It only changes how the drawing plays while you are editing. Everyone who opens the exercise later sees it play at the same default pace.
Work with several objects at once
Hold Shift and click to select more than one object, use the box selector by clicking and dragging the mouse, or press Ctrl/Cmd + A to select everything. With several objects selected you can:
Move, resize and rotate them together.
Change shared settings, such as colour, for all of them in one go. Only settings that every selected object has are shown.
Align them left, center, right, top, middle or bottom.
Distribute them evenly, horizontally or vertically. This needs three or more objects.
Duplicate or Delete them.
Layers and overlap
When objects overlap, the Steps tab shows a list of everything on the canvas, topmost first. Click a row to select that object, drag rows to reorder them, or use the arrows on each row to move an object up or down, to the top or to the bottom. Turn on Keep on top in an object's preferences to pin it above everything that is not pinned.
Shortcuts
Ctrl/Cmd + Z | Undo |
Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + Z or Ctrl/Cmd + Y | Redo |
Ctrl/Cmd + C, V, D | Copy, paste, duplicate |
Ctrl/Cmd + A | Select all |
Arrow keys | Nudge the selected objects a little. Hold Shift to nudge by the grid size. |
Delete or Backspace | Delete the selected objects |
Esc | Put down the current tool or deselect |
Alt or Space (hold) | Pan around when you are zoomed in |
Shapes also have single-key shortcuts, shown on the tool: for example 1 for a circle, 3 for a rectangle, 9 for a line, F for freehand and T for text.
Grid, zoom and clean-up
Use the - and + buttons at the top of the screen, or your mouse wheel or trackpad, to zoom between 50% and 400%. Click the percentage to jump back to 100%. In the Settings tab you can turn grid snapping on or off, show the grid and change its size. Clear drawing removes everything and starts over.
Save it and use it
Click Save and add to exercise at the top of the editor.
Then make sure you Save the exercise itself. Until you do, the drawing is not stored. If you remove a drawing, it is only removed once the exercise is saved.
If you leave the editor with the back arrow, you are asked to confirm so you do not lose your changes.
The first drawing you save becomes the exercise thumbnail automatically. To use a different drawing as the exercise thumbnail, open the ... menu on it and choose Set as exercise thumbnail. This uses the step you are currently looking at, and it is the fastest way to recognise an exercise in a long library list.
That same menu also lets you Edit, Duplicate, Export image (a PNG you can drop into a document or a chat) or Remove a drawing.
A note on sports
The background, icons and equipment available in the drawing tool are set by the Group. For example, if your club has both football and ice hockey teams, coaches inside the football group will see a pitch, a goal and a football when they create drawings, and coaches in the hockey group will see a rink, a puck and hockey sticks. You cannot mix them.
If you're a member of many groups with different sports, you can swap groups (in the top left corner of the app) to change which sport you can draw. This ensures drawings are always created in the relevant group.
When you select a group higher in the hierarchy that has sub-groups containing more than one sport, for example the club's top-level group that holds football, tennis and ice hockey, the default sport in the drawing tool is football (soccer) ⚽️
Related note: On the Create exercise / Edit exercise screen, inside Additional information, the Sport menu there is for filtering only, and does not change the drawing tool's background or icons. For example, a coach or admin who is part of a parent group that contains multiple sports can see the entire club's training library of exercises, then filter by sport to only see ice hockey. If you're on a sub-group, the filter for the group's default sport is automatically applied.
