120 players, one dashboard: How Almere City FC's Nouk got her time back

Before ClubOS, the job came with a quietly maddening ritual: a player would swear they'd completed an exercise, Nouk would check, and there'd be nothing there. "No, you haven't filled it in — can you do it again?" So they'd redo it — except now the answers were different, because they'd already thought it through once. Multiply that by 120 players, and you start to see the problem.

As Mental Performance Coach for Almere City FC's entire youth academy, Nouk is responsible for all 120 youth players across five teams, from Under-14 to Under-19 — running monthly mental workshops, setting exercises, and holding one-on-one conversations with players. It's a role that barely existed at the club two years ago. She started as an intern during her master's in Sport and Performance Psychology, covering two teams; now it's five, likely seven next season as Under-13 and Jong Almere come into scope. The role, in other words, keeps expanding — and so does the volume of players to keep track of.

The copy-paste problem

The heart of Nouk's work is the individual player dossier — a running record of every one-on-one, every exercise, every reflection. "I filled this in in January and this in May. I want to remember how I dealt with mistakes, what match tension actually is." Building those dossiers used to mean hours of manual copy-pasting each week, just to check whether the boys had done their exercises at all. With 120 players, that overhead was enormous — and none of it was the actual work.

Everything in one place

That's what changed. With ClubOS, the dossiers build themselves: every exercise, every response, every workshop lands in one dashboard instead of scattered across files and Google Drive links. She compares it to the learning system you'd get at school or university — you can see the lesson waiting for you, and you complete it before moving to the next. No more hours spent verifying who did what. No more reconstructing records by hand.

The end of "he said, she said"

The old system ran on Google Drive links and email confirmations that didn't always arrive — which is how you end up in a loop of "I filled it in" / "no you didn't." That's gone. Players now get their own automated notifications: seven days out, then a deadline reminder, then a flag if they're late. "It's no longer a case of he-said-she-said. Now it's genuinely clear to everyone what they have to do." Nobody can claim they didn't know where something was, because there's only one place it can be.

Building the solution

Nouk is warm about how the system came together, working mainly with Sven. It started with a brainstorm — what do you actually need, what are you struggling with, what's currently scattered that we could pull together — and grew from there. What she valued most was how fast the loop was: she'd suggest an addition, Sven would ask if she'd considered a certain angle, and they'd adjust on the go. She even pulled the players into the pilot, telling them to flag anything that felt off. Their feedback went straight to Sven, got fixed, and came back to the player — often, she says, resolved within a day. "The next day I could immediately continue with a problem I'd had, that now wasn't a problem anymore."

What the players think

The player response has been the clearest signal. Where the old flow bred confusion and duplicated work, the new one just works: they get a notification when an exercise is due, and they can read back everything they've done. "They all have one single thing to look at." The feedback she's had, she says, has been purely positive — it works, and it's easier.

The bigger picture

Ask what the biggest benefit is, and Nouk doesn't hesitate: time. The hours she used to lose to copy-pasting and chasing reminders now go back into the actual craft — more one-on-one conversations with players, deeper research, more reading to sharpen her workshops. It's a small reframe with a big implication for how ClubOS creates value: the point isn't the dashboard, it's what the dashboard gives back. "I have so much more time now — it's genuinely a relief."

What Nouk hopes for is permanence. Not a tool that gets trialed and quietly abandoned, but one that grows into the club — where a player who starts with it at Under-14 carries it naturally through to Under-19, and it becomes simply how things are done. "It really integrates into the club, so it grows with the club." For a side she describes, in the club's own words, as young, headstrong, and ambitious, that's the fit: figuring out where you're going by discovering it together.

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Thank you to our partners at Almere City FC for sharing these insights with us.

You can watch the interview on YouTube.