Trac quick start — from sign-up to your first live match

The video shows the same flow this post walks through. If you'd rather skim and tick steps off as you go, read on — the written version is what most coaches actually end up referring back to.

1. Create the account and verify

Sign up on the Trac website with your email. The verification email arrives in a minute or so — click the link and you're in. You'll land straight on the onboarding step the first time you log in. That's where the free trial actually starts.

2. Create your team

On onboarding, hit Create a new team. Put in the basics — team name, age group, kit colours. There's also a field for what parents pay for subs. Don't overthink that one, you can change it later.

Dead easy. Two minutes.

3. Add your squad

Hit Manage squad from the team page. This is the longest step, honestly — it's just typing players in one at a time. Name, position, date of birth.

If you don't set a date of birth, Trac assumes the player is a minor and locks down anything externally visible behind parent consent (match reports, leaderboards shared outside the squad, etc.). That's the law more than it is Trac. Just put the DOB in.

4. Add your first fixture

Three ways to add fixtures:

• Bulk upload from the FA — if your county FA exports a fixture list, paste it in and Trac parses the lot. There's a separate post on this in the playbook.
• Add one at a time — fine for cup runs, friendlies, or if you only know fixtures one or two weeks ahead.
• Manual entry — for the rare one-offs where the league hasn't posted anything yet.

For one fixture: opponent, kit colours (so you know what your lot are wearing), kick-off time, and the stadium name. Filling in the venue name properly is worth the extra ten seconds — it shows up on the parent availability message later.

5. Send availability to parents

From the fixture page, hit Send availability request. Trac generates a WhatsApp message you can post straight into your team group. Parents click the link and mark their kid in or out.

If parents have the Trac app, they mark availability inside the app — same effect, no WhatsApp middle-step. Most coaches end up with a mix of both. That's fine. The answers feed straight into the lineup screen.

You can also flip a player's availability manually as the coach — useful when a parent tells you at training that their kid is on holiday next week and forgets to mark it.

6. Pick your lineup

Once availability is in, the lineup screen shows who's available and auto-suggests a formation based on the positions you've set on each player. You can keep that suggestion or start again.

On desktop it's a drag-and-drop interface. On the phone it's tap-to-place. You can add up to four lineups per fixture — useful at the younger ages where you might run a different shape per quarter.

7. Generate the live-match pin

Last step before kick-off — generate a pin. The pin is what parents and spectators use to view the live match on their own phones (goals, subs, time, scoreline) without needing an account. Post the pin into the WhatsApp group with the lineup, or stick it in the venue chat group.

That's it. Account, team, squad, fixture, availability, lineup, pin. You're ready to tap events on Saturday morning, and the season archive starts building itself from the first whistle.

What to do next

Two things worth doing in the same week:

• Import the rest of your fixtures from FA Full-Time in one go — there's a separate playbook post on this.
• Set up a training session and start logging attendance. The cleanest rule we've ever used — the more you train, the more you play — only works if attendance is in Trac.