Lean Annual Planner

Description

One spreadsheet. Your entire season — planned, tracked, and monitored.

Lean Annual Planner is an Excel and Google Sheets template that gives coaches full-season clarity without software, subscriptions, or setup.

Every coach starts the year with a plan. By week six, sessions get rearranged, players miss training, testing weeks appear, and travel messes with the schedule. The plan still exists — but nobody is looking at it anymore.

Planning lives in one file, the calendar in another, monitoring in your head. You don’t notice the drift until someone asks: “When was the last time we actually worked on X?” — and nobody has the answer.

What is Lean Annual Planner?

A single, customizable spreadsheet that connects your season plan, daily calendar, and training monitoring in one place — across the entire year. No accounts, no onboarding, no features you’ll never use.

How it works

Annual Plan — See the whole season
Your full season laid out week by week (52–53 weeks), starting whenever your season begins. You define what goes in: training components and sub-components (e.g. offensive, defensive, set pieces, conditioning, strength), matches and opponents, camps, travel, breaks, testing, and peaking indicators. Need another component? Copy a row. Want to remove one? Delete it. Pure Excel logic.

Calendar — Connect plan with reality
Log daily sessions with timing and duration — morning, afternoon, match day, all in one view. Planned matches and opponents from your Annual Plan appear automatically, so you always see how today connects to the bigger picture. No duplicate entries, no switching between files.

Monitoring — The part that changes everything
This is where most planning systems fall apart. After each day, record what was actually done per component — numbers, yes/no, or short descriptions. Multiple sessions per day, different groups — just add a column.

Over time, patterns become impossible to ignore: which components are disappearing, what hasn’t been trained in weeks, where reality has drifted from the plan. A simple count tells you exactly how often something was trained. No dashboards, no algorithms — just honest answers.

Attendance — Spot problems early
Mark each athlete as Full, Modified, or Missed per session. Colors update automatically. Within weeks, you see who’s consistently missing key work — strength, set pieces, defensive sessions — without digging through notes. Customize dropdowns and colors in the Calendar Constants tab.

Why a spreadsheet?

You already know Excel. Your staff already knows Excel. There is nothing to install, nothing to learn, nothing that breaks when someone updates the software. Upload to Google Sheets and you get real-time collaboration, commenting, and sharing — for free. You own your data, you control the structure, you change what you want when you want. This isn’t a compromise. It’s the point.

What you get

• Excel file (.xlsx) with 3 connected tabs: Annual Plan, Calendar, and Monitoring
• Calendar Constants tab for easy customization of dropdowns and colors
• Read Me PDF with step-by-step instructions for setting up the planner on Google Sheets
• Google Sheets demo link included — just open, click “Make a copy”, and start working
• Video walkthrough showing exactly how to use and adapt the planner
• Full flexibility to modify everything to fit your sport and context

Works with Google Sheets out of the box

Prefer Google Sheets? The Read Me PDF includes a direct link to a ready-made Google Sheets version. Open it, click File → Make a copy, and you have your own editable version in seconds. From there, use the Share button to invite fellow coaches or athletes with viewing, commenting, or editing access.

Who this is for

Coaches who want to see the full season clearly, adjust quickly, and know what’s actually happening — not what was planned three months ago.

Not for you if you need automated load tracking, wearable integrations, or a plug-and-play software system.

See it in action

Watch the walkthrough below to see how the three components work together.

Demo Video