Open Coaching Format
An open standard for sports coaching diagrams, drill animations, and playbooks — written as plain, readable data instead of pictures.
Locked in proprietary apps
Coaches draw plays every day, but the diagrams live inside closed tools — the FIBA Europe Coaching App, FastDraw, Sportplan.net, and dozens of others. Each one stores plays in its own private format and lets you export only a flat image: a PNG or a PDF.
An image can be viewed, but it cannot be understood by another program. You cannot search it, replay the movement, translate the labels, restyle it for a handout, or move a play from one app to another. The moment a drill leaves the app that drew it, it stops being data and becomes a picture.
What OCF is
The Open Coaching Format is an open standard that stores a coaching diagram — or a whole animated drill — as readable JSON. JSON is a simple, text-based way of describing information that both people and software can read. Because an OCF play is data rather than an image, any tool can open it, render it, animate it, or convert it.
The same file can drive a static diagram for a printed playbook and a frame-by-frame animation on screen. Nothing is locked to one vendor: the format is public, and anyone can build a reader, an editor, or a renderer on top of it.
One format, every sport
OCF is not basketball-only. A play in any team sport is the same kind of thing: players positioned on a marked surface, moving and passing over time. OCF captures that shared shape once, then lets each sport add its own vocabulary of actions on top.
Basketball is fully specified today. The other sports are reserved: the structure already fits them, and their action vocabularies are open for the people who know each game best.
Full vocabulary today: actions, rulesets, named positions, and worked example drills.
Reserved. A provisional vocabulary is stubbed and waiting for sport experts to shape it.
Reserved. Court, entities, and frames carry over; the action list is open for contribution.
Reserved. The shared structure applies; a hockey-specific action set is yet to be defined.
Reserved. Same document shape, awaiting a futsal vocabulary from the community.
How an OCF document is shaped
You do not need to read JSON to get the idea. An OCF play is built from a few plain parts:
- Court coordinates. A chosen ruleset fixes the size and markings of the playing surface, so every position is measured in real units — a spot on the floor means the same thing to every tool.
- Entities and actions. Players, defenders, and balls are the entities. What they do — pass, cut, screen, dribble — are the actions, drawn from a sport's vocabulary.
- Frames and animation. A play is a sequence of frames. Each frame lists the actions that happen and where everything ends up, which is what turns a static diagram into a replayable animation.