If you've used Saideline for a while, you've probably had this moment: you typed in exactly what you needed — a specific phase of play, a principle, a number of players — and got a session back that was close, but not quite it. You'd end up manually swapping a game form or two before it felt right.
What's New: A Much More Precise Matching Engine
We've significantly upgraded the search and matching behind session creation. The system now reads your input with far more precision — the phase of play, the principle you're coaching, your player count, your space, your constraints — and composes a session that reflects what you actually asked for, not just an approximation of it.
The difference shows up immediately if you've used Saideline before: fewer near-misses, fewer manual swaps, and sessions that feel like they were built for the exact question you asked, because they were.
Why More Precise Matching Actually Saves You Time
The real cost of an imprecise match was never the five minutes it took to swap out a game form. It was the trust it cost you in the tool — every near-miss made you double-check the next result a little more carefully. A search that consistently gives you what you actually meant is a search you stop having to supervise.
"We didn't build this because coaches complained about the results," says Jonas Stephan, co-founder of Saideline. "We built it because the moment you start double-checking a tool out of habit, it's already stopped saving you time — even if the fix only takes a minute."
That's the bigger shift here: less time spent verifying and adjusting, more time spent actually running the session you asked for. And the idea has since grown: Saideline now assigns your players to those game forms and builds the teams too.
Try It Yourself
Go back to a session type you've searched for before and try it again — the same query should feel noticeably sharper. This update also lays the groundwork for something we're rolling out alongside it: a badge on every game form that tells you exactly how well it matched what you searched for. More on that next.