How Harvard Women's Soccer Streamlined Recruiting with Notability

For Harvard Women's Soccer Head Coach Chris Hamblin, the challenge of running a competitive Division I program involves everything from recruiting trips, staff meetings where decisions about players' futures get made, training sessions and practices, to game days themselves. And at the center of it all, helping Hamblin and his staff handle all of it, is Notability.

A Collaboration Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Before Notability, Harvard Women's Soccer ran the way most programs do: each staff member kept their own notebooks, tracked their own recruits, and held their own information. It worked—until it didn't.

“It's challenging when you have multiple staff using their own notebooks and trying to cover a range of recruits,” Hamblin describes. “Over time, we probably had things slip through the gaps.”

Without a shared system, information lived in silos, and some of it never made it to the people who needed it most.

One Shared System, In Real Time

That changed when the entire coaching staff moved onto Notability. Today, pretty much everyone on the staff uses the app for recruiting, practice planning, and individual athlete development. The feature that made the biggest difference? Shared Libraries.

“Shared Libraries are, without doubt, the game changer for us,” Hamblin says.

In the past, the staff had to physically carry paper player profiles to every meeting, spending hours reviewing notes in person together. Now, those same profiles are digitally uploaded into Notability and accessible to the whole staff instantly. When a coach watches a recruit play, whether across town or across the country, their notes are available to the rest of the staff the moment they're written.

“When another member of staff may watch that team or watch that player play, we have immediate access to those notes,” Hamblin shares.

A Stress-Free Game Day

The impact is felt most acutely when the stakes are highest. On game day, last-minute changes, like player injuries, used to be a source of stress. Now, the staff has a system built for it.

“Players can pick up injuries. We can just make notations,” Hamblin explains. “One coach can look and another can edit. That has been a real-time game changer where we're not creating any anxiety about where people need to be in those moments.”

With one coach updating a note and another reading it simultaneously, the whole staff stays aligned without having to scramble. The anxiety that used to come with late changes has been replaced by a quiet confidence in the process.

Beyond the Office (and Google Drive)

What’s notable about how Harvard Women’s Soccer uses Notability is how far it extends beyond any single context. Much of what the coaching staff needs to capture happens outside the office at games, recruiting visits, and in transit. Notability travels with the team everywhere.

The staff has even moved away from Google Drive for in-meeting notes, consolidating more of their workflow into one place.

“It's not only saving time, it’s also saving steps,” Hamblin says. “Our ability to collect information and be very, very intentional about what each athlete needs for their development has streamlined our process immensely.”

That intentionality is the thread that runs through everything. Notability has helped the team’s staff be more deliberate about each individual athlete’s development, with every relevant note organized and accessible when it matters.

A Team That Wins

Having been an individual user of Notability for more than a decade, Hamblin doesn't mince words about where Notability now stands in his program's toolkit.

“We're incredibly satisfied with Notability,” he says. “I love it. I love it.”

For a coaching staff that’s constantly moving, evaluating, and making decisions that shape young athletes’ careers, that kind of staying power speaks for itself.