How NFL Coaches Use Notability for Game Planning

In football, strategy isn’t crafted in spreadsheets, but drawn by hand. On locker-room whiteboards, on clipboards at practice, and now, increasingly, on the digital surfaces that allow coaches and athletes to collaborate faster than ever.

Across teams in the National Football League (NFL), coaches are turning to Notability as a modern, portable whiteboard. One that lets them sketch plays, adjust strategy in real time, and instantly share updates with their teams. The result? Faster communication, sharper execution, and a competitive edge that begins long before athletes step onto the field.

Here’s how high-performance coaching staffs are using Notability to think, teach, and win more effectively.

Why Playbooks Are Evolving to Living Strategy Tools

Playbooks have traditionally been dense documents made up of diagrams, terminology, routes, and responsibilities bundled into a print or PDF file. But the way teams use those materials has changed dramatically.

Today’s coaches need:

• More speed: strategies change game-to-game, and even drill-to-drill.
• More flexibility: plays evolve on the fly, requiring live adjustments.
• More accessibility: athletes review film and notes on their phones, tablets, and laptops.
• More clarity: a drawn arrow communicates more clearly than a paragraph explanation.

Notability bridges that gap by transforming static documents into dynamic teaching tools. With digital drawing, instant markup, and effortless sharing, coaches can deliver visual strategies the way players actually learn best, through diagrams, movement, and quick iteration.

Coaches can also import their traditional standard playbook PDFs and turn them into editable canvases, adding handwritten notes, adjusting diagrams on top of existing plays, highlighting player responsibilities, inserting new variants in the play, and combining multiple pages into curated scouting packets.

Instead of maintaining multiple versions of the same playbook, coaches simply update the portion they need, export their note, and send. The playbook becomes a living document updated as often as the team evolves.

Drawing the Play Anywhere

In practice or in film review, strategy is rarely linear. A coach sees something, sketches it, adds an adjustment, then demonstrates the change. With Notability, those whiteboard moments happen anywhere: in team meetings, during practice, or on the way to the game.

Key Notability features coaches rely on include:

• Precise drawing tools for routes, screens, rotations, and movement patterns.
• Shape detection to snap circles, triangles, and arrows into clean visuals.
• Color-coded brushes to differentiate positions and alignments.
• Layers of handwriting that can be added, erased, or reworked instantly.

Some coaches use Notability as their primary digital whiteboard during practice, while others use it to refine ideas drawn on paper into cleaner diagrams for the team. Either way, the process is fast, natural, and built around the way strategists already think—with a pen in hand.

Breaking Down Film With Markups and Overlays

More and more film review sessions happen directly inside Notability. Coaches take screenshots or stills from game footage and annotate them with player paths, defensive coverages, blocking schemes, movement maps, and other on-field tactics.

By marking up visuals directly, coaches give athletes the clearest possible look at what needs to happen next. Paired with Audio Recording, one of Notability’s most unique tools, coaches can even record voice notes explaining adjustments, synced to specific diagrams or screenshots.

Instant Sharing Keeps Teams Connected and Prepared

Strategy is only as good as the team’s ability to internalize it. Notability makes play distribution frictionless. With a tap, coaches can send entire digital playbooks, practice plans, scout reports, and individualized notes for specific positions.

Athletes can open these materials on any device, reviewing them on the bus ride to the stadium, in the locker room, or at home the night before a game. They can also interact with the strategy instead of only receiving them by adding their own handwritten notes and questions, creating personalized goals, tracking play tendencies and film observations, and collaborating with teammates on shared notebooks.

The same tools that elevate coaching, elevate player learning. It becomes a loop, with more engagement, better clarity, better execution.

Visual Communication Wins Games

At its core, coaching is about communication. And great communication is visual, fast, and clear. Notability gives NFL teams the speed of a whiteboard, the structure of a digital platform, the flexibility of a notebook, and the shareability of a modern collaboration tool. In sports where every adjustment counts, every second matters, and every player needs to understand their role, the teams that visualize best are often the ones that win.

With Notability, the strategy comes to life in the exact way coaches imagine it, and athletes absorb it.