A Football App Shares Strategies With Coaches Former NFL assistant coach Charles Coiner launched FirstDown PlayBook DropBack for middle-school, high-school and college teams. The app has a database of more than 5,000 plays--many used in real-game situations.

Football is a complex sport, with millions of options for each run or pass play. For coaches, the biggest challenge is in finding the time to dream up new strategies that will work from year to year. That's difficult enough when you're a pro, but it's an almost insurmountable task for the part-time coaches in the high-school, small-college and youth-league ranks.

This inspired former NFL assistant coach Charles Coiner to launch FirstDown PlayBook DropBack for middle-school, high-school and college teams, and FirstDown PlayBook Youth, a simpler version for younger leagues. The DropBack app, currently limited to iOS devices, has a database of more than 5,000 plays--many used in real-game situations by Coiner over his career, which spans 27 years and includes stints with the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears, as well as at the University of North Carolina. "In many cases, the app is saving these [coaches] considerable amounts of time," Coiner says.

In 2009, when the Bills purged their coaching staff, Coiner found himself out of work but armed with 17 boxes of binders stuffed with an estimated 10,000 plays sketched out on paper. He took his boxes and moved to Austin for an extended break from the sidelines. His plan: digitize the plays so they would be easier to search through during his next coaching job.