What a Weekly Athlete Summary Contains When It's Written From the Data

Simma drafts a weekly summary from an athlete's own sessions. Building that meant deciding, line by line, what the data can honestly support saying and what it cannot. This piece is that decision, written out.

Why draft from the data at all

The reason is simple and unglamorous. A summary written from memory of a week you half-watched drifts toward the generic. "Solid week, keep it up." A summary written with the sessions in front of you can say the specific thing, and the specific thing is what tells the athlete someone looked. The difficulty is not knowing what to say. It is having the sessions in front of you, for every athlete, every week, before you sit down to write.

So the draft's job is to put the week in front of you, already read, in your voice, so the writing starts from synthesis rather than research. Everything below follows from that.

The six parts, and why each is there

The story of the week, in a sentence or two. Big volume, a comeback after illness, a week of quality sessions, a week of nothing. The draft opens with this because the athlete's week had a shape, and naming it first is the difference between a message and a report.

Two or three sessions, by day, with numbers from them. Not "your threshold work" but "Tuesday's threshold set, four reps, holding 3:42 per kilometre". This is the part that proves someone looked. The draft picks the sessions from the data, which means it sometimes picks the one with the most interesting numbers rather than the one that mattered in context. That is one of the things the coach's read is for.

What changed, against this athlete's own recent normal. A reading on its own is a number. A reading beside the athlete's own usual is an observation: "1.11 metres per stroke against your usual 1.23", "easy runs six beats higher at the same pace as a fortnight ago". The draft is built to quote both, always, because a number without the comparison asks the athlete to know their own history better than most people do.

The draft deliberately does not open with load, fitness or form, and never quotes a form score to the athlete. Those are background for the coach. To the athlete they are a scale they did not choose and do not use.

A flag, if there is one, framed as an open door. Missed sessions, an elevated resting heart rate, three hard sessions with no recovery between. The draft names it plainly and invites the athlete to reply with the context it cannot see. This is the part of the message that comes back, and what comes back is often the thing the coach most needed to know.

The week ahead, tied to what is coming. If the athlete has a goal or an event on their record, the draft says how this week relates to it. If they do not, this part is thin, which is a reason to put the goal in.

One priority for next week. One. Not a list. Because a list is easy to write and hard to act on, and because a single priority is a thing the athlete can carry into Tuesday.

The result is plain prose, a few hundred words, no bullet points, nothing invented that is not in the sessions. A week with no activities says so rather than pretending.

What the data cannot supply

The draft does not know that the athlete mentioned a sore calf on a call, that the light week was planned, that the pool was shut, that they have an exam on Friday, that their father is ill. It does not know the tone you would take with this particular person on this particular week. It does not know which of the two sessions it chose is the one you would have chosen.

Every one of those is the coach's read, and the read is short when the data has been done. It is not proofreading. It is the coaching.

What should your assistant be able to do here?

The draft is one tool. There are others we could build on the same data: a squad-wide "who has not heard from me in a fortnight", a summary of what an athlete has been told over the last month so the next message does not repeat it, a draft written against the plan rather than the week.

If there is something you want to ask your assistant about athlete communication and it cannot answer yet, email coaching@getsimma.com and tell us the question. We build tools from those.

Simma reads every session your squad records, and when you ask for a draft, whether in the web app or through the assistant you already use, it writes one from that athlete's own week in your voice, for you to read, change and send. It does the reading. The message is still yours. Create your coaching account.