What if quarterbacks could get mental reps anywhere?
An NFL offensive coordinator came to us with the seed of an idea: what if quarterbacks could watch a play unfold in a 3D environment on their phone, read the defense, and choose where to throw?
The initial proof of concept was closer to a video game than a training platform. Our job was to figure out what it would take to turn that idea into a tool that could actually help quarterbacks improve.
I came into Crucible knowing very little about the mechanics of quarterback decision-making. To design the experience, I first had to understand how quarterbacks actually learn.
I worked closely with our NFL coaching partner, observing how he worked and interviewing him about how quarterbacks prepare, read defenses, and make decisions. He also connected us with other coaches and quarterback specialists who helped us understand how those skills were taught at different levels of the game.
As we learned more about how quarterbacks train, the original simulator expanded into a much larger system.
Creating meaningful mental reps meant translating a coach’s playbook into interactive football, turning that football into structured training experiences, and delivering those experiences in a way players would actually want to practice.
Personalized training only worked if Crucible could reflect a team’s actual playbook. But asking our engineering team to build every play wasn’t scalable—and asking coaches to operate a traditional 3D animation tool wasn’t realistic.
Many of the coaches we spoke with were accustomed to whiteboards or creatively bending tools like Visio into football diagramming software.
The editor combined conventional web UI with an embedded Unity environment responsible for rendering the field, players, and animation.
I partnered closely with engineering to understand what the underlying system could expose, then designed the controls and workflows around those constraints. The goal was to let coaches manipulate a sophisticated 3D simulation while keeping the technology itself largely invisible.
Building the football was only part of the problem. Crucible also needed a way to decide what players should train, how concepts should be grouped, and when new experiences should become available.
I designed the Content Engine to give the team a flexible way to organize the underlying football content into experiences that could evolve alongside the product.
Schedule new content around the football calendar—from major games to special challenges inspired by plays athletes were already watching and talking about.
This supported a larger vision for Crucible: not a fixed library of drills, but a training experience that could keep changing.
One of our biggest early lessons was that simply giving athletes access to more mental reps didn’t mean they would take them.
Repetition was fundamental to the training model, so motivation became a product problem.
We studied learning products like Duolingo alongside games and other habit-forming experiences, exploring how competition, progression, feedback, and personalization could make practice feel rewarding without losing sight of the training itself.
The mobile experience needed to feel closer to a game than homework.
I designed the interaction and motion behavior alongside the visual UI, using animation studies and prototypes to communicate how transitions, scoring, feedback, and other moments of reinforcement should feel in the finished product.
At camp, players reinforced something we’d heard from coaches: every team has its own language. The same underlying concept could have an entirely different name from one playbook to another.
So we gave players and teams the ability to adapt Crucible’s terminology to match the language they were actually learning.
That same thinking influenced what we showed before a rep. We looked at the real-world tools players relied on—including wristbands carrying condensed play information—to understand what context should be available before the snap.
As Crucible matured, we began asking what repeated training data could tell us about the player over time.
We called the concept QBI — Quarterback Intelligence Score: a way to move beyond individual reps and begin building a broader picture of how a quarterback processed the game.
We partnered with an outside naming agency to explore the product’s positioning and name. Once the team selected Crucible, I developed the visual identity around it—from the logo and app icon to color, visual language, and marketing applications.
The name captured something fundamental about the product we were building: putting athletes into repeated moments of pressure so they could become more prepared for the real ones.
Over roughly a year, we took Crucible from an NFL coach’s early idea to a working training platform, tested it across three football camps, and helped bring the product to its next stage.
After securing funding, development transitioned from our consulting team to Crucible’s internal organization.
Our football camps taught us a lot, but today I would push for longer trials, better instrumentation, more structured observation, and clearer measures of how players’ understanding changed over time.
I’d also push the Content Engine further toward simplification. Looking back, I can still see places where the underlying information architecture shows through more than it should.
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