5:30Practice report
The practice
Who's going, who isn't by name, the boats set for that day and any kit that's off the water, as numbers rather than a paragraph.
In development · iPhone
Your whole crew.One app.
Catch is the app a rowing team runs on. The day's practice, lineups, attendance, messages and the club's fees in one place, so tomorrow's boating isn't buried in the group chat.
For coaches, rowers, coxes and the clubs above them.
Built for every boat in the shed
- 8+Coxed eight
- 4+Coxed four
- 4xQuad
- 2xDouble
- 1xSingle
In the app
Everything you juggle, in one place
Coaching a crew is mostly logistics: who's coming, who's in which boat, and how tomorrow's boating reaches twenty people who half-read their texts. Open Catch and today's practice is the first thing you see.
On the water
The bit that has to be right before you push off.
8+Seat by seat
Lineups
8+, 4+, 4x, 2x, 1x with each rower's side against their name. A starboard rower in a port seat gets flagged on the bank.
RSVPGoing by default
Schedule & attendance
Practices, land and races on a list or month grid. Rowers count as going unless they say they can't make it, and the register takes one tap for everyone who turned up.
52°Hour by hour
Conditions
Temperature, wind, UV and rain for the hour a session starts, in the boathouse's own timezone.
Heat 2Crew by crew
Regattas
Entries with the lineup attached, plus departure, trailer and hotel details. One source of truth on race day.
In the shed
Numbers, kit, and the training that produces them.
6:58.42k · 5k · 6k
Erg results
Recorded by coaches and ranked for the coaching staff picking crews, with splits parsed properly so a typo can't become a permanent record.
1,240Minutes · Mon – Sun
Training log
Rowing, running, cycling and lifting, logged by each rower and seen by their coaches. A record of the work, not a competition: nobody is ranked.
HeldBoats · blades
Equipment
Condition, damage and repair log for every boat and set of blades. Book one to a lineup.
+1.8sPiece by piece
Seat racing
Record each piece and every swap. The arithmetic says who moved the boat.
Wk 14Phases · targets
Season plan
Phases with benchmark targets, so a 2k target has a date attached.
Around the squad
Everything that isn't rowing but decides whether rowing happens.
RadioChats · messages
Radio
Team chats and messages, kept apart from the group chat. A coach can send a message as an announcement, important or urgent, and an urgent one leads everyone's home screen.
£175Fees · ledger
Registration & fees
Raise a fee, price it per squad and record what comes in. Catch never touches the money; it keeps the ledger. A parent with no account can be sent a link to one rower's fee.
▶ 0:42Launch footage
Video review
Upload a clip from the launch or the bank. Under-18s are tagged only where consent has been given.
ClubEvery squad
Clubs & squads
A director sees across the club's teams, and a coach can read the squad next door. Medical and contact details stay with the people whose job needs them.
Lineups
A wrong-side seat, caught on the bank
Catch knows which side each rower takes, and says so before you launch, not halfway to the start. It also shows the crew's weight and how many seats are still empty.
Radio
One message, as loud as it needs to be
A coach picks how important a message is as they send it. An announcement goes into everyone's notices; an important or urgent one sits at the top of the whole team's home screen until they clear it. Nobody has to dig a dock change out of the group chat.
A look inside
What your crew actually sees
Real screenshots from the app. The names are stand-ins, because the real ones belong to children.
Home
Today's practice first, with an urgent message from the coach on top.
Practice report
Who's coming and the boats set for the day, as numbers rather than a paragraph.
Lineups
The crew drawn as the boat, with a wrong-side rower flagged while you're still on the bank.
Live connect · in testing
Connect the erg. Watch the piece as it happens.
Pair a Concept2 PM5 over Bluetooth and split, rate, watts and distance stream stroke by stroke onto a coach's board, with the whole squad side by side.
- Every stroke as it happens: split, rate, watts, distance, elapsed time.
- Coach-hosted erg sessions, with each athlete live on one board.
- The whole piece kept afterwards, to go through together.
Not yet proven on a real monitor. The pipeline from phone to board works against our servers; the Bluetooth side hasn't been checked against a PM5 yet, so we're not claiming it until it has.
Split /500m
1:42.3
Rate
32s/m
Watts
327W
Distance
1,240m
Elapsed
4:13.6
Example 2k piece · PM5Maya P
A sport full of teenagers
Most rowers are under 18. That shaped the whole app.
This wasn't bolted on at the end. It decided how the data model works.
Under 16
A rower under 16 can't sign themselves up. A coach adds them, and a parent or guardian approves the account before they can take part.
Photos
Taking part and appearing in team footage are separate permissions. For under-18s the second defaults to no.
Need to know
Weight, dates of birth and medical notes are visible only to the people whose job needs them. A club director sees them only by taking on a safeguarding role that every team can see.
No 1:1
No private channel between one coach and one young athlete. A coach's message to an athlete is visible to every coach on that team.
No fake zeros
Where Catch has no reading, it shows nothing, never a zero standing in for a number nobody measured.
Coming next
What we're building next
Everything above is in the app today. These are next, listed so you can see where Catch is heading.
In testing
Apple Health sync
Training from Garmin, Whoop, Polar, Coros and Apple Watch into the training log. Catch reads three things only: workout type, start time, duration.
Next
Notifications
An urgent message or a cancelled practice on your lock screen, not just inside the app.
Next
Erg memory import
Forgot to connect before the piece? Pull the workout off the monitor's own memory afterwards.
Later
Android
Catch on Android through Health Connect, designed for from the start rather than retrofitted.
CatchSystems
Rowing deserves better tools than it has
CatchSystems is the name Catch is being built under; the company itself is still being formed. Rowing has been getting by on group chats, whiteboard photos and spreadsheets while every other part of life moved on. Catch is the first thing we're making. It isn't meant to be the last.
Now
Catch, for a team
One app genuinely right for coaches, rowers, coxes and the club above them. Depth before breadth.
Next
More than one app
Tools for the individual sculler, regatta organisers and clubs running boathouses, sharing what Catch already knows.
Later
Hardware, eventually
Almost nothing comes off the boat itself. Our own hardware, so the water can be measured as well as the shed.
Throughout
Drag the sport forward
A sport that still feels like rowing but stops losing information between a coach's head, a group chat and a clipboard.
Built by someone in the boat
Every decision is tested against a real squad's week, not a list of feature requests.
Safeguarding is architecture
When most of your users are children, that belongs in the data model. It is.
Honest numbers
If Catch doesn't have a reading it says so. That rule has cost us features and we've kept it.
The sport first
If it doesn't survive a wet Tuesday in February, it doesn't ship.
From the rower building it
Why Catch exists
Hello, my name is Liam. I'm the builder and founder of CatchSystems, and I'm a rower: someone who has the privilege of being on a rowing team and being part of this sport every day.
I've grown a huge passion for this sport, and I believe it could be even bigger. I think rowing is going to grow over the next few years more than ever, and I want to be part of that. That's why I'm developing these tools: to help coaches and athletes with their training and their logistics.
These tools won't make you faster. But a rowing team or club is about much more than time on the water. There's a lot to figure out, from lineups to trailer loading, dues and fees to attendance. We should have tools that do that for us, and that's why I'm building Catch.
Liam, founder of CatchSystems
Coming to iPhone
Built for the whole crew
Catch is in development and being tested now. When it's ready for your squad, this is where you'll hear about it.
See what it does