CheerCounts is built around the formation designer, and getting to your first saved formation is the fastest way to see what the app can do. This walkthrough covers the exact steps from a fresh install to a complete formation with your roster placed on the mat — no guesswork required.

Step 1: Create Your Club and Team (2 minutes)

When you open CheerCounts for the first time as a coach, you'll set up a Club first, then a Team inside it. The Club is the top-level container — your gym or school name. The Team is the specific squad you're choreographing for. Most coaches have one club with multiple teams (Junior, Senior, Game Day, etc.).

  • Tap Create Club and enter your gym or school name
  • Tap Add Team inside the club and name your first squad
  • Select your routine type: Competition or Game Day — each team gets two separate routines

Your team is now set up. Next: get your athletes into the roster.

Step 2: Build Your Roster (3 minutes)

Navigate to your team's Roster screen. You have two ways to add athletes:

  • Invite by email or link — athletes receive an invitation and join the team themselves. Their profile appears in your roster once they accept.
  • Add manually — enter athletes' names directly. Useful when you want to start designing before athletes have downloaded the app.

Add your full roster now. Each athlete in the roster automatically appears in the bench area of the formation designer — the staging area along the edge of the mat where unplaced athletes wait. You drag from the bench onto the mat, which means anyone not yet placed is always visible and never accidentally left out.

Step 3: Open the Formation Designer (1 minute)

From your team's routine screen, tap Choreo Designer. You'll see the full 54′ × 42′ competition mat rendered to scale, with your roster listed in the bench area.

The mat uses a grid that matches standard competition floor markings. The center is marked, and the proportions are accurate — so a formation that looks balanced on screen will look balanced on the actual mat. This is the detail that matters when you're spacing stunt groups and trying to judge visual symmetry.

Step 4: Place Athletes on the Mat (3 minutes)

Drag any athlete's name from the bench onto the mat. Drop them wherever their position should be for this formation. A few things to know:

  • Snap-to-grid keeps placements precise and consistent across formations
  • Ghost overlay shows where each athlete was in the previous formation — so you can see exactly how far they're traveling in the transition
  • Athletes remaining on the bench are highlighted, making it easy to confirm every roster member is placed before you save

Place your full starting formation — all athletes off the bench, positioned where they'd stand at the top of the routine. Take a moment to check spacing visually. The ghost overlay isn't active for the first formation (there's no prior formation to compare to), but it becomes essential the moment you add a second.

Step 5: Save and Name the Formation (30 seconds)

Tap Save Formation and give it a name — "Opening," "Formation 1," or whatever your choreography uses. It saves to your routine's formation list, ordered by sequence. You can reorder formations with drag-and-drop at any time.

That's your first formation. The routine list now shows one saved formation. Add another, and the ghost overlay activates — you'll see exactly where every athlete is moving from one formation to the next.

What to Build Next

Now that you have the workflow, the fastest path to a complete routine skeleton is to build one formation per section: Opening, Stunt Sequence 1, Tumbling Pass, Pyramid, Dance, Finale. You can rough-position athletes in each section quickly — precise spacing refinement comes later, during cleaning. The goal at this stage is capturing the choreographic structure, not perfecting it.

Once your skeleton exists, add beat timing by uploading your team's song — CheerCounts auto-detects the beats and locks your 8-counts to the music. From there, start assigning actions to athletes in each formation using the Action Library.

The whole design workflow — formations, timing, actions — is in one place. You never need to pull out a paper grid again.