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Who is actually at the field right now?
Every emergency action plan starts with a question most teams answer from memory. Who is here, who is limited, and who has the equipment that needs checking. Here is how to answer it in seconds instead.
By ProgramSlate3 min read
An emergency action plan has a lot of parts: who calls 911, where the AED is, which gate the ambulance uses, who meets it, who stays with the team. Underneath every one of those is a simpler question.
Who is actually here right now?
Most teams answer it from memory, or from a clipboard in a bag at the far end of the field. That works until the day it has to work fast.
Emergency plans are now expected to be practiced
This is not hypothetical. The NFHS Sports Medicine Advisory Committee's 2026 guidance on heat stroke in football linemen tells schools to rehearse the emergency action plan, including rapid cooling. Tennessee's Smart Heart Act requires every high school to have an AED accessible at all athletic activities and to review and practice an athletics emergency action plan every year.
The Korey Stringer Institute scores every state on five areas of athlete safety policy, and emergency preparedness is one of the five. No state has scored 100%.
Your state association and your athletic trainer own the plan itself. A coach owns the part that happens at practice.
Three things a coach should know before practice starts
1. Who is present. Not who is on the roster, who is on the field. If an athlete leaves early, that should be written down.
2. Who is limited or out. An athlete coming back from an injury, or held out by the trainer, should not end up in a conditioning period by accident because the assistant running it did not know.
3. What equipment needs attention. A helmet past its recertification date is a safety issue, not a paperwork issue.
How ProgramSlate helps with those three
We want to be straightforward here. ProgramSlate is not an emergency system. It does not monitor heat, does not store medical records, and does not replace your athletic trainer, your school's emergency cards or your state's rules. What it does is make the three questions above quick to answer.
- Attendance at the field. Coaches mark present, late, absent or excused, prefilled from families' RSVPs, so you fix a few names instead of calling the whole roll. It works with no signal and sends when you reconnect.
- Limited and out on the roster. Athlete status shows on the roster and in game plans, so every coach on the staff sees the same thing.
- Recertification dates on equipment. Gear items can carry a recertify-by date, and the inventory flags them 45 days ahead.
One deliberate limit: when ProgramSlate saves data on a phone for offline use, it strips guardian contact details and coach notes first. That is the right call for athletes' privacy, and it means your emergency contact sheet should still live where your school keeps it, on paper or in the school's own system.
Before your next practice
- Find your school's emergency action plan and read the part about your venue.
- Know where the nearest AED is, and how long it takes to get it.
- Take attendance at the start, every time.
- Make sure every coach running a period knows who is limited.
- Check the recertification dates on anything that has one.
The plan is only as good as what you know when it starts.
