The attendance sheet template
Below are two files: an Excel sheet that calculates attendance for you, and the same table as a printable PDF. No form, no newsletter sign-up, no email address. The template is built for a real youth squad — 18 rows for players and 10 columns for a month of sessions.
Download the attendance sheet template
Both files are open: no newsletter sign-up and no email address. You can change them, print them and pass them on to the other coaches at your club.
- XLSX11 KBExcel template (XLSX)A grid for 18 players and 10 sessions a month. The attendance count and percentage are calculated by formula, statuses are picked from a list, and the second tab is a short set of instructions. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.
- PDF37 KBPrintable template (PDF, A4 landscape)The same grid ready to print and file in a binder or clip to a board. The status key and the space for the session leader's signature fit on the same page.
The files contain no player data — they are empty forms. The names you type into them stay with you.
What a good attendance sheet has to contain
An attendance sheet has one job: three months from now, it has to answer the question “how many sessions did this player miss, and why”. Anything that doesn't serve that only takes up space on the page and time at the pitch.
The most important decision is the set of statuses. The template uses five: P (present), L (late, still counts as present), A (absent with no word), E (excused, flagged in advance) and I (injury). Injury has to be separated from the rest, because a player coming back from a knock has low attendance for a reason that has nothing to do with willingness — and if “wasn't there” means an injury, a family trip and a lack of interest all at once, then a month later that column means nothing.
| Column | What you write | What it's for later |
|---|---|---|
| Player name | Full name, the list kept in alphabetical order | Alphabetical order shortens the search on a printout — with 18 names that's the difference between a second and turning the page |
| Birth year | The player's year of birth | For age-limited matches and group splits you don't have to open a second document |
| Session date | Day and month in the column header, for example 04.09 | A column with no date is useless a month later, because nobody knows which session it refers to |
| Attendance status | One character from the key: P, L, A, E or I | One character can be counted by formula and compared across months; “he was probably there” cannot |
| Notes | A short reason for the absence: school competition, family trip, illness | Three absences for school competitions is a completely different conversation from three with no reason at all |
| Attended | Nothing — it adds up from the session columns | A number you can show a parent instead of your own impression |
| Attendance | Nothing — the percentage comes from the number of dates entered | A summary of attendance over the recorded period; consider joining dates before comparing players |
| Leader's signature | A signature on the printout once the month is closed | The paper version is sometimes required for reporting, and a signature added after the fact can't be reconstructed |
A worked example: U12s, 18 players, September
Consider an example U12 squad with 18 players, training on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 17:30 and a league match on Saturday. Suppose there are nine sessions in the month, giving 162 cells to complete. In this example, twelve players have attendance above 85 per cent, four between 60 and 85 per cent, and two below half.
A group average can hide individual attendance patterns. Suppose the average here is 81 per cent, while two players attend fewer than half the sessions. Check the reasons with their families. The percentage alone cannot tell you whether an injury, travel difficulties or other commitments explain the absences.
- Jacob: 9 out of 9. Needs no action, but it's worth saying out loud once.
- Felix: 7 out of 9, twice marked “L”. He travels from the other side of town — that conversation is about the meeting time, not about discipline.
- Oliver: 4 out of 9, three of them “A” with no word at all. That's the one phone call to make this week.
- Anthony: 3 out of 9, every absence marked “I”. He's coming back from a sprained ankle — his 33 per cent does not mean what Oliver's 33 per cent means.
One number changes the whole conversation
You don't tell a parent “Oliver hasn't been around much lately”. You say “Oliver was at four of the nine sessions in September, three times without letting us know”. The first sentence can be argued with; the second can't.
How to run the attendance list through the week
Attendance lists fall apart not because they're badly built, but because nobody has a fixed moment to fill them in. The following five steps help you keep the register up to date throughout the week.
How to calculate attendance so the numbers mean something
Attendance is sessions attended divided by sessions held in the relevant period. In the Excel template, the denominator is the number of dates entered in the header, shared by every player row. Empty columns are excluded. For a player who joins mid-month, use a separate copy with only the dates since they joined, or calculate their percentage separately. Earlier sessions should not count as their absences.
Percentage thresholds can help you decide which records to review first, but each club should set them for its own group. Low attendance is a reason to check the context and speak to the family, not proof that a player has lost interest. Check the period, joining date and completeness of the records before comparing players.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
A spreadsheet works beautifully for one team run by one person. Let's do the arithmetic for a growing club: 18 players times two sessions a week times 40 weeks in a season is 1,440 cells in a single file. With four teams that's nearly six thousand cells across four files that somebody has to merge to answer a simple question about an age group's attendance.
The second limit isn't numbers, it's access. A parent will never see the spreadsheet on your drive, so every piece of information about an absence gets retyped by hand into a chat. A coach covering a session for you has nowhere to record attendance. And when a coach leaves the club, the attendance history of their group leaves with them, because it lived in their file.
This is where a training attendance app earns its place: attendance is tied to an event in the calendar rather than to a file. Availability replies arrive on their own, the coach marks actual attendance on one screen after the session, and the totals add up per player and per team. The player attendance feature page covers the scope, and the how to check player attendance instruction walks through it step by step.
Moving over doesn't mean dropping the spreadsheet overnight. The simplest route is to import the squad from Excel, run one month in both places at once, and close the file only when you can see you're losing nothing.
TrainTeam
Real-time player availability
Players and parents confirm from their phones. After the event, TrainTeam pre-fills the list from their answers; the coach confirms actual attendance and corrects any differences.
Training Wed, May 6
17:00 – 18:30 · SP 33 pitch
Example app view · demo data
Attendance sheets and personal data
An attendance sheet holds personal data about players who are mostly minors. Rather than getting into readings of the regulations, it's simpler to hold to three rules that follow from common sense anyway.
- Collect only what you actually use. First name, surname, birth year and attendance status are enough — a national ID number on an attendance sheet serves no purpose whatsoever.
- Keep reasons for absence general. “Illness” is organisational information; the name of a diagnosis is health data you have no need to store.
- Keep the file somewhere the club controls, not only you. A spreadsheet on a coach's private drive leaves with the coach, and the club is left without records it is formally answerable for.
Summary
- Download the template, but first settle on one fixed moment in the week to fill it in — without that, no file survives a season.
- Five statuses instead of one: present, late, absent, excused and injured are five different conversations.
- Look at the list of names, not the group average — the average hides exactly the players you need to see.
- A spreadsheet runs out where four teams and two coaches per group begin.
