The short answer
Coach's Eye was retired in September 2022, so it is no longer an option. The best replacement depends on who reviews the film. If you want automatic, event-specific feedback on your own clips, Track & Field AI is the best fit and your first analysis is free. If a coach draws on video, Onform or Kinovea fill the manual gap.
Key takeaways
- Coach's Eye was fully discontinued on September 15, 2022 and cannot be downloaded
- Manual replacements (Onform, Kinovea, Dartfish) still need a trained eye to read the film
- AI-native tools answer the question Coach's Eye never could: what should I fix
- Kinovea is the best free like-for-like manual replacement, but it is Windows and Linux only
- Solo track athletes get more from automatic event-specific feedback than from a blank drawing canvas
Coach's Eye is gone, so what now
Coach's Eye is no longer available, which is why you are reading this. TechSmith stopped new downloads in September 2021 and shut the app down completely on September 15, 2022. Existing users lost access when the grace period ended. There is no paid tier, no legacy mode, and no way to reinstall it. If you coached sprints, hurdles, or jumps off that app, your workflow disappeared overnight, and millions of athletes are still looking for the replacement.
Do not chase a dead app
Some sites still rank for Coach's Eye downloads. The app is retired and will not return. Anything claiming to install it is not the real thing. Pick a tool that is actively maintained.
Source: AlternativeTo, Coach's Eye discontinued listing
First, decide what Coach's Eye actually did for you
Coach's Eye was a manual tool, which means it gave you a canvas, not an answer. You scrubbed frame by frame, drew angle lines, added a voiceover, and compared two clips side by side. That is powerful in the hands of someone who already knows what good sprint mechanics look like. It is close to useless if you are the athlete trying to coach yourself, because the app never told you what was wrong. So the right replacement depends entirely on one question: who is reviewing the video, a knowledgeable coach or you, alone, on the infield?
The real alternatives, compared
Coach's Eye alternatives for track and field
Prices are entry-level and change; verify before you buy. The highlighted column is the pick for a solo track athlete.
| Tool | Manual or AI | Platform | Events | Entry price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Track & Field AI | AI feedback | iOS | All track and field | Free first analysis | Solo athletes |
| Onform | Manual + coach tools | iOS, Android | Multi-sport | About $100/yr individual | Coaches and athletes who share film |
| Kinovea | Manual, open source | Windows, Linux | Multi-sport | Free | Coaches on a desktop |
| Dartfish | Manual, pro features | Desktop, mobile | Multi-sport | From about $90/yr | Institutions and pros |
Kinovea: the closest free manual replacement
If all you want is the old draw-and-scrub Coach's Eye experience for free, Kinovea is the answer. It is free, open source, and built for sport: slow motion, frame stepping, angle and distance measurement, and trajectory tracking. The catch is that it runs on Windows and Linux only, so there is no phone app, and it still demands that you know what to look for. For a coach who works from a laptop and already has the eye, it is excellent value. For an athlete filming on a phone at the track, it is the wrong shape of tool.
Onform: the polished manual successor for coach and athlete
Onform is the app most former Coach's Eye coaches land on. It does the drawing, slow motion, voiceover, and side-by-side comparison, plus modern athlete-coach messaging so a coach can review a clip you send from home. Individual plans run around $100 a year and coach plans run $200 to $600 a year depending on the tier and number of coaches. It is a genuinely good tool. The honest caveat for track is the same as Coach's Eye: it is a canvas. Someone still has to read the sprint and know that your shin angle off the blocks is the problem.
Dartfish: the pro standard, priced for institutions
Dartfish is the long-standing professional video analysis platform, with features like stromotion and simulcam that Coach's Eye never had. Entry plans start around $90 a year (roughly seven euros a month billed annually), and the serious tiers climb into the hundreds of dollars a year. It is overkill for one self-coached athlete and priced for federations, universities, and clinics. If you are a school program replacing a roomful of Coach's Eye licenses, put it on the shortlist. If you are one sprinter, keep looking.
Track & Field AI: the answer Coach's Eye could not give
Here is the gap none of the manual tools fill. Coach's Eye, Onform, Kinovea, and Dartfish all hand you a video and a pen. Track & Field AI reads the video and tells you what to fix. It grades each event the way a coach would, block start through finish for a sprint, approach through clearance for a vault, and reports back in coaching language instead of raw lines and angles. For the huge group of athletes who used Coach's Eye to film themselves and then squinted at the replay with no idea what was wrong, this is the part that was always missing. And because your first analysis is free with no card, you can find out in one rep whether automatic feedback beats a blank canvas for you.
- Covers every event: sprints, hurdles, relays, jumps, throws, pole vault
- AI flags the specific phase costing you time and suggests the cue to fix it
- Works from a normal phone video, no desktop and no extra gear
- Honest by design: it flags an incomplete rep rather than inventing a fix
What Coach's Eye got right, and what it never could
Coach's Eye earned its loyalty for real reasons, and a good replacement should keep them. It was cheap, usually a small one-time purchase rather than a yearly subscription. It was simple enough that a parent could film a race and a coach could draw on it in seconds. And it put frame-by-frame review in your pocket years before anyone else did. Those are the things people actually miss. What is worth saying plainly is the ceiling it never broke through: it was a recorder and a pen. It could slow your sprint down and let you draw a line on your shin, but the line meant nothing unless you already knew which angle you were looking for. For a whole generation of self-coached athletes, that ceiling stayed invisible until they smacked into it.
What to look for in a replacement
The right Coach's Eye replacement is the one that matches how you actually work, not the one with the longest feature list. Before you pick, run your situation through these five questions, because they sort the four tools above faster than any review can.
- Platform: do you film and review on a phone at the track, or on a desktop at home? Kinovea and most of Dartfish lean desktop; Onform and Track & Field AI are phone-native.
- Cost model: Coach's Eye was a one-time buy. Most replacements are subscriptions, so check the annual price and whether it auto-renews.
- Manual or AI: this is the big fork. A manual tool hands you a canvas; an AI tool hands you a diagnosis. Decide who is reading the film.
- Event awareness: generic tools treat every clip the same. A track-specific tool knows a drive phase from a top-speed fade.
- Honesty: does the tool admit when a clip is unusable, or does it always produce a confident-looking answer? The first kind earns trust.
One-time purchase nostalgia
Part of why Coach's Eye is missed is the one-time price. Weigh that fairly: a free first analysis or a low subscription that tells you what to fix can be better value than a one-time tool you still have to read yourself.
Source: Track & Field AI coaching desk
Where Track & Field AI is not the right replacement
Honesty cuts both ways, so here is where the AI tool is not your answer. If you are a coach who wants to draw your own lines, add a voiceover, and compare two athletes side by side on a big screen, a manual tool like Onform or Kinovea is a more direct Coach's Eye successor than any AI app. If you need to exchange game film across a full roster, that is a team platform's job, not this one. And if you are on Windows with no interest in a phone workflow, Kinovea is the obvious free pick. Track & Field AI is built for the solo athlete who films on a phone and wants the answer, not for the coach who wants the canvas. Knowing which one you are is the whole decision.
How to choose your Coach's Eye replacement
- You film yourself and want to know what to fix: an AI app like Track & Field AI.
- You coach from a laptop and want free drawing tools: Kinovea.
- You and your coach trade clips and notes: Onform.
- You are an institution replacing many licenses: Dartfish or a team platform.
Coach's Eye gave you a pen. It never gave you the diagnosis. That is the whole reason athletes are still searching for a replacement.
Track & Field AI coaching desk
Migrating off Coach's Eye without losing your library
If you are only now moving off Coach's Eye, the practical worry is your old clips, and the honest answer is that they are gone unless you exported them while the app still worked. There is no archive to recover from a retired app, so treat the migration as a fresh start rather than a transfer. The upside is that a fresh start is the right moment to upgrade your whole workflow, not just swap the app. Decide first whether you want a canvas or a diagnosis, pick the matching tool from the table above, and then build a simple habit: film the same way every session so your clips are comparable over time. The athletes who handled the shutdown best were the ones who used it to stop drawing lines they could not interpret and started getting feedback they could act on.
The setup that makes any replacement work
Whichever tool you pick, the clip decides the quality. Shoot side-on, in landscape, from about 30 feet, and keep the whole movement in frame. Coach's Eye could not save a bad angle and neither can its replacements. Get the framing right and even a free analysis is sharp. For more on this, see the best track and field video analysis apps roundup and the best app for sprinters breakdown.