COACH TO EXCELLENCE

About Us

Hear why Kelly built C2X
Kelly Sims, founder of C2X, in her STA and U.S. Soccer coaching jackets

FOUNDER

Kelly Sims

17+ years as an elite soccer coach, with deep industry connections ranging from youth to professional leagues.

A former Arsenal Women’s youth player coached by current USWNT Head Coach Emma Hayes, Kelly has spent 17+ years in elite youth coaching and 5+ years with U.S. Youth National Teams. She led the STA Girls Academy program to back-to-back national finals — winning the 2025 GA Champions Cup title and the CONCACAF U15 Championship with Team USA. She holds a B.Sc. in Coaching from Cambridge and multiple U.S. Soccer licenses.

C2X grew from her work studying how coaching communication shapes learning — and from wanting every coach to get the feedback she wished she’d had.

Emily Buckley, co-founder of C2X, on the substitutes’ bench at Cesena FC

CO-FOUNDER

Emily Buckley

A former NCAA soccer & lacrosse player who went on to earn a Master’s in Sports Management, Emily has built her career where sport and technology meet.

She is an investor in three sports properties across Europe and the U.S. A three-time founder who writes production code herself, she leads C2X’s product and engineering, including the pipeline that turns a coach’s audio into a clear debrief in minutes.

She wants every coach to understand the impact they have on their players and to always strive for continuous improvement.

THE EXPERTISE BEHIND C2X

Built by coaches and researchers. Not guesswork.

Every metric in C2X comes from years of hand-coding real coaching sessions, checked against published coaching research.

45 yrscoaching experience
30 yrsin coach education
7sport science & coaching degrees
6PhDs behind the method
2 yrsof expert hand-coding before the AI
Trained on real sessions

Before any AI, our coaches spent two years hand-coding real practices and games: every praise, question and instruction. That expert coding is what C2X learned from, and how we check its work.

Grounded in research

Our metrics come from decades of coaching research, from studies of John Wooden's practices to work showing that asking players questions improves their decisions. Developed in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University.

Consistent by design

The same behavior is measured the same way every session, so a coach's progress is real progress, not a different opinion each week.