Ask about an injury. Get the mechanism first, and a hard stop at diagnosis.
An assistant that knows the major injuries across volleyball, basketball, soccer, running, tennis, swimming, and the weight room — and knows its own limits. It teaches, it never diagnoses, it screens every message for red-flag symptoms, and it routes you to a human when that is the correct answer.
Topics
27
Triage rules
14
Refusal classes
4
Data sent out
0req
Education, not diagnosis. This is a student-authored science platform. Nothing here replaces a physician, a physical therapist, or an athletic trainer. Sudden severe pain, numbness, an inability to bear weight, or visible deformity means stop reading and get seen.
Describe it the way you would say it out loud.
“My knee hurts when I jump” works better than trying to guess the medical term. Every message is screened for red-flag symptoms before any teaching happens, and if one fires you get a stop-and-get-seen answer instead of a protocol.
Volleyball
Running and field
Court and racquet
Pool and weight room
The classic questions
The harder questions
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Capabilities
The refusals are the feature
Most assistants advertise what they can do. The interesting half of a medical-adjacent tool is the list it will not touch, and why.
What it does
Explains the mechanism of an injury down to tissue, signaling, and timescale.
Grades the evidence honestly, including saying when a popular treatment has nothing behind it.
Gives a protocol whose every step traces back to the mechanism above it.
Names the red flags specific to each injury, not just a generic disclaimer.
Routes to a human when a human is the correct answer, and says so plainly.
Links every claim back into the Science Library or the Truth Engine.
What it refuses, on purpose
Naming your diagnosis, or telling you whether something is torn, broken, or fractured.
Dosing any prescription medication, or advising on someone else's prescription.
Anything involving anabolic steroids, SARMs, hormones, or healing peptides.
Rapid weight loss, weight cuts, restriction, or any request shaped like disordered eating.
Injuries in children, whose growth plates make them a different specialty.
Clearing you to play. That decision belongs to a clinician who has examined you.
These are not gaps waiting to be filled in version two. A recovery assistant that answered all six of these would be more useful for about a week and dangerous forever.
Screen 01 · Triage
Fourteen rules that run before anything else
This screen sees every message first. If it fires, the education is withheld and the reply becomes a single instruction.
Rules armed
14
Emergency
9
Same day
3
Evaluate
2
| Trigger | Why it is on the list | Response |
|---|---|---|
Loss of consciousness Emergency | Any loss of consciousness after an impact means the brain was significantly disturbed, and it raises the possibility of bleeding inside the skull that can develop over hours. | Emergency department today. Do not drive yourself, do not be alone tonight, and no return to play at all until a clinician clears you. |
Worsening headache after head impact Emergency | A headache that escalates after a head injury is the classic presentation of an expanding intracranial bleed. It is uncommon and it is the reason this rule exists. | Emergency care now. Bring someone with you and tell them what happened, including the time of the impact. |
Repeated vomiting Emergency | More than one episode of vomiting after a head injury is a sign of rising intracranial pressure. | Emergency department now. |
Seizure Emergency | A seizure after a head impact or during exertion needs immediate assessment, and any first seizure needs a neurological workup. | Call emergency services. This is not a wait-and-see situation. |
Numbness, tingling, or weakness Same day | Numbness, tingling, or true weakness points at nerve or spinal-cord involvement rather than a muscle or tendon, and nerves do not tolerate waiting well. | Get assessed today by a physician or an urgent care clinic. If it involves both sides, the groin or saddle area, or bladder or bowel control, that is an emergency: go now. |
Cannot bear weight Same day | An inability to weight-bear after an acute injury is one of the strongest indicators of a fracture or a significant structural injury, and it is a formal criterion in validated decision rules for ankle and knee X-rays. | Get imaged and assessed today: urgent care or an emergency department. Keep it elevated and do not try to walk it off. |
Visible deformity Emergency | A limb or joint that looks wrong is a fracture or dislocation until proven otherwise, and delay risks the blood supply and the nerves around it. | Emergency department now. Do not attempt to straighten or reduce it. Splint it as it lies, and do not eat or drink in case sedation is needed. |
A pop or snap with immediate swelling Same day | An audible or palpable pop followed by rapid swelling suggests bleeding inside a joint, which typically means a ligament, meniscus, or tendon has failed rather than strained. | Get assessed today or tomorrow at the latest, by a physician, physical therapist, or athletic trainer. Elevate, compress, and do not test it to see if it still works. |
Chest pain or shortness of breath Emergency | Chest pain, breathlessness, or fainting with exertion in a young athlete can be cardiac or pulmonary, and those are the causes of sudden death in sport. This is never something to train through. | Stop exercising completely and get emergency care today. Do not return to any training until a physician has evaluated your heart and lungs. |
Dark urine after heavy exertion Emergency | Dark urine with severe muscle pain or swelling after unusually hard exertion suggests rhabdomyolysis: muscle protein released into the blood, which can injure the kidneys. | Emergency care today. Drink water on the way and tell them exactly what training you did and when. |
Fever with a swollen joint Emergency | A hot, swollen, painful joint with fever raises the possibility of joint infection, which can destroy cartilage within days. | Emergency department today. This is one of the true orthopedic emergencies. |
Night pain and rest pain Book a visit | Most sports injuries hurt with load and settle with rest. Pain that is worse at night or at rest is a different pattern, and while it is usually benign, it is on the short list of features that clinicians use to screen for bone and systemic causes. | Book an appointment with a physician rather than self-managing this. Mention specifically that the pain is present at rest and at night. |
Unexplained weight loss or systemic symptoms Book a visit | Unintended weight loss, night sweats, or persistent feeling of illness alongside musculoskeletal pain is a combination that needs a physician rather than a training adjustment. | See a physician. Bring a written timeline of the symptoms and any weight change. |
Symptoms after a seizure or collapse Emergency | Collapse during exertion, and anything following a seizure, requires medical evaluation before any return to activity. The muscles and the heart both need to be checked. | Emergency care, and no training until a physician clears you. Tell them it happened during exercise. |
The screen is negation-aware: “no numbness, no tingling” does not fire the neurological rule, because a system that cries wolf gets ignored, and an ignored screen protects nobody. It is still deliberately tuned toward over-firing. The cost of a false positive is an unnecessary appointment. The cost of a false negative is the reason this page exists.
Coverage
What it actually knows
Twenty-seven topics, grouped by the tissue that is failing rather than by the sport you play, because a tendon behaves like a tendon in every gym.
Ligament
03Ankle sprain
volleyball · basketball · soccer
ACL
volleyball · basketball · soccer
Wrist and fingers
volleyball · basketball
Tendon
04Jumper's knee
volleyball · basketball
Achilles
running · volleyball · basketball
Rotator cuff
volleyball · swimming · tennis
Elbow tendinopathy
tennis · weight room · volleyball
Muscle
04Hamstring
soccer · running · basketball
Groin
soccer · basketball · tennis
Cramps
volleyball · soccer · running
DOMS
weight room · volleyball · running
Bone
03Shin splints
running · basketball · volleyball
Bone stress injury
running · volleyball · basketball
Low back
volleyball · tennis · swimming
Joint
02Shoulder impingement
volleyball · swimming · tennis
Runner's knee
running · basketball · volleyball
Fascia
01Plantar fascia
running · basketball · volleyball
Nervous system
02Concussion
volleyball · basketball · soccer
Sleep
all sports
Modality
03Ice and cold
all sports
NSAIDs
all sports
Stretching
all sports
Nutrition
02Protein
all sports
Creatine
all sports
Systemic
03Load management
all sports
Return to play
all sports
Soreness and progress
all sports
Each topic carries its own mechanism, its own honestly graded evidence note, its own protocol, and its own red-flag list. If a question falls outside this map, the Coach says so and shows you the map rather than inventing a confident paragraph.
Architecture
How this works, honestly
Four screens in a fixed order. The ordering is not an implementation detail, it is the safety argument.
- 01
Red-flag screen
Fourteen rules run against the raw message before anything else touches it: loss of consciousness, a headache worsening after head impact, repeated vomiting, seizure, numbness or weakness, inability to bear weight, deformity, a pop with immediate swelling, chest pain or breathlessness, dark urine after exertion, fever with a swollen joint, night and rest pain, unexplained weight loss, collapse. On a hit the reply becomes a stop-and-get-seen card and the topic content is withheld.
- 02
Scope screen
Prescription dosing, performance-enhancing drugs, weight cutting and restriction, and anything about a child are refused with the reasoning shown on the card, and each refusal ends with the useful thing the Coach can do instead. A refusal that just says no teaches nothing.
- 03
Diagnosis boundary
Diagnostic phrasing is caught and reframed. The Coach explains what it can and cannot establish, then lists what a clinician would actually check: mechanism history, palpation against anatomy, specific special tests with known sensitivity, validated decision rules, a neurovascular exam, and imaging only when it would change the plan.
- 04
Topic match
Only now does teaching happen. The message is normalized, punctuation stripped, tokens stemmed, then scored against per-topic phrase and keyword sets, with sport context breaking ties and short follow-ups inheriting the previous topic. Below a confidence floor the Coach declines to guess and shows its coverage instead. Every card exposes its matched terms and its score.
Why the ordering is the design
Put the education first and you will eventually hand a beautifully written tendon-loading protocol to somebody with bleeding inside their skull. Guardrails written into a prompt are suggestions. Guardrails placed in front of the prompt are guarantees. That is the entire architectural claim of this page, and it is why the screens are code rather than instructions.
What this actually is
A hand-authored knowledge base and a scored intent matcher, running locally in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere, and no text is generated. The response shape (mechanism, evidence grade, protocol, red flags, links) is deliberately structured so a real model call can be dropped in behind it without the interface changing and without the safety screens moving inside the prompt, where they would become negotiable.
Author’s note
I built the triage screen first, before a single topic was written. I had two injuries in one junior season, and the thing that actually mattered both times was how fast somebody qualified decided whether it was serious. A chatbot cannot make that decision. It can be very good at knowing that it cannot.
Iyla
Education, not diagnosis. This is a student-authored science platform. Nothing here replaces a physician, a physical therapist, or an athletic trainer. Sudden severe pain, numbness, an inability to bear weight, or visible deformity means stop reading and get seen.