From Experience to Design: Deciding What Goes Into a DIAG Bag

If you read the first post, you know where this started — disorganized gear, a smelly shirt, and a drive home where I couldn't stop thinking about how a bag that players rely on could fail to meet the most common needs. If this is your first time here, welcome. My name is Gabe, founder of DIAG Athletics. I've been playing soccer for over twenty years and decided it was time to stop accepting a soccer bag that wasn't working.

But having a problem isn't the same as having a solution. That part took some work…

Once the idea was real, the first thing I wanted to do was make sure I wasn't just solving a personal problem. It's an easy trap — you have a bad experience, you assume everyone feels the same way, and you run with it before ever stopping to check. So before I got too deep into designing anything, I put together a short survey and sent it out to players I knew. What do you carry? What frustrates you about your current bag? What do you wish existed? If I'm going to build something for players, the least I can do is ask them first.

The responses came back and mostly confirmed what I had already suspected. I got a lot of people describing similar problems I had encountered that all more or less came back to a few key elements…

Number one: organization. People struggle to find what they need when they need it; stuff gets lost easily, shin guards migrate to the bottom of the bag and disappear. Items that are in almost every soccer bag don’t have a designated spot; cleats take up space in a way that makes everything else harder to access, snacks get crushed, small personal items  — phone, wallet, keys, jewelry — have nowhere to live that feels secure or separate from everything else. Also had several comments on how clean and dirty gear end up together to where a change of clothes would come out looking like it had been in the bag for a week, and certainly smelling like it.

That leads to the other big issue: the smell, as expected. We all know that our bags smell terrible, but it has become almost an accepted reality — frustrating but expected. But, that doesn’t mean it cannot at least be improved and keep the stuff that is always going to smell from the stuff that does not necessarily have to.

So when I went back to my notebook and tried to approach it the way I would any engineering problem. What does someone actually need to carry? Where does each thing logically live? How do you keep the smelly stuff from the non-smelly stuff?  And most importantly, how do you do all of this while maintaining functionality?

The list took shape pretty quickly: a dedicated cleat compartment that keeps cleats isolated from the rest of the bag. A real separation between clean and dirty clothes — not just two pockets, but an intentional system. A spot for shin guards that doesn't require excavating the rest of the bag. Secure space for personal items that players actually trust enough to use. Room for snacks, water, the small things that add up. And yes, design choices that intend to truly isolate smell.

None of these are revolutionary ideas on their own. But the goal was never to reinvent the bag from scratch — it was to actually think through what a player needs and make sure the bag was designed around that, rather than designing the bag first and hoping players adapt to it. Which, if I'm being honest, is what most bags on the market feel like.

We're still working through the details. I don't want to share more than I have yet on the product itself — I'd rather show you something finished than talk about something that's still changing. But the direction feels right, and having those responses from real players to come back to has been useful in ways I didn't fully anticipate. When I'm second-guessing a decision, I go back to what people actually said. It keeps things grounded.

More to come as things develop. Thanks for following along.

— Gabe, Founder of DIAG Athletics LLC