Le coéquipier prépare la stratégie.

French normally needs an article before common nouns.

• le coéquipier = the teammate
• la stratégie = the strategy

In English, you can sometimes drop articles in headlines or notes, but in normal French sentences, that sounds incomplete. So the articles le and la are expected here.

Because French nouns have grammatical gender.

• coéquipier is masculine, so it takes le
• stratégie is feminine, so it takes la

This grammatical gender does not necessarily mean anything about real-world biological sex for objects or abstract ideas. It is just part of how French nouns work.

In this sentence, you know it is masculine because of the article le.

The feminine form is usually coéquipière.

So you could have:

• Le coéquipier prépare la stratégie. = a male teammate / the masculine form
• La coéquipière prépare la stratégie. = a female teammate

In real French, the masculine form can also sometimes be used in a general or mixed-gender sense, depending on context.

Préparer is the infinitive, meaning to prepare.

In this sentence, the verb is conjugated to match le coéquipier, which is third person singular (he/she/it form). So:

• préparer = to prepare
• il/elle prépare = he/she prepares, he/she is preparing

That is why the sentence uses prépare.

Yes. Prépare is in the present tense.

In French, the present tense often covers both:

• prepares
• is preparing

So Le coéquipier prépare la stratégie can mean either:

• The teammate prepares the strategy
• The teammate is preparing the strategy

The exact meaning depends on context.

Yes, this sentence follows the basic subject + verb + object order:

• Le coéquipier = subject
• prépare = verb
• la stratégie = object

So it works very much like English:

• The teammate
  • prepares
    • the strategy

That makes this sentence fairly straightforward for an English speaker.

A helpful approximate pronunciation is:

ko-ay-kee-pyay

A few useful points:

• The coé- part is pronounced in separate parts, roughly ko-ay
• The qui sounds like kee
• The ending -pier here sounds roughly like pyay
• The final written r is not strongly pronounced the way an English r is

The word has several syllables, so it helps to say it slowly at first: co-é-qui-pier

The accents mainly help with pronunciation.

• é in prépare and stratégie tells you that the vowel is pronounced like a clear ay sound
• è in stratégie is a more open vowel sound, somewhat like eh

So the accents are not optional spelling decorations. They are part of the correct written form of the word.

You often have to learn noun gender along with the noun, but some endings give useful clues.

Words ending in -ie are very often feminine, and stratégie is one of them.

So:

• une stratégie
• la stratégie

This is a helpful pattern, but not every ending rule works 100% of the time, so it is still best to learn nouns with their articles.

It can be used in sports, but it is not limited to sports.

It generally means teammate or someone on the same team. Depending on context, that could be:

• a sports teammate
• a teammate in a competition
• sometimes even a teammate in a broader collaborative setting

If you want a more general word for a coworker or colleague, French often uses other words such as collègue instead.

The plural would be:

Les coéquipiers préparent la stratégie.

Changes:

• le becomes les
• coéquipier becomes coéquipiers
• prépare becomes préparent

So:

• singular: Le coéquipier prépare la stratégie.
• plural: Les coéquipiers préparent la stratégie.

Notice that the plural verb ending -ent in préparent is usually not pronounced.