A big part of our job is to continually talk with coaches and athletes, and figure out what makes sports less fun (and of course try and change that. Some recent findings of things coaches hate:

—-Email lists…who knows if anyone checks them?
—- Excel… why is formatting always messed up?
—- MySpace…why do my players like it so much?
—- Team Websites…why do they all look the same?
—- Team Websites…. why are they so ugly?
—- Dealing with parents… why are they always asking questions
—- Player attitudes… enough said.
—- Losing.
—- Bad refs. Wait. Inconsistent refs
—- Ordering tee-shirts.
—- Lack of hustle.
—- Stupid mistakes.
—- Out-of-shape players

Now we can’t help with refs or your players attitude (though we can try for both), hopefully we can help you out with some of those other things. Feel free to let me know what you hate about coaching, and how you want to fix it.

The will to succeed is important, but the will to prepare is more important.
– Bobby Knight

When I played high school football, in my 4 years we had two different coaching staffs with two different summer workout systems. One you picked 3 days out of the 4 in a week and completed a three day workout. They had workout sheets that you had to file out, have the coach who was watching the room sign, and file in a giant file folder. I doubt they ever got looked at…100 players * 10 weeks in the summer…that’s a lot of sheets to go through. But they were effective in making sure each exercise was completed.

The other coach was less structured, when you walked in the weight room a bunch of lifts were on the white board…some players did them all others did their own workouts. Lineman had a different set of lifts. Most guys left early to get ready for 7 on 7 afterwards.

Two different structures, two different sets of results, no real tracking. Both systems lead to ‘hell weeks’ in the fall to get players in shape.

After talking to hundreds of coaches and athletes, they told us there was a better way to do it…it just wasn’t built yet. We built version 1 (which is live now) to test, and now we’re finalizing version 2. It will be up by the time school’s out this month.

Custom workouts, lifts, conditioning program, and sport specific drills that you create, or choose from our database. Use your current system or steal one of ours. Whatever you want. It’s your team.

Players receive a sheet with their workouts, they print them out (or you can print them out) they fill them out while working out, and then input their results in the same form onto the computer. Workout takes an hour…input should take about 30 seconds.

You then get an easy to analyze readout of player’s effort in comparison to each other, and the team has leaderboards, goal tracking, and more. Watch how the bar gets raised when guy’s see how their teammates are pushing themselves.

This will all be live soon. In the meantime, feel free to SEND ME YOUR WORKOUT, in word, excel, or wherever you have it stored, so we make sure that the system fits your requirements. (The pick below is the old system…wait till you see the new one).

It had been awhile. It’s only an interim solution to what we have planned…but hopefully it’s more obvious to you now what Athleon offers your team. http://www.athleonsport.com

We have received questions about text messaging for announcements and event updates/reminders in countries outside of the US. We’re adding non-US carriers on a country by country basis…so if you don’t see your service provider there send us an email at brent@athleonsport.com, and please include the primary providers in your country (including the one you use).

If you’re in the Seattle area and want to meet our team in person/ see a demo of what’s to come on Athleon, join us at the nPost Demo Event on April 22nd at the Columbia City Theater or on May 9th at the NWEN Early Stage Investment Forum.

X’s and O’s apparently don’t mean much to Lacrosse…so, thanks to many of your requests, you can now customize your ‘bench’ to have A’s, D’s, M’s, and G’s, as well as the traditional X’s and O’s.
As part of the revision, you can now customize player names and numbers as well. While creating a play, click on ‘edit player.’ to view your options.
Check out a demo here:
http://www.athleonsport.com/demo/lax

Teams on Athleon have told us they’ve used their private forum for a variety of things: from actually helping clear up email clutter to just talking trash about each other, the world, or their opponents. Today we launched a new tool to do that, per your request (and a bet of flair of our own)

You can now easily upload pictures to the forum, either from your team’s album, or from your computer. You can then add captions in the pictures, going with the new trends in forum posting.

Our calendar feature originally matched the design of our website. It looked great too, except for the fact that the Athleon Gold was very difficult to read in full calendar mode. Looks don’t do much when it kills usability. We darkened the words to dark gray and left it at that.
Now, after more requests, different events are in different colors, and it certainly brings a little more life to the calendar. Games are in red, practices in gree, tournaments in blue and meetings in purple. ‘Other’ events are still the lovely dark gray color. Hope that works for you.

Upload your game results to Athleon, then copy and paste the code onto your public website. Go on Athleon, then click your record to check it out.