SCOTT MACKENZIE, HEAD STRENGTH COACH ON COACHMEPLUS
When I arrived at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, they were already using CoachMePlus. Having used Teambuildr in the past, I was a little skeptical that CoachMePlus would be the right fit for what we were looking for.
“We were really looking for a way to manage the programming of about 200 athletes while being able to give individual attention to each athlete.”
We have about 200 elite swimmers in our Academy and each athlete requires personal attention. Obviously, the size of our coaching staff was a limiting factor in delivering this kind of attention to each athlete. That problem led the coaching staff to look into a full range of athlete management solutions. What we found is that CoachMePlus was the only software that was able to meet all the needs of our program.
We were spending hours on just managing athlete programming. It interfered with our ability to spend coaching time with the athlete or develop new programming.
“With CoachMePlus, we’re able to save those hours of programming time by storing all that information in their app. We can easily pull up the workout programs when we are with the athletes and not miss a beat.”
We were initially using Excel spreadsheets to run all of our training programs. Excel templates are great for general programming but once you start to tailor programs to the individual, it becomes really time-consuming. Athlete management software is great for scaling individual programming to provide better training to larger groups of athletes.
One area that we’ve saved a lot of time on is athlete testing. Testing athletes typically takes forever. You’ve got to organize the testing so that the athletes can all be assessed within your timeframe. Then, you’ve got to make sure that the testing procedures are the same for each athlete. Once you’re finished, we were having to take our testing data and create programming from it. CoachMePlus allowed us to enter the testing data during the testing sessions and visualize that information immediately. It was a huge help and saved us hours of Excel time.
Key features I like as a strength and conditioning coach:
- Ability to create reports and dashboards for each age group of athletes
- Ability to individualize programming based on the athlete
- Information is accessible to athletes through an app and team access is achieved through tablets
- Ability to track athlete weight changes
- Ability to assign and track workouts through the Program Builder and Assessment Monitor
Benefits from a management perspective:
- Track and manage athletic performance with daily monitoring and assessment
- Decrease likelihood of fatigue-related, non-contact, soft tissue injuries
- Scalable Strength Programming which allows us to grow our business
- Easier to implement testing into the training programs of our athletes
“We’ve noticed significant strength improvements and lower injury rates which have corresponded with faster swim times among our athletes.”
Since we’ve implemented CoachMePlus, we’ve been able to improve on programming consistency for the athletes. These changes, in addition to training and coaching, have led to faster swim times and a decrease in non-contact injuries.
Before we had CoachMePlus, we were limited in how many athletes we could train without diluting the value of our services. Now that we have programming that can be assigned directly to athletes, we are looking forward to expanding our strength and conditioning programs to take on more elite swimmers. The CoachMePlus app has really given us the opportunity to grow while maintaining the excellent level of athletic performance training that we are known for.
“By the way, our athletes absolutely love using the app. It shows them how invested we are in their success and helps promote accountability in our culture.”
Scott MacKenzie – TPASC
BSc., CSCS, Head Strength Coach
Scott MacKenzie has overseen strength and conditioning programming at TPASC since April of 2018. Prior to that, Scott was the Senior Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach with the University of Toronto. Scott was also a Strength and Conditioning Coach at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada for about 3 years. Scott graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology and Exercise Science in 2009.
