It’s been 1 year since the introduction of the Sports Science Hub. With the creation of 3 modules and 2 more to appear very soon, it might be good to reflect on where we started and where we plan to go.
From day one, our mission was simple: to empower coaches with deeper, more intuitive reporting, helping facilitate meaningful conversations with athletes, sport coaches, parents, and other key stakeholders. We didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel—but rather, to give coaches a tool they could dive into confidently, finding the insights they need in just a few clicks.
In Our First Year
Our first step was turning wearables into something more—actionable feedback devices. This transformed how coaches could engage with athletes, especially regarding their recovery habits and how to improve performance. We followed that with the subjective feedback in our Load Monitoring Dashboard. In this case, coaches could view feedback from athletes in a longer form along with rolling averages to see trends away from the norm. We’ve seen coaches implement questionnaires in “non-traditional” ways to view the information within this report. Asking athletes for feedback on their training conditions to view as a load score, adding distances to their lift data to add to the cumulative load shown on a day. This has provided them with insight into how they can deliver more targeted training regarding what they experience outside the weight room.
The Sport Coach Dashboard was created as a direct response to feedback from coaches using our downloadable reporting sheet. After getting feedback from coaches on using their sheet and reporting it to teams, we felt it would be a good system to implement in TeamBuildr natively. We also introduced templated testing protocols to allow coaches to save their testing batteries for teams and quicker access to those results. Going even further, we allowed strength staff the opportunity to deliver these results to sport coaches with a generated web page view that only allows for the review of the data and no other access is required for them to get the information they need out of the report.
The Force Plate Dashboard was designed and developed after a consistent integration request from coaches and users to view this impactful information within the same environment they seek to act on those results. Allowing coaches to see day-to-day changes and longer form changes in metrics has given people a more streamlined way to adjust programming based on their force plate readings within TeamBuildr.
With three modules already live, we’re just getting started. We have 2 more before the end of this calendar year we plan to roll out: The Recovery Radar and The Consistency Coach.
The Recovery Radar will allow athletes to pinpoint pain or soreness through their mobile devices on a body map that will feed into a larger group report and add to an individual's running history for coaches to review. This will allow coaches and medical practitioners to monitor athletes' progression in rehab protocols or general trends within a team. Did a lift change cause a spike in soreness that wasn’t previously reported? Did a drill in practice cause some issues across a team or position group? This can all be monitored daily through our Recovery Radar and we think it will serve as a centerpiece for athletic medicine and strength coaches to have consistent conversations.
We know that the performance department is more than just the Strength coach and communication is a dire need across all sectors of sports performance. This will serve as a major artery from medicine to strength.
The Consistency Coach will bring to TeamBuildr a way to instill habits and track daily, weekly, or monthly goals. This feature can highlight deficiencies in an athlete or client day-to-day that are holding them back from consistent results or performance.
We see this as a possible entry point for tracking habits, but also nutrition and monitoring the changes that someone will see as they have a more guided approach to their routine.
What the Future Holds
We are committed to bringing more modules and enhancements to the Sport Science Hub. There are still many areas of performance that can be serviced within TeamBuildr. Before we continue to add, our mission is to revisit and add more features to our current offerings. These range from smaller quality-of-life changes in each dashboard to larger additions such as more metrics for the Force Plate, alternative test types for Force Plates, more metric selections to be added to the Sport Coach Dashboard and more. Our goal is to make every feature even more robust and tailored to the needs of performance coaches everywhere.
One new module that we are slated to offer pertains to retrospective looks at programming. If you have taken the Program Auditing & Tactics course, there was a large portion of the lectures dedicated to what was Prescribed vs what was Completed. This type of reporting is invaluable in our field and something we will be bringing to the Sport Science Hub as a way to dive even deeper into your programming. There are so many ways to identify what went right or wrong in a program and we are looking to bolster your ability to key in on that particular analysis.
There are other devices that we integrate with that can still be added to the Sport Science Hub, such as VBT and Timing Gates. These metrics are valuable to coaches and have a place within our software to better program for athletes as well as track progress. We also partnered with Plyomat and that is something we feel can have a positive impact on our users and more advanced reporting capabilities for that device could be a major benefit as well.
It’s been an incredible year, and we’re energized by the response from our communities, and we’re even more excited to continue to grow this software to help coaches, departments, teams, athletes and users at every corner of this profession.