TeamBuildr, the strength and conditioning software platform built for coaches, is now officially partnered with Universal Speed Rating (USR) to bring USR’s in-season speed program into TeamBuildr. Starting this fall, high school football coaches can add the program to their TeamBuildr account and run it with their team.
It is one session a week, under 30 minutes, and every exercise, distance, and rep count is already filled in. Coaches assign it to their roster and run it pre-game.
From a webinar to a program in the platform
TeamBuildr and USR launched their free webinar with USR founder, Les Spellman, Simplifying Speed Principles into Actionable Coaching last year, covering how to take speed research that looks complicated on paper and turn it into something a coach can run on a Thursday with 80 kids. Paired with a USR-tailored drill library, this gave coaches a valuable tool. But one thing was missing: the time to turn the drill library into a weekly plan, lock it into their program, and keep it going into October. Naturally, we worked to bridge that gap to embed the program into TeamBuildr itself, so a coach can copy it into the calendar and get back to coaching.
Speed is the first thing to go
Most coaches are comfortable in the weight room. Add load over time, and kids get stronger, and the strength hangs around for a while even when you take your foot off the gas. Speed doesn’t work like that. It is harder to build and harder to keep.
A team that sprints all summer and stops in August has lost most of that work by the middle of the season. USR’s answer is to keep sprinting year-round. The dose changes, but it still happens, and is periodized to happen when it will actually be effective. The goal in season is simple: know whether your athletes are improving, holding, or losing their speed, and do something about it before November.
Built for the high school coach
The high school strength coach is often the football coach, the history teacher, the phys ed teacher, or all of the above. They coach three sports, drive the bus, run the fundraisers, handle parent meetings, and maybe get 40 minutes with their kids on a Thursday. No one is handing them a speed consultant.
That is who this is for. Not the college program with the sport science staff. The coach who wants to do right by their athletes, knows speed matters, and doesn’t have the hours to turn a research paper into a Thursday practice plan.
USR built the plan, and TeamBuildr put it where the coach already works. Open the account, add the program to the calendar, and run it.
Where this is headed
The in-season program is step one. USR’s bigger idea is that testing is training: speed shouldn’t be measured once at a combine, showcase, or on testing day, and then forgotten until the next one. USR works with 250 Speed Labs across the country to test athletes against a standard for their sport and demographic, build athlete speed profiles, and track progress over time so coaches can see how an athlete actually moves, not just how fast they ran once.
Over time, the aim of this partnership is to bring that measurement closer to where coaches already program, so a test result and the next week of training sit in the same place.
“Speed data becomes valuable when it changes what happens next,” said Les Spellman, Co-Founder of Universal Speed Rating. “Our goal is to make speed part of everyday coaching. TeamBuildr already lives inside the daily workflow of coaches, which makes this a natural opportunity to connect measurement, understanding, and training.”
Coaches who want to further on their own can look at USR’s Certified Speed Lab pathway, which is built around interpreting and applying speed data.
