How Johns Hopkins Built a Championship Performance System Across 24 Teams

Introduction

When Joe Alexander became Director of Athletic Performance at Johns Hopkins in 2021, he and his small team faced the challenge of managing data for 24 teams across multiple divisions with limited resources.

TeamBuildr’s AMS has provided them a unified platform that replaces scattered systems and manual processes, integrating seamlessly with their existing tools. 

The result was improved communication, data-driven decision-making, and more time for coaching—all while staying within budget. This streamlined approach empowered Hopkins to deliver elite-level support across a diverse and demanding athletic department.

Challenges

Managing 24 teams with four staff members created an immediate need for scalable solutions that could handle everything from Big Ten lacrosse programs to Division III teams.

A lack of data visualization limited what Alexander could share during weekly performance meetings. “One of our challenges was that data was understandable for us as strength coaches but not for our sports coaches,” Alexander said. These critical stakeholder conversations included head coaches, athletic trainers, assistants, and sometimes administrators, who each needed different levels of detail from the same data.

Creating meaningful reports was a time-intensive manual process that pulled coaches away from their primary responsibilities.“Before, we had the logistical challenge of creating Google Sheets and then trying to make dashboards from them,” Alexander said. “That took time away from being on the floor and coaching.”

The inconsistency problem extended beyond time management. With multiple staff members developing their own reporting approaches, the department lacked unified communication standards. “We’d have coaches and their assistants reporting training data in different ways,” Alexander said. This fragmentation made oversight difficult and created confusion among stakeholders.

Budget constraints added another layer of complexity. Many comprehensive AMS applications carried price tags that exceeded what many collegiate programs could justify. The challenge was finding a solution that could provide enterprise-level functionality without enterprise-level costs while maintaining the holistic view necessary for effective athlete development.

Solution

TeamBuildr's AMS provided Johns Hopkins with exactly what they needed: a comprehensive system that handles data collection, analysis, and reporting across multiple sports and stakeholder groups and integrated seamlessly with their existing programming platform.

The implementation centered around creating systematic workflows for weekly performance meetings. “We like to take certain data points from TeamBuildr AMS that include force plate data, as we’ve integrated it with VALD ForceDecks. We also utilize wellness questionnaire reporting to help paint a full picture.”

Johns Hopkins implemented what Alexander calls their “stoplight system”— Plan A for full training, Plan B for volume modifications, and Plan C for both volume and intensity adjustments, depending on each athlete’s status. “We look at countermovement jump scores and wellness data to give us insight on when we need to adjust certain individuals’ training when they’re red-flagged in these areas,” Alexander said.

The customizable dashboard functionality allowed Johns Hopkins to tailor how information is presented to different audiences. Sports coaches received streamlined dashboards focused on key performance indicators, while athletic trainers could access comprehensive data sets needed for injury prevention and return-to-play protocols. 

Johns Hopkins expanded beyond traditional physical metrics to incorporate cognitive and emotional wellbeing through customized questionnaires. Working with their Mental Performance Director, they built monthly mental assessments. 

These provide useful insights and customizable access privileges maintain student-athlete privacy. The department also implemented separate calendars for different training populations, with football requiring four distinct programs that are all managed through TeamBuildr. This flexibility eliminated what Alexander described as potential “logistical nightmares” and maintained program specificity across diverse training needs.

Results

The transformation at Johns Hopkins has touched every part of their performance operations. The department eliminated the inefficiencies of juggling multiple systems and improved communication across coaches, trainers, and athletes. Rather than defensive conversations about athlete readiness, data-driven discussions became collaborative problem-solving sessions.

“If you can visually show lines and graphs and display how performance has progressed over a period of time, that's super important. Most of the time, the more information that you have, the better, and our sports coaches have been really receptive to that,” Alexander said. “Now we can talk about different plans of action and they're part of the conversation.”

Mental performance data and wellness questionnaires support a more holistic approach to development. Monthly metrics provide insights that complement physical data, enabling more proactive interventions. The wellness questionnaire data helps identify patterns before they become performance issues.

Rather than investing in multiple specialized systems, Johns Hopkins achieved comprehensive functionality through a single integrated platform. 

The system also saves significant time, allowing staff to focus more on coaching. “TeamBuildr AMS is more affordable than most, and our sports science data is now integrated with our actual training,” Alexander said. 

With everything streamlined in one platform, Johns Hopkins can compete with larger institutions —using technology to drive athlete outcomes without losing their personalized, relationship-driven coaching approach.