If you were on Athleon today from about 3:58-4:02 Pacific Time, you may have received a nice little error message when trying to navigate the site. Thank you to those of you who let me know this…we’re uploading the new stats system, and had a few minutes of downtime.
It’s back up now, thanks for bearing with us. Will write more on the new stats system later today.
“Believe, deep down in your heart, that you’re destined to do great things,”
-Joe Paterno, Head Football Coach, Penn State University
As you dive deeper into Athleon, you’ll find more and more features. One of which, Athleon workout tracking, is a first version feature. We’re looking to launch version 2 later this spring.
What that means is it’s far from perfect, but more than functional enough for you to use. One glaring problem that coaches ask me about a lot is customized pieces of workouts. Yes the ‘bench press’ is common, but the ‘towel dumbell fly on a stability ball’ is not (and probably not on our site).
I know you have your own workout routines. We have a database of over 200 lifts, conditioning programs, and plyometric exercises for you to choose from…and I know that’s not NEARLY enough. Rather than spending the time continually adding every workout we can possible imagine, we wait for you to tell us what you want.
It happened today, I just added a bunch of wall drills for lacrosse training that coaches requested. Have a sport specific drill you want up? Maybe just some sort of crazy hanging leg raise with a suspended twist ab flux that you want your players to do? Just send me the name, a short description, and the parameters (sets, reps, weight….time etc. etc.) and, assuming it’s not TOO strange, I’ll add it for you asap.
We’re doing a 180 on our stats system per user requests, and are excited about where it’s going.
HOWEVER, when developing it, we used some coding language the broke a few buttons on our website, namely those in our workout feature. So, if you’ve tried to upload a workout in the past day, I’m sure it was very frustrating when you got stuck with no way to upload the workout to your team.
It’s fixed now. Sorry for the problem. If you see any other things like this please let us know asap so we can fix it for you.
Had a few questions about which sports were and weren’t currently available on the Athleon Playbook creator.
As of Valentine’s Day, 2008:
Hockey, Lacrosse, Basketball, Water Polo, Soccer, Volleyball, and Rugby are up and ready for you to create plays on.
Football, Field Hockey, Roller Hockey, and Club Ultimate will be up as requests for playbooks in these sports come in. (Football, we’re holding off on you until we get the playbook beta ready for release).
If you want playbooks in a specific sport please send me an email
We love Lacrosse here at Athleon, it’s America’s first and fastest growing sport (77% at the high school level in the past 5 years for guys…109% for girls!), and Lacrosse clubs are some of the most active teams on our site.
I coach a 5th grade basketball team. Many of them played lacrosse for the first time last year, and they’re just starting again as basketball is ending. I overheard one of the guys who played last year explaining it to a kid who’s first year is starting now.
“Lacrosse is so awesome. It’s just like soccer, except if someones in your way you can just run over them.”
Have a great spring season guys.
“I’ve got a theory that if you give 100% all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end.”
–Larry Bird
Heard of a great use of our playbook app, especially in its current state: have your PLAYERS build the plays. Every single player. Every single play. Why? Because if they can draw it, they understand it. It’s one thing to know what route to run, or what to do around the goal, but to know what ALL their teammates are doing takes the play to a different level.
You can easily delete plays from the playbook (since you’d now have 20 + of each play) by clicking the drop down arrow to the right of each play. Try it out, and see if your plays don’t work more crisply on the field