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

We’ve had plans for Athleon Playbooks since the idea for this company first started. Recently multiple teams have begun requesting exactly what we’d planned to build…but they needed it sooner than this coming fall.

We decided that putting playbooks up while they were still being tested was worth it to give you the opportunity to use them THIS season. We hope you’ll agree with us.

Playbooks are in Alpha, feel free to check them out and help your team visualize plays. Feel free to tell brent@athleonsport.com the playbook features you’d like to see and hang tight, we’ll get the full fledged version up as soon as we can

Hey users, quite a few of you, if you edited your account options recently, may have found that you had mysteriously moved from ‘Seattle, WA USA’ to ‘Seattle, WA, Afghanistan.’ We’re going to assume that most of you actually did not move, and we’ve fixed the bug.

If you actually did move, then I hope Afghanistan is nice this time of year.

“Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead”

–Roger Bannister (after becoming the first person to run a sub four-minute mile in 1952)

Hey coaches, want to remind your athletes or parents when events occur, or send them a text message reminding them of that morning workouts?

Players or parents, need to remember what time games, practices, or meetings are, but can’t get to a computer?

You already received announcements and messages via text message (sms) and email. Now you can set it up to receive automatic reminders the night before a game, practice, or event, as well as when new events are posted.

You also can get reminders sent when new workouts are posted, to make sure the training gets done.

All these can be sent to your cell phone as a quick text, and/or sent to your email inbox. Customize your settings in any way you want. Click ‘options’ in your toolbar to check it out.

“If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win.”

-Bear Bryant, former Alabama and Texas A&M Football Coach

Last Thursday, the MIT Enterprise Forum held a demo event which Athleon was lucky enough to be selected to pitch at. We gave a five minute talk on our business plan, how we got started, and tips for other entrepreneurs in the audience, then gave a five minute demo. It went well, we met a lot of great people, and we were lucky enough to be selected the winner of the event.

From John Cook, venture writer for the Seattle PI:

“Dressed in his UW rugby jersey, Athleon co-founder Brent Lamphier gave a crisp and clear presentation on a new Web site that allows coaches to communicate with athletes about game schedules, work out routines and — most interestingly — game film. It was a good pitch, complete with humor. In explaining his reason for bringing on a co-founder, the rugby player noted he needed help because “I get hit in the head a lot.” He later described the service as “virtual locker room, with everything but the showers.”

Read the rest of the story here.

The University of Washington SEBA (Science and Engineering Business Association) put on a Science and Technology Showcase Event sponsored by some VC firms in the area at my old home ‘Balmer High Commons’ at the UW Business School…and Athleon won best pitch (and a nice deposit for our new bank account)!

The companies presenting were all very interesting, and all more scientific than Athleon, but as a tech company we fit the bill and had a good time pitching and having conversations with all sorts of interesting people. The overall winner went to two women who had done research at the University on using saliva instead of blood to preform medical tests. Makes everyone who hates needles jump for joy.