Here at Athleon, we’ve been working hard to add new features to our site and improve existing content to better serve the coaches and athletes who use the Athleon service.  We’ve updated a number of features recently and we’d like to show you what’s new.

Team Hub
We have revamped the Team Hub and improved the navigation to make it easy for you to access the features you use most. This includes a new header and menu at the top of the page, and a Tools bar on the left side of the page.

The center column contains Notifications which displays upcoming events and recent updates. The center also includes information from a weekly article at Athleon Chalk Talk, the most recent thread from the Team Forum, and Stats information. The right column has your Inbox, Calendar, Events, and Roster. (Click on the Team Hub image for a full-size preview.)

Athleon Chalk Talk
Athleon recently started Chalk Talk to provide quality articles, tips, and quotes to coaches and athletes. Content is contributed by Eric Musselman, the former head coach of the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings basketball teams.

A big part of our job is to continually talk with coaches and athletes, and figure out what makes sports less fun (and of course try and change that. Some recent findings of things coaches hate:

—-Email lists…who knows if anyone checks them?
—- Excel… why is formatting always messed up?
—- MySpace…why do my players like it so much?
—- Team Websites…why do they all look the same?
—- Team Websites…. why are they so ugly?
—- Dealing with parents… why are they always asking questions
—- Player attitudes… enough said.
—- Losing.
—- Bad refs. Wait. Inconsistent refs
—- Ordering tee-shirts.
—- Lack of hustle.
—- Stupid mistakes.
—- Out-of-shape players

Now we can’t help with refs or your players attitude (though we can try for both), hopefully we can help you out with some of those other things. Feel free to let me know what you hate about coaching, and how you want to fix it.

When I played high school football, in my 4 years we had two different coaching staffs with two different summer workout systems. One you picked 3 days out of the 4 in a week and completed a three day workout. They had workout sheets that you had to file out, have the coach who was watching the room sign, and file in a giant file folder. I doubt they ever got looked at…100 players * 10 weeks in the summer…that’s a lot of sheets to go through. But they were effective in making sure each exercise was completed.

The other coach was less structured, when you walked in the weight room a bunch of lifts were on the white board…some players did them all others did their own workouts. Lineman had a different set of lifts. Most guys left early to get ready for 7 on 7 afterwards.

Two different structures, two different sets of results, no real tracking. Both systems lead to ‘hell weeks’ in the fall to get players in shape.

After talking to hundreds of coaches and athletes, they told us there was a better way to do it…it just wasn’t built yet. We built version 1 (which is live now) to test, and now we’re finalizing version 2. It will be up by the time school’s out this month.

Custom workouts, lifts, conditioning program, and sport specific drills that you create, or choose from our database. Use your current system or steal one of ours. Whatever you want. It’s your team.

Players receive a sheet with their workouts, they print them out (or you can print them out) they fill them out while working out, and then input their results in the same form onto the computer. Workout takes an hour…input should take about 30 seconds.

You then get an easy to analyze readout of player’s effort in comparison to each other, and the team has leaderboards, goal tracking, and more. Watch how the bar gets raised when guy’s see how their teammates are pushing themselves.

This will all be live soon. In the meantime, feel free to SEND ME YOUR WORKOUT, in word, excel, or wherever you have it stored, so we make sure that the system fits your requirements. (The pick below is the old system…wait till you see the new one).

It had been awhile. It’s only an interim solution to what we have planned…but hopefully it’s more obvious to you now what Athleon offers your team. Visit the new Athleon.com now!

We have received questions about text messaging for announcements and event updates/reminders in countries outside of the US. We’re adding non-US carriers on a country by country basis…so if you don’t see your service provider there send us an email at brent@athleonsport.com, and please include the primary providers in your country (including the one you use).

If you’re in the Seattle area and want to meet our team in person/ see a demo of what’s to come on Athleon, join us at the nPost Demo Event on April 22nd at the Columbia City Theater or on May 9th at the NWEN Early Stage Investment Forum.

X’s and O’s apparently don’t mean much to Lacrosse…so, thanks to many of your requests, you can now customize your ‘bench’ to have A’s, D’s, M’s, and G’s, as well as the traditional X’s and O’s.
As part of the revision, you can now customize player names and numbers as well. While creating a play, click on ‘edit player.’ to view your options.

Check out a demo of our playbooks — click here.

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.

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.