> Endlessly Motivating

This is the exact phrase one of the coaches I’ve been speaking to recently used, when I asked him if he has any feedback from his athletes who are using our platform on a daily basis. It felt very good, obviously, to hear such a compliment from one of our most active users, and at the same time it got me asking the question to myself: how did we get here?

For a bit of a trip down memory lane, it all began with my co-founder Alexei talking about the potential he sees in improving the way in which athletes and coaches work with each other.

After facing challenges in this area himself during his past career as a professional athlete - he was three-times Swiss Champion in Beach Volleyball and Volleyball - , Alexei noticed the gap existing on the digital tooling side between the world of tech and that of competitive sports. This gap was brought even closer into his focus during the 2018 Summer season of Beach Volleyball, where Alexei still competes on the national stage for fun and love of playing. His partner - who was then 18 years old and part of the national team in Volleyball - was facing the exact same challenges and difficulties that Alexei had faced 7 years earlier. Keeping track of his own activities, communicating to his coaches on how he felt and what body part was hurting each day, and overall in getting relevant insights into his own past training and performance.

As Alexei was explaining to me what an early prototype for an app that could solve this problem can look like, I was initially skeptical that such a tool didn’t already exist. It somehow sounded impossible that in 2018 there was no athlete-focused platform of this nature. But his reasoning, along with my own intense market research during the following weeks, brought both of us to the conclusion that it would definitely be worth a shot.

So that’s how we set about building the first prototype of Athlyts. Our focus was clear from the beginning on what would be our unique differentiator: an app focused on the athlete, one that is so well crafted around their daily lives that they will LOVE to use constantly. We were well aware of the difficulty of such a challenge though, so we set our sights on first solving a specific use case we knew would be relevant and a burning need: digitizing the activity tracking form that Swiss Olympics recommends Swiss sports federations to use in order to prevent athlete injuries.

At the point when we started this process, a large number of athletes and coaches in Switzerland using this tool (an Excel spreadsheet) were interacting with it at most once per week, and the process of inputting and analyzing data was archaic, to say the least. Each athlete would spend a few hours at the end of the week writing down all the things they did during that week - trainings, recovery sessions, cross-sports activities, etc. - and then they would send it to the coach. The coach would then put all the info together - manually of course - and then have a look at the insights which the Excel provided: charts showing load and potential risk of injury using the ACWR model. After that the coach would try to figure out what those charts can actually mean in terms of next weeks’ training program, for each of their athletes.

As you might already imagine, the entire experience was not rewarding and not fun, to say the least, for anyone involved. And that’s why not a lot of coaches or athletes were really making use of it, and those who did try to do it properly were really struggling. So we knew clearly that even if we could improve on this process by a small margin, we would surely get the attention of a few teams and coaches who would give it a try.

It turned out that we were right in this assumption, and lucky as well. One of the coaches in the Swiss Volleyball federation (thanks Frieder!) knew Alexei well enough to trust that we were serious about our prototype, and that we were in this for the long journey needed to build a platform that could be really useful in the day to day interactions between athlete and coach. So he started using it with his women’s teams on a daily basis. He was also kind enough to always provide us with feedback, and we also opened direct communication channels with his athletes, in order to get their feedback first-hand.

That’s how it all began to evolve. More feedback, more insights, more decisions, more features on an ever-growing list of requests. Slowly but surely we kept adding to the product, until we were comfortable enough to call it a Beta, and then a few months later open it to the world as a fully working platform focused on athlete development.

It’s always hard to judge objectively, as an entrepreneur, whether you have something that really connects with your customers in the early stages. In our case, we noticed from the first weeks that both the athletes and the coaches were really liking the vibe and feel of our app, and that they really enjoyed using it. So we pressed on, and Alexei started contacting a handful of other coaches he knew in other sports. More feedback, more interest, more updates.

And then something really amazing happened. Coaches started talking to each other more and more, and they started spreading the word themselves, without us knowing or doing something about it. They were doing it not because we sold them anything (our product is still fully free as of this moment), but because they really loved the product, our vision and our dedication to improving the lives of athletes. One sport turned into a couple, then very soon we had 5, and a few months later close to 10 different sports active on Athlyts. As of now we have more than a dozen sports here in Switzerland, with tens of teams, hundreds of coaches and thousands of athletes using our platform each day. Quite amazing when we think about it, and also incredibly humbling for us. Having so much trust put in us, and with so many coaches putting their own credibility on the line for us, makes us very grateful on one hand and also massively motivated - and pressured in a good way - to keep delivering and improving. We are now marking 1 year since we went out of Beta with Athlyts, and what a ride it has been so far!

So what about the coming years? Using the words of the coach I mentioned in the beginning, developing Athlyts is an endlessly motivating experience and we are here for the long journey.

The clear vision we work towards is elevating the world of sports and helping athletes around the world develop successfully in their careers, increase performance and decrease injuries. My personal belief is that we have the right ingredients to make this happen, and to have a long lasting contribution in the world of sports.

There is so much opportunity to improve the lives of athletes everywhere, and we are so grateful to have so many of our coaches on the platform sharing that excitement and acting as our daily ambassadors and spreading the word about Athlyts. Along with the outstanding talents we’re honored to call the Athlyts team, and in close collaboration with the high calibre investors who’ve put their trust in us from the beginning, we’re super excited to take on any challenge the future has in store for us.

Here’s to our continued journey, onwards and upwards, together!  
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[**_Athlyts_**](https://athlyts.com/) **_is a tech platform for individual-centered athletic development._**

_We believe in helping athletes improve and manage themselves by focusing on their needs and dynamics. At the same time, our “Coach” app is dedicated to serve and support the coaching staff on an everyday basis, in ways that feel intuitive and relevant. Together we want to push the quality of each athlete’s development and performance level, while taking care of their health and reducing injuries._

_We also believe we can have a lasting contribution by innovating on the key tech and science aspects which can support athletes and coaches everyday. Our attention is primarily focused on observing and listening, in order to understand what really works and what doesn’t. That’s why our platform offers a tremendous amount of functionality for free, as part of our vision to elevate the world of sports globally, together._

_If you haven’t given Athlyts a try yet, we warmly encourage you to do so: whether you are an individual athlete or a coach, club or federation aiming to onboard hundreds of athletes, our platform is simple, fast and free!_

_Also do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions or ideas and feedback on how we could further improve._

athlyts_october-2019_name-and-phone.JPG

Endlessly motivating

This post is part of a series called “Coach Dashboard”, in which we explore the key features Athlyts offers to coaches, and the way in which we add value to their efforts on a daily basis.

When we first started prototyping Athlyts, one of the most common questions we’ve heard from competitive coaches was “Can I get daily updates on the status of my athletes?”.

As we began tackling this topic, we soon realised that it’s quite a tough nut to crack.

First, because it involves getting information from athletes on a daily basis. That means that you need to offer them both a great experience in doing so - otherwise they won’t be coming back to the app to do it- as well as a value-add to their own lives as athletes. In the end, “just because the coach said so” is not a sustainable long term motivator.

Second, because once you have that information from athletes, the way in which you show it to the coach requires a lot of thought. It would be very easy to just dump all the info on the screen, and overload the coach with a tremendous amount of charts and figures and colours. As if you expect each coach to be a market data analyst. This is where we see a lot of other tools in the market falling short as well: in the way in which they show the most relevant data, in the most relevant way, at the most relevant time.

So, with these challenges in mind, we set about designing our own coaching dashboard, following a few key principles.

**Keep it as simple as possible**

As Einstein famously said, “_everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler_”. We therefore put thought, and many iterations together with coaches, on what would be the very simplest set of information which needs to be shown in order to allow a coach to make decisions on a daily basis.

Also, “simple” is a moving target, because what is simple to a coach who is just starting with Athlyts is no longer sufficient for a coach who is using the platform daily for months. To that point, we’ve built in smart filtering and sorting, to enable for a variety of use cases and needs, all on a “get it as you needed it” approach.

**Focused on daily decision making**

The main goal, in our view, of why a coach should use the dashboard is to be able to make daily decisions. Decisions about the coming training structure, about each athlete’s current level of fitness, as well as about the team’s overall status.

We believe that the usefulness of such a tool relies primarily in the amount of “actionable information” it gives a coach.

**What the coaches infer from the information really matters**

At Athlyts we are deeply passionate about bringing the world of science into daily use for performance improvement and injury minimisation. To that end, we’ve spent time and research trying to figure out what are useful paradigms, at a meta level, of thinking about information overload and decision-making in the context of ASRM tools (Athlete Self-Reported Measures). Our conclusion, up to this point, has been that one of the most important aspects we can help coaches with is **inference-based information communication**. Quite a mouthful huh?

Here is an excerpt from a scientific paper we really liked which addresses this topic, called “[What is unified validity theory and how might it contribute to research and practice with athlete self-report measures](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/53/19/1202 "What is unified validity theory and how might it contribute to research and practice with athlete self-report measures")”:

“Validity is traditionally defined as ‘_whether a test measures what it is supposed to measure_’. For example, does an anxiety inventory measure anxiety, or does it measure something else (eg, depression)?

Unified validity theory arose from advances in validation research within psychometrics across the last half-century.

The foundations underpinning unified validity theory contrast traditional views in two important ways.

> 1. Validity is more about inferences than about measures: A ‘measure’ cannot be valid or invalid, ‘per se’. The question of validity is more about what researchers intend to do with the measure, than the measure itself. A low score on an ASRM may accurately reflect an athlete’s fatigue levels, but not their anxiety levels, so researchers may ‘validly’ introduce a recovery measure, but inappropriately refer the athlete to a sports psychologist.
> 2. Validity is an ‘integrative, evaluative judgement’: This means that researchers continually assess the cumulative evidence base from multiple sources to decide how appropriate an inference would be using a certain ASRM (eg, measuring daily fatigue levels), rather than giving a binary ‘yes/no’ pronouncement.

You can easily replace “researchers” with “coaches” in the quote above, for the same effect and conclusion: it’s more about **what you intend to do with the information** than the information in and of itself.

What that means practically: we have put a lot of thought in the type and quality of information we show to the coaches, with the goal of _allowing them to make specific inferences, useful in a day to day decision making process_.

**User Interface drives behaviour at a subconscious level**

There is significant research showing that the hue and intensity of a color - think about typical semaphore colours of red, yellow and green - can generate significant mental biases, strongly depending on culture as well. Which means that the colours used when designing an interface should be thought through as much as anything else on the screen.

We’ve theresport obsessed in trying to offer the highest quality experience to the coach, down to the minute details such as the shapes of the icons we use, and how much information should be packed into each part of the screen (answer: as simple as possible but not simpler :) thanks Einstein!)

Here is an overview of how the coach dashboard currently looks like.

![Coach Dashboard Overview](/features_coach-dashboard_overview.png "Coach Dashboard Overview")

In the next post we’ll be exploring in depth some of the key features that the Coach dashboard has to offer, and what all of those colourful symbols mean :)

Onwards & upwards - together,

Your Athlyts team

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[**_Athlyts _**](https://athlyts.com/)**_is a tech platform for individual-centered athletic development._**

_We believe in helping athletes improve and manage themselves by focusing on their needs and dynamics. At the same time, our “Coach” app is dedicated to serve and support the coaching staff on an everyday basis, in ways that feel intuitive and relevant. Together we want to push the quality of each athlete’s development and performance level, while taking care of their health and reducing injuries._

_We also believe we can have a lasting contribution by innovating on the key tech and science aspects which can support athletes and coaches everyday. Our attention is primarily focused on observing and listening, in order to understand what really works and what doesn’t. That’s why our platform offers a tremendous amount of functionality for free, as part of our vision to elevate the world of sports globally, together._

_If you haven’t given Athlyts a try yet, we warmly encourage you to do so: whether you are an individual athlete or a coach, club or federation aiming to onboard hundreds of athletes, our platform is simple, fast and free!_

_Also do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions or ideas and feedback on how we could further improve._

Daily decision making for performance increase and injury minimisation

features_coach-dashboard_overview.png

Coach Dashboard - Overview

How do we help our athletes become more mindful about their practice? How can we facilitate a self-reflection and self-development process? How can we keep our key learnings, both for the mental as well as physical dimensions, grouped together with the training or competitions which generated them?

These were some of the questions, coming from coaches and athletes, which inspired us to think long and hard about the topic of _reflection_. We’ve arrived at a solution which was inspired by our own team’s experience inside and outside of professional sports, and a user experience which we believe is both intuitive and highly helpful whenever an athlete records an activity - whether it be a team training, a tour in the gym, a competition or a mental session- they are encouraged, as part of the recording process, to also self-reflect on that activity.

We actively support this thought process by providing dozens of sports-specific aspects on which the athlete could reflect on; these key aspects were developed in conjunction with top level coaches across different sports. The athletes are therefore able to select from an “endless” list of relevant suggestions, split in contextual categories: technique, tactics, physical, mental. Once a specific reflection aspect is chosen (e.g “defensive play”), the athlete is presented with the key dimensions he/she could reflect on:

* **What was good**
* **What was not good**
* **What I thought/felt**
* **What helps me/I will try next (takeaways)**.

![Showcase of the self-reflections feature, as used by an athlete after a training](/self-reflection-feature.gif "Self-reflection feature")

By now we have observed a large number of reflections recorded, and what we’re noticing through direct feedback is that both the athletes themselves, as well as their coaches, are able to have more meaningful and focused discussions around these self-reflections, and therefore about their everyday development.

> _High performance sports is not only happening on court when rehearsing, sweating, struggling and succeeding. High performance sports is lived day in day out. By tracking all my training activities, I can note what is going well, what causes me troubles, what I can take away for future practices or on what topic I want to focus on with my coaches. The self-reflection feature by **Athlyts** gives me the chance to do it in an easy, but effective way. This is an asset with small impacts, everyday. Gathering them all together, they create positive influence for my trainings, I believe._

**-** [**Joel König**](https://www.joelkoenig.ch "Joel König's website")**,** elite Badminton athlete

From developing the mental habit of thinking about one’s actions and the reasons behind them, to gradually collecting a list of focus areas on which they can work on together with their coaches, to increasing the mental practice of visualization; self-reflection is a key part in an athlete’s journey to improve on the various dimensions in their sport.

For the coach, one of the fundamental benefits is that they can now have a more consistent view into the athlete’s thinking. They can understand what each athlete focuses on and how they are able (or unable) to identify their own weak points in technique, tactical thinking and mental focus. At the same time, they can provide their athletes with constant encouragement and advice, in a very easy manner (making use of in-context comments and messaging), which is otherwise quite hard to do in a normal day to day interaction, especially when you need to manage an entire team.

Reflecting after the training is in itself a valuable act and behavior. But from our own experience we know how helpful it can be to quickly recall what you took from your last practice, just before the next one starts. That’s why we included the option to “pin a reflection”, which moves them also onto your home screen, making it easy to keep it “top of mind” as long as needed.

We are very excited about building positive habits and helping the development process. Especially for the young talent in the junior age group, where focusing on good habits early from the very beginning has a lasting impact on their careers. But no matter the age or stage in an athlete’s journey, we see lots of potential in further developing features that will build on and augment this type of (inter-)active self-development.

Onwards & upwards - together,

Your Athlyts team

\---

[**_Athlyts _**](https://athlyts.com/)**_is a tech platform for individual-centered athletic development._**

_We believe in helping athletes improve and manage themselves by focusing on their needs and dynamics. At the same time, our “Coach” app is dedicated to serve and support the coaching staff on an everyday basis, in ways that feel intuitive and relevant. Together we want to push the quality of each athlete’s development and performance level, while taking care of their health and reducing injuries._

_We also believe we can have a lasting contribution by innovating on the key tech and science aspects which can support athletes and coaches everyday. Our attention is primarily focused on observing and listening, in order to understand what really works and what doesn’t. That’s why our platform offers a tremendous amount of functionality for free, as part of our vision to elevate the world of sports globally, together._

_If you haven’t given Athlyts a try yet, we warmly encourage you to do so: whether you are an individual athlete or a coach, club or federation aiming to onboard hundreds of athletes, our platform is simple, fast and free!_

_Also do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions or ideas and feedback on how we could further improve._

“It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.” – Vince Lombardi

Endlessly motivating

More stories

Coach Dashboard - Overview

Self-reflection on activities for competitive athletes