How Tully Is Powering the Sprint-Based Football Movement

Speaker 1 (00:11.31)
that’s part of our mission and approach. can talk about big picture ideas like, I want all my kids to be bigger, faster, stronger. I want them to develop, but what are you doing to measure it and understand it and actually help your staff and coaches reach those goals? So that’s what we want Tully to be that kind of tools for that.

Speaker 2 (01:23.874)
Hey, I’m really excited today. This is the Sprint Base Football Podcast. And I’m here today with Adam Redmond, a six-year NFL veteran, a guy that went to Harvard. And what he can do for us sprint base football coaches is to give us a way to record, and publish. So with no further ado, Adam Redmond, glad to have you on the show. So tell me about, I mentioned that you went to Harvard. You know, how in the hell does that happen to a guy that’s from Cleveland?

Thanks Tony out. Sorry to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:53.678)
Yeah, I’m still wondering that, you know, the answer to that question, but yeah, I grew up on the West side Cleveland, Strongsville, Ohio, went to high school near Akron and I was a football player and I was a big kid offensive lineman. So I had college aspirations and honestly, I always joke, I backed my way into Harvard because I was hoping to go get a big 10 offer. And I, you know, got to go visit Michigan state and some other big 10 schools, but it was sort of undersized weight wise and never got an offer. And I had some Mac offers, but you know,

A lot of the Mac is coaches leaving every two years. so anyways, I kind of took a second look at Harvard going into my senior year. I’d gotten some letters from them and finally returned some phone calls. And really once I got on campus and realized I could kind of have the full experience that I wanted, it really became extremely compelling. And I met some players who were from the town over. was like, okay, these are normal guys. It’s not what you think it’s going to be. And kind of fell in love with the culture there. So I got really fortunate. Couldn’t have anticipated the value I’d be getting from.

The football program, Coach Murphy, the friends that I’ve made, but I was very, fortunate to have that opportunity.

So you’re at Harvard and you said that you were undersized. I was doing a little pre-show research because I’m a professional here, but I saw that in the NFL, you were 6’6″, 295.

Yeah, I was, yeah, I probably played most of my career in the NFL at about 305, 310. High school, I was soaking wet, 230, know, six, six, tall, skinny kind of guy. So I guess I just wasn’t athletic enough to be a skill player, you know, back then. So I no lineman, but I walked on campus in Harvard. was 248 maybe 250. So really never played it down at Harvard above 275, 285. And so that was always the knock on me both.

Speaker 1 (03:34.506)
As you would know, going to getting recruited for college and especially going to NFL is like, this guy get big enough? So I always saw myself as a weight gain. I was the five meal guy. was people are in jellies at 1130 at night trying to keep my weight up. yeah, undersized, guess is a good.

As much as I would like to do that now, I’ve heard that that’s terrible burden, actually, right?

Yeah, more of my wife and now my then girlfriend at the time, think having to plan your days, your weekends around, hey, when are we going to eat every three hours was quite a chore. So very happy to be done with that. Now I wish I could eat whatever I wanted, but I’ve turned over a new leaf.

So are you like other NFL offensive linemen that drop like 50 pounds the year after you leave the game? Yeah.

I got no credit to me. was very just my body kind of going back to its normal state. I lost about 80 pounds in about seven or eight months. Like it was very quick, maybe too quick. Some healthcare people would say, but kind of just fell back into my normal state. So I’m like two 30 now and I’m back to high school.

Speaker 2 (04:34.754)
Interesting. The last podcast we did on this print based football podcast was with Wendy Earlbeck, a nutritionist. And so I’m very interested. Did you work at it at all to lose 80 pounds?

I probably, did mostly like for the first couple of months, I went from five meals a day to two and a half kind of that was, you know, I, I always heard, Wendy can probably shake her out if she’s listening, but it’s like, you you don’t eat, basically eat after 8 PM. If you want to gain weight, don’t eat after 8 PM. If you’re going to lose weight, I kind of putting in some basic principles like that, but I didn’t, I was never been a calorie counter. I sort of just went back to more normal state, cut way down on what I was doing as far as a calorie intake.

you know, riding peloton and doing cardio for a few months, it sort of started to fall off. And then I had to sort of build my body back up from a muscular, actually start lifting weights and start trying to look good again. But no, it was pretty natural for me. Like my body was ready to jump back to it was stress to the max of being that heavy for so long.

I love it. So tell me the reason why we’re talking here today is that you and I were introduced to the guy that does the coaching coordinator podcast, Keith Kravowski, and he’s also a Cleveland area guy. So the reason why Keith wanted me and you to talk is that one of the biggest tenants of sprint-based football is that we are going to prioritize speed and not endurance, and that we are going to try to create fresh, healthy athletes in the off season.

kind of getting away from the grind culture that’s so traditional and instead focus on the things that truly make a football player a great football player. Things that NFL Combine will test. we’re going to laser-like focus on speed and jumping ability and the ability to lift weights and the things that make us a great athlete instead of just the thing we’re just gonna make it hard on kids every day.

Speaker 2 (06:29.322)
So the record, rank and publish is critical. It’s central to feed the cats, to spread baseball. And tell me about your app and how that fits in to record, rank and publish.

Yeah. So for the kind of background on Tully was I retired after the 2021 season, my last planned season in Baltimore and teamed up with my college roommate, Mike Metz in LA to co-found Tully. And frankly, from day one, we were really just interested in combining, he’s a tech background engineer by trade. And so we’re looking at sports tech and, but really we were trying to find how can we apply sports tech in a way that would actually be useful to youth sports, to high school, to.

the everyday athletes, not things that, you know, the Dallas Cowboys have endless budget and resources for. So we’re trying to find a simple solution. We actually started with a device for velocity based training, which I don’t know if you guys had talked about that much on the podcast, but you know, something I did with like the old Tendo units on a string in college and NFL measuring the speed of the bar as you’re lifting. It’s a great tool.

So we actually build our own device and we had it out in the market to several schools and you know, they came back to us and said, Hey guys, we love this, but I can use this for 10 kids. I’ve got 85 others who I’m just trying to monitor. Did they show up, record some weights, record some sprints. And so it was kind of a light bulb moment for us of simpler is better. And there’s efficacy and value in recording as much, you know, important KPI things we can and making that possible. But we took the philosophy of BBT, which is frankly,

We want to quantify the quality of your rep. It’s really how I see, you know, maybe T working, right? If you’re just lifting 315, Hey, I got it three times, but if you were moving it, took you six seconds to get it off your chest. That’s a lot different than somebody who’s, you know, rattling the bar, right? So that philosophy and then being able to show that to an athlete, we were reading, you know, research papers and case studies where if you show an athlete a vertical jump, Hey, you just, you know, your first rep, we show you, had 27 inches.

Speaker 1 (08:30.062)
They’re way more likely to jump higher the next time if they saw that number. So that kind of positive feedback became really the engine of what Tully was about. And it was how can we not only record the data for these athletes officially, so in a high school weight room where there’s one coach at 55 athletes at 6 AM, how can we record that data in a way that’s usable? But also how can we instantly channel it back to the coach, to the athlete in real time so they can use it to improve? And I think we basically went into a recorder rank publish.

mindset immediately because as many cliche things as you want, you know, can’t hit the mark if you don’t know where it is or if you don’t have it set a bar, like how can you jump over it? Those types of things. For me, it’s if we’re not doing that every single day, whether it’s in the weight room, you know, if you’re taking the time to run sprints and teach it and try to measure it, like if you’re not using that data and you’re not tracking it and you’re not sharing it with your kids, if that lives on a dirty Excel spreadsheet on your computer for four months and nobody ever sees it, what’s the point?

So that kind of became the philosophy of Tully. Like just keep it simple. Allow coaches to create those metrics that they want to record, whatever they might be, whatever lifts they like, whatever sprints, jumps, may allow them to record them and then make it really easy and engaging for kids to see their progress, track it, both short-term and long-term.

We’re like talking the same language here. I use gamify all the time because for several reasons. One is that many times practices don’t look like the game. If the practice does not resemble the game, then you’re pretty messed up on your practice ideas. But in the off season, gamified basically means we measure things. One of my quotes is that we measure meaningful things to make meaningful things more meaningful. And if you’re not measuring, now the weight room has always kind of done that because

Kids will remember what their bench press is, but they may not remember what their Bulgarian squat was or something like that. So maybe there are certain things in the weight room we did. And then of course, if you’re timing kids, kids seem to remember their times pretty good. But what they really need is that ranking too, to see all athletes are competitive or they shouldn’t be athletes. So if we press the button of this is what you just did, this is what your teammate did.

Speaker 2 (10:45.516)
both guys are probably enthused. They’re probably, can’t wait to do another one or like, can’t wait to do this again next week. So part of your stuff is self-reporting. So the kid can self-report, which worries me because I’m like, one of the lies about the thing or something, but it doesn’t have to be self-report, right?

Yeah, no. So that’s the first stage to record for us is like, we have to make this usable. So if you’re a high school and you’re fortunate to have 20 racks, you got iPads in every rack, you know, you’ve got great technology. We can fit for you. If you’re a coach in rural Ohio and you have a cell phone in your pocket and 30 kids, you can also record on telly. So we want to build the flexibility in there. Sometimes logistically, it’s just not possible with a weight room of 75 athletes for a coach to jot down.

every kid’s bench press every single day. like, it’s all more about the efficiency piece where we build in kind of the quality control is that transparency and the visibility of that data. And so it really serves two purposes. have what we call our data live feed, is essentially live reports and a live leaderboard. So you can show, you know, the metrics for the day, maybe it’s a bench press and a broad jump you want to record. actually shows instantly as soon as a kid submits it, pops up on the board. And so we’re now psychologically.

If an athlete knows, Hey, this isn’t like, I’m not lying on a sheet of paper. That’s going to go in my coach’s folder for six weeks. They might get to you like this is going to be live in the room. Three seconds later, we’ve really seen almost no cases where that’s been an issue. But then to your point, we also allow coaches, if it’s a testing phase, if you’re out on the turf and you’ve got the timing gates out and you’re trapped, you can do this all yourself. You can report every data point yourself as well. We do have schools that do that coaches manage it all. So.

Our job is kind of in flexibility and then we make it so transparent, easily understood and seen. Then coaches kind of make that decision. Hey, what fits my culture, our team, you what’s going to work best for us.

Speaker 2 (12:42.03)
So even though this is software, it’s a high tech thing, a low tech school that had a weight room and a track and a gymnasium, it could be recording things like vertical jump, horizontal jump. I love to measure, you know, six bounds. say, if you tell a kid to bounce six times, they’ll do it. But if you say, I’m going to measure it, they will do it better. And so your stuff, could I customize your stuff to fit the things that I measure? Yeah.

Absolutely. Get coaches determined. You set what we call our metric list. That’s your list of KPI. That’s all the lifts, all the sprint times, all the jumps, anything. So we’ve built a tool that you can create custom metrics or pull from our generic catalog. So our kind of mission and our promise is like anything that you quantify, anything you’re writing down now on pen and paper, you can log in Tully just the exact same way, but it’ll be sorted, analyzed, ready for you to view and see that progress deliverable to kids.

All those leaderboards and things just kind of done automatically.

Can you sort based on gender, age, different types of things like that, offensive linemen, different subgroups?

Yeah, exactly. Yep. So the way the roster is set up, you organize an athlete to the sport or sports they play. There’s a creation called our group tag, which allows you, you can create all the groups you want. You can have a varsity tag, a JV, you could have advanced, you could have big skill, you know, whatever by position, even you could break it down, tag athletes, age, gender, you know, class year. There’s a bunch of different fields. So you can kind of determine how you want to slice up the data and keep it really straightforward. But yes, totally customizable.

Speaker 2 (14:19.554)
That really excites me because one of the things that just organically come up, there’s multiple schools that report to me that they are feeding the cats K through 12 or middle school. My own son Alec does a middle school feed the cats curriculum for half of his middle school. Half the middle school does a feed the cats curriculum. The other half does more traditional game like, you know, they’re playing like

you know, 12 on 12 volleyball or eight on eight bat, know, dumb things that happen in PE classes are too big. But the kids that are really competitive, they want to sprint and see how fast they run. They want to see how high they can jump every day. It’s like a gamified fun experience. And a lot of people think that if you’re at the bottom of the rankings, that somehow you won’t want to do it. We have not found that to be true because the people at the bottom of the rankings improve more than the people at the top.

And so they get excited as well. So when I’m thinking in my head, is there a way that a school could get the Toli app and make it K through 12, make it a physical education thing that’s also used by coaches in high school sports or maybe middle school sports.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s exactly kind of our goal is to have this, you know, percolate down to as early on the tele platform. Now our kind of sweet spot, Adrian’s like age eight all the way through, you know, 18, 19 and the high school, have some college pro athletes as well, but basically we’re in the position again, whatever metrics those might be. maybe for a, and you’re the expert on this time, like feed the cats, you know, the curriculum, but like,

Maybe there’s a second grader. Sure. You’re not putting them under the bar for, you know, a back squat or you’re not testing everything that you’re going to be testing high school athlete in, but maybe why not a broad jump? Why not a 10 yard dash? Why not, you know, simple things like that, a vertical jump. You get it on there. You can do it maybe once every six months instead of every week, but you were able to kind of build that database and that those, that understanding again, that this is something number one, it’s important. We care about it.

Speaker 1 (16:22.094)
Nothing speaks to an athlete more as if my coach or the organization I’m with, actually care enough to measure this and show me, okay, it must be important. So I’m going to actually pay attention and focus on this. We just launched with our first youth football team up in New Hampshire. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. Their coach is taking 20 minutes of practice and they’re running them a 20 hour dash. They’re doing a broad jump. You know, they’re doing some mobility, like how many, you know, body weight squats can you do or kettlebell squats. So it can be really simple. It doesn’t have to be.

You know, an all in college strength, interesting program, but just again, having that data, being able to measure it, building competitions around it. That’s kind of what we’re about. You mentioned always gamify. the game, the term gamify is like kind of looked down on, but it’s really just creating competition, like great competition about what you’re doing every day. And athletes will respond to that in a positive way. So I couldn’t agree with that more.

And I just see that with athletes, a lot of people think motivation comes from what the coach says and things, but I think motivation comes more from the athlete feeling legitimate progress. When they see growth, they are motivated to see more growth. They were just wired that way. And I think I kind of see it as the presidential physical fitness award, you know, where they test kids in five things or something, and then they would move on. This could be an ongoing, like a PE curriculum.

anywhere from kindergarten all the way up where kids are sprinting and doing strength things and bouncing and jumping. I think it’d be very, very cool. I know as a parent, I would love to see my kid progression between age six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. Then the kid gets excited too. Yeah.

No, absolutely. mean, that’s part of it. It’s competing, it’s measuring, and that’s the trend we’ve seen with our customers. We usually start in the high school, but when they come back to year two, they’ll say, okay, you know, we want to expand this to our middle school. What does that look like? And it allows to create that, especially when you’re like a public school or a system where there’s a natural progression. You started the elementary schools. That’s such a value. Imagine identifying, you know, those athletes, the elementary school level, they’re going to be in this middle school, those middle school coaches, knowing the athletes who are coming in.

Speaker 1 (18:26.37)
Being able to see not for to rate them or to evaluate them, but more for understanding where that athlete’s at, where could they improve? What can maybe they focus on more than a different athlete and then have that go all way to the high school becomes kind of its own, you know, organizational level tool. And I think as well, putting that up to district level athletic directors and folks at the top, being able to see this information, understand where the holes are, where we can get better.

Making sure that every school, every organization, every coach is getting the right resources they need. Cause if they’re falling behind, can use better resources. So, yeah, that’s part of our mission and approach. And again, to your point from the beginning, it’s all driven by this record rank. You don’t have the data, you have nothing to shoot for. You have nothing to strive for. So you can talk about big picture ideas like, I want all my kids to be bigger, faster, stronger. want them to develop, but what are you doing to measure it and understand it and actually help.

your staff and coaches reach those goals. So that’s what we want Tully to be that kind of tools for that.

I think without data, you don’t know where you’ve been and you don’t know where you’re going. And I’m such an anti-data guy in the classroom because the tests are not meaningful. The difference between the 40-yard dash and a district-wide chemistry test is the district-wide chemistry test is a flawed instrument of collecting data. It’s silly. But the ability to sprint in a straight line as fast as you can is really a differentiator among even, you know, when they bring the best

people in the country to the NFL combine. They differentiate them based on athletic testing. And the number one thing is the 40 yard dash, but a lot of people hate that, but there’s a reason why that happens. So all this data collection, I see also the thing, I’m so excited about the PE part of this. know, lot of states have diminished PE programs. They don’t require it, things like that. But man, if you could show data of the growth of kids physically, that would

Speaker 2 (20:24.686)
justify maybe expanding physical education.

Yeah, absolutely. mean, be able to point to that of the value. And sometimes the biggest is that we get with our data as a show, an athletic director in a school or anywhere is to say, Hey, look how many kids, how many check-ins you had? So we track the attendance. Look how many kids are engaging in this activity. I think that gets lost. always, meet ADs. like in the high school level, you know, my brother’s a strength conditioning coach at a high school. Like that’s where we built this thing.

When we built Tully with him, but it’s like, they’re so underappreciated because I don’t think an AD or somebody outside of it realizes, oh, wow. Like you mean to say that, you know, there were 30,000 workouts this semester, like 3000 times athlete came in here and trained with you. Like no other faculty, no other staff in the school does that. They don’t have the same touch points as coaches do, whether you’re a strength coach or a team coach. So quantifying that’s really powerful. And then we want to see it as like, and we talked about this Tony off Arab, like

We want to help be that vehicle to provide those resources because not every PE, you know, system, not every PE teacher is going to have the tools, the knowledge, but when you package it in a way that’s really accessible and it’s basically be able to analyze flaws and holes. Now you’re able to pair great resources like a feed the cats, like that philosophy to say, Hey, you know, so and so school district, this is a, not only the tool that you have to collect this data, but higher. Now we can show you better ways to achieve these goals.

get better results and that’s where the education, the programming side. So I think that all works hand in hand for you. If you send off your philosophy to somebody, but then they’re not tracking it, you know, they might follow up with like a phone call, but it’s like, are they doing it correctly? Maybe they’re just missing one little piece and they’re not getting the results they want. But now if we put it all together, you can kind of really get a much better results, much more efficiently.

Speaker 2 (22:11.5)
Now I haven’t asked you this, so I don’t know the answer. Let’s say, you know, my whole school district is doing it. PE, every coach is bought in, the middle school coaches. And can we compare our data to other schools data?

Yeah, we call it Tully benchmarks, which now, know, the data set we’ve built, you know, we’re not sharing directly, you know, coach so-and-so’s data or name or something like that, but be able to see whether it’s percentiles or rankings or understanding, you know, where do we fall kind of based off of norms? So we’ve kind of, we’ve been able to build our data, those norms based off age and sport and different groups. So we can communicate that both to the organization, to the school, because, Hey, here’s how your school compares to other.

public schools across the country in these different areas you’re measuring, but even to the athletes. If I’m an athlete and I’m an undersized offensive lineman in Ohio and I’m trying to play in college, how do I stack up? Where are the areas I can get better? So those types of, we call them benchmarks, norms, building that all in is really important. I think it’s again, breeds more competition, but it’s another great context, this data that makes it really valuable and interesting.

Speaker 2 (24:19.704)
Two of the things that are kind of big in sprint-based football is the mile per hour thing. Obviously I didn’t create that, but I think I did a lot to promote the conversion of a fly time to a miles per hour. Because a miles per hour is, if you say you go 22.2 miles per hour, it means more to me than, I ran a 0.96 in the 10 yard fly. And then the other big thing is the truck stick, where you take a player’s mass is weight in

pounds convert to kilograms and take his kilograms time meters per second and you get basically a big fast kid is usually a great football player. I mean, it’s just a deadly combination. Even if they can’t catch the ball, they are still going to find a way to play football if you’re really big and really fast. And is there a way that I imagine there is to customize to have a miles per hour rankings and a truck stick rankings?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is another outcrop of, I think, your work in sprint-based football, because this was a request from our customers early on, was wanting to show data, not recorded in seconds, but I want to present it in miles per hour. So we’ve completely automated that. So that’s automatic. You can decide to measure a 10-yard dash in seconds. Your input’s all in seconds. Super easy, but then you can display it in miles per hour. That conversion can be automatic. And then also the truck stick. lot of people are using that word.

So we have what we call assessments. Essentially you could build those derived metrics right in the platform to say, combine this time, compare it to your athletes body weight, the exact equation that you guys have set. And that way now you have a truck stick automatically built. So all you’re doing is entering, recording the body weight or that sprint time, but now you’re getting it in whatever presentation or analysis that you’re wanting.

And you could probably do that. I’ve heard of some coaches doing other types of metrics like power quotient that they made up themselves. doesn’t have to be something that you offer them. They could actually customize themselves.

Speaker 1 (26:18.062)
Yeah, you build the equation yourself. So it’s as simple as the old school thousand pound club. If you want to add up your bench back squat deadlift, and you can basically say, tell us this and to do that. It’s really easy. You put in the equation, you can actually set like categories as little like badges. So if you get over that thousand pound, it’s obvious you have that list of anyone has achieved it. It gets a little badge on the athlete profile as well. But like you have people, you like built spark scores. I’ve heard of I’ve learned a lot of different scores.

It’s all built by the coaches and it could be as complex or as simple, but it’s all built by you.

I’m fascinated with the idea of the badges. I give wristbands for 2021, 22, 23 miles an hour. Garrett Moeller in Stewartville, came up with the truck sticker originally and he gives dog tags for that. But you’re talking about his like digital badges, like next to the kids. I almost think it’s like a helmet sticker.

Yeah, that’s essentially what it is. So our, of our athletes, every athlete in is an athlete summary page, whereas their information, we do our own Tully score, which is our kind of in-house gamification that looks at every metric you’re recording. It quantifies a single score. There’s some customization there as well. So coaches can ratchet up improvement versus they get to build the score essentially. But under that is basically we show every athlete, all the metrics, the recording and then on that truck stick card or that.

thousand, whatever that card might be that metric, then there’d be that little badge to show you, Hey, you achieved the goal in this metric. So making it super straightforward. Like it’s just the context of raw data. It’s gotta be clear. It’s gotta be obvious. That’s kind what we’re trying to shoot.

Speaker 2 (27:50.734)
Do the coaches who have tried this, is there a learning curve or do they kind of hit the ground running?

It’d be foolish to say there isn’t some learning curve. It’s a little bit different, but everything we’ve built is for like a same day onboarding experience. So from sending us an email, the onboarding process is like, Hey, shoot over your roster. Those names are input immediately. You basically can list out, Hey, there’s three metrics we’re going to test back swap today. And you can start collecting data that same day and put it in. We also have the ability to pull in historical data. So.

most of our customers, you’ve been logging data for maybe 20 years in a certain way. And so you can actually share those spreadsheets with us. So we can just input that data for you same day. So you hit the ground running all the numbers you already have, and now you can just start collecting data and tally from that point on. So we pride ourselves on being as seamless and as the onboarding as we can outside of 20, 30 minutes zoom call with myself or the team. It’s pretty self-starter.

As you referred to earlier, if I was working with the Dallas Cowboys, I probably wouldn’t have to ask this question. But since I’m working at a high school, what kind of costs are we talking about thousands here? What kind of costs? Let’s say since we’re talking to football coaches here on this podcast, if I was a head football coach at Plainfield North High School and I said, holy cow, this sounds like great stuff. And I have really good program. have about 150 kids in my program. How much would it cost me?

Yeah, so it’s $1200 for the year. So a hundred dollars a month. would be, you know, accounts for all your coaches, the, the athletes, so everything that we’ve listed, all the features is that’s kind of how we set that price. What we try to typically see is most of our customers are all school customers, but I think that entry point has always been good. It’s always football, a lot of football teams, football coaches are the drivers. So after that first few months, so that first year, they usually were expanding in the old school and now becomes like an athletic department budget.

Speaker 1 (29:45.334)
And that goes from $1,200 to $2,500 is the all school starting point. so that way it’s really incentivized. A lot of times it’s saves a lot of money. If a football coach like, think our basketball coach would use this a couple of teams on there. You spread the cost out, but that’s 1200 price point is the start.

And that $2,500, once again, I have this dream of K through 12 athletic training. Would that be a K through 12 or just a high school?

I mean, instead of like an all school, all campus, but we would be looking at just the size of it. We want this to be an affordable solution. So our goal is to maintain that $2,500 to $3,000. We’re talking about several hundred athletes under that umbrella, all the coaches and all the features. So no, we’re not moving too far off of that mark. We’re not escalating to $20,000 price point.

I keep thinking too that if I was a football coach, you kind of mentioned this, like, wouldn’t it be cool to know which of your eighth graders coming in to become freshmen are off the charts in the weight room or holy cow, is that kid fast? And I don’t know if you realize this, but I’m very aware of it, that there are a lot of great athletes that choose not to play football in our modern world that do not play high school football. I would say the best athlete to play basketball only and

It would be really nice to know what kids you should be talking to about joining your program. Or sometimes you have a kid that moves in and he’s in PE and he’s not signed up for any sports. And if you were doing some athletic things and putting this stuff on Toley and you say, gee, the second fastest kid in the school is not out for a sport, that would help coaches get the right kids on the bus.

Speaker 1 (31:24.718)
A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, it’s really clear and obvious. then we’ve even heard a lot from coaches is it uncovers athletes on your current roster. Well, you didn’t realize how high they were achieving in the weight room and like, wow, you look at everything together. You realize this is one of our top performers. Their Tully score is super high. Like why is that? And like we’re uncovering this because it’s the kid who showed up and maybe two years ago they were undersized, but now they’ve gotten bigger. They’ve gotten better. They’ve gotten stronger.

So it’s not necessarily the star athlete that the United One’s talking about. You’re going to find kind of those diamond roughs, those athletes who are competing. Again, only possible if you’re actually recording this stuff and looking at it and ranking and publishing. So yeah, both of those are huge. There’s so much you can learn from this data. It’s just the key is always how easy is it to collect, how easy it is to keep it organized. And that takes a lot of work if you’re not using a tool like Telly, frankly.

Yeah, I was a freshman football coach for six consecutive years at Plainfield North and we did basically a feed the cats training in the summer. And what we learned by timing sprints was just, mean, like if we did not time sprints, basically we would have to just ask a person what position they played. And that’s usually what happens. But as we found that the big fullback was not in our top half speed wise, we’d be having that talk with him about the move to offensive line.

Whereas a kid that looks generic, who is the fastest guy on the team, but you maybe had not known that before. You’re like, we might want to find a place for this kid. So yeah, I think we just learn a lot of stuff when we start gaining that data. Let’s finish up here. What have I forgotten to ask you? What stuff is on your mind that we want to talk about?

No, I mean, I think when we talk to coaches, I think there’s so many things pulling coaches in different directions. is, know, unfortunately, if you don’t have the luxury of a full-time strength coach or somebody on your staff, training edition coach or coordinator, like you’re forced to spend 10 % of your time on the weight room that you’re in between jerseys and everything else. And so it’s always kind of that communication. Like when’s the right time to do this or when do we commit or just the thought of like changing over the way we’ve always done things is so daunting.

Speaker 1 (33:33.134)
I just always try to encourage, even just check out whether it’s our switch or others, just realizing what’s out there. And if you haven’t looked in the last 12 to 15 months, there’s probably something new that you’re not aware of that. Couldn’t make your life and frankly, the athletes and everyone’s experience a lot better at a relatively low cost, low friction and would not be a heavy lift. So I just am always, we’re talking on October 10th here, right? We’re in middle of season. Now is maybe not the time, but as you kind of to the off season, just encouraging.

coaches to kind of take that peak and find solutions. That’s where you’re all the time. That’s what makes me excited every day is when I hear a coach, you maybe was skeptical, realize, wow, you guys are saving me a lot of time or I don’t have to spend my weekends, three hours trying to like go through testing numbers and stuff. Now that makes a lot of this worth it for us. So always just try to relay that message.

That’s interesting. mentioned that because as a coach, one of the things that I would be like, Hmm, I’m wondering if I’m adding too much to my plate by considering this. And what you’re saying is, is that you can actually remove things from your plate that this is actually not additional hours of work. It’s actually a subtraction.

Yeah, absolutely. Our average is reporting like four to five hours a week of less time. If you’re the one running the weight room or you’re the one who’s either looking at data, collecting this testing, it’s four to five hours you’re saving. Whether you outsource the collections of the kids or not, even if you’re going to record it, imagine walking out of the weight room, turning the lights off, your laptop away and all the data is already there. You just go back and look at it. There’s no going back later and punching into your Excel spreadsheet. There’s no updating program. I mean, it’s yeah, the cost, the investment of

taking 30 minutes to learn about it. We could tune in to get a feel for it. I think it’s well worth it for customers we work with and we’re in the business of saving time, not adding to coaches. We understand intimately what that looks like, especially in the middle of the season.

Speaker 2 (35:22.23)
Yeah, that whole thing is really important. think all coaches need to remove things from their plate. It’ll make them a better coach. And so what you’re doing is actually fitting in perfectly with all that and just sounds like a win-win. How do people get ahold of you?

Yeah. So I mean, through the coaching coordinator media, we have a page now as Lanny Page, we sponsor the D3 Coaching of the Week award. Also can visit our website, Tully.app to you, LLY to learn more. And then the last point, yeah. So trying to, like you said, take less off the plate, just outsourcing what you can. So if you can outsource the data collection, the analysis to your assistant coaches, much easier. Again, that’s goal with Tully is to make that possible.

It’s been great to have you on, Adam, and I have a feeling like we’re going to talk again someday.

Yeah. Thanks, Tony. I really appreciate it.