When TJ Belanger joined the strength and conditioning coaching staff at Yale University in 2017 as an unpaid intern, he used the same tools as everyone else on staff to manage the administrative and organizational aspects of the department: pen and paper.
Six years later and Belanger has taken over as Director of Sports Performance & Student-Athlete Innovation, overseeing a strength and conditioning department responsible for 32 varsity sports – 25 of which use the weight room – and personally coaching football, men’s lacrosse and field hockey athletes.
Just like his status as an unpaid intern from years back, the pen and paper method is history.
“In terms of innovation, I find ways to utilize the foundational principles that started this field of strength and conditioning and apply the tools and technology available to us to better simulate the things we need to prepare our athletes to do in competition,” says Belanger. “I’m very happy I was part of the transition from pen and paper to TeamBuildr. I think I love and appreciate TeamBuildr so much more, having used pen and paper and knowing what we tried to achieve, then understanding how much more efficient we could be with this virtual platform.”
TeamBuildr is online strength and conditioning software for brick-and-mortar strength and conditioning coaches. With clients ranging in size from small high schools to as large as the Texas Rangers, The Ohio State Buckeyes, the New Orleans Saints and the Oregon Ducks – to name just a few – TeamBuildr approaches innovation in the same way as Belanger. They focus on the foundational principle of serving the best interests of coaches and athletes first.
Whether you’re programming workouts from scratch, taking your program paperless, collecting better data or providing higher-quality programming, TeamBuildr is built to fit any level strength coach in any setting. Defining TeamBuildr as a set of features does it injustice, because the platform is far more than the sum of its parts.
Whether you’re building your own programming, looking to create custom reports, or providing athletes with a tool to keep them accountable, TeamBuildr has built it out. It’s mobile friendly, comes with 100+ program templates ranging from sport-specific to Conjugate & Triphasic, tracks maxes, outputs more than 15 standard reports, integrates with rack-mounted tablets, delivers evaluation and testing tools, connects with your weight room’s TV to display timers, leaderboards and whole lot more.
Belanger knows how innovative TeamBuildr’s platform really is, because it checks the same boxes he checks when seeking innovation within Yale’s strength and conditioning program. To Belanger, innovation means engaging with student-athletes in meaningful ways, creating efficiencies in communication and programming, and driving incremental improvement at all times, to cite just a few examples.
“The level of communication we foster through TeamBuildr is exceptional,” says Belanger. “There’s so much more involvement and outreach from the students, even when they head off campus, because they understand what to do.”
Belanger says it helps student-athletes stay confident in the process. They know they’re doing the right exercises and providing the right feedback. They’re engaged with and tied to the process. This cultivates a level of accountability among athletes that permeates their entire lives.
“That engagement and accountability becomes second nature,” he says. “If they’re applying that level of accountability to their strength and conditioning program, they’re more likely to apply it in everything they do. It becomes a tool that reinforces those values and improves performance in all aspects of their lives. Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
TeamBuildr also increased Belanger’s administrative efficiency, which allows coaches to focus more on what’s really important: coaching athletes. It certainly helps that today’s college student expects to organize their lives using apps. Belanger’s search for efficiency through innovation, combined with the modern athlete’s comfort with using high-tech tools, has a multiplying effect.
“When we bring athletes in for the first time, we run a lift session involving an orientation with the weight room,” says Belanger. “Part of that orientation is an introduction to TeamBuildr, how it works and our standards and expectations for usage and communication. Depending on the team, you might have to reinforce that message a few different ways at different times, but today’s athlete expects to use his phone or her tablet to manage their lives. Extending it to the weight room is just natural.”
When migrating from any comfortable system to something brand new, most people expect to face learning curves and unforeseen challenges, but TeamBuildr proved so immediately intuitive and helpful that Belanger never experienced the normal frustrations. The upside manifested itself so quickly and intensely that working with TeamBuildr has only produced upside since Yale deployed it.
“Probably the best way to quantify the level of overall improvement we’ve experienced since implementing TeamBuildr is in terms of variables in training that we can control,” says Belanger. “I would say I’m confident that — on the strength and conditioning side of things here at Yale —I’m in control of 95 percent of the variables that are the basis of what we do.”
For coaches seeking to create control from the chaos, TeamBuildr delivers.
Details
Whether you are programming phys ed, weights classes, or sport-specific workouts, students and athletes can input workout data via their mobile devices or by using our weight room view tablet feature. This feature allows 4-8 athletes to receive their individualized workouts, including prescribed loads and intensities, using tablets in the weight room. Our reporting features help coaches view student progress over time, identify strengths and weaknesses, and visualize the effectiveness of the strength and conditioning program.
