Ennis High School

Case Study:

Ennis High School is a 5-time Texas 5A high school football champion. Considered a perennial powerhouse, the program fields 150 football players each year - all of which are on TeamBuildr. More impressively, there is actually no full-time strength coach on staff. Rather, the football coaches collectively run the weight room together.

Before TeamBuildr

Before TeamBuildr, Ennis coaches used printed paper sheets created over the weekend and printed at the beginning of the week then stapled the papers together into “workout groups.” Athletes rotated from rack to rack then wrote their numbers down onto paper workout cards. Coaches would then enter the results into the computer during their conference period which would take an hour or more per day. To cut down on time, coaches would not record sets with missed reps and just lower the maxes for the next workout manually.

Key Feature: Weight Room View

Today, Ennis football players use iPads with the TeamBuildr Weight Room View module creating multiple benefits:

• Allowing the strength program to go paperless
• Delivering custom workouts (%s, reps, etc.) to reach athlete
• Collecting data directly from athletes on rack-mounted tablets
• 1RM updating automatically each session
• Aggregating data into reports for the coaches

Ennis coaches were able to use iPads that the school already owned at no charge. TeamBuildr’s Weight Room View module works on any tablets which allows many schools to purchase lower-priced tablets as an alternative to iPads. In total, the Ennis weight room operates on 16 tablets – one tablet on each rack or platform with an extra tablet used to check attendance and manage/change programming on the fly.

Programming Workouts

Prior to using a software platform, workouts were programmed with the BiggerFasterStronger (BFS) software program which Ennis cited as having a few setbacks such as inability to customize programs, manual data-collection and lacking ease-of-use. Although Ennis’ training program today on TeamBuildr is similar to BFS, coaches can now easily and quickly customize workout programming down to the individual athlete.

In addition to adding flexibility to the programming, coaches create the training program in a minimal amount of time due to the streamlined Workout Building Calendar. The Ennis staff then saves workout programming into 4-week and 6-week cycles and simply “loads” the training blocks rather than re-building programs from scratch. Modifying the training blocks are done by simply editing the sets, reps, and percentages to periodize the workouts correctly for the next phase.

Interviews: Head Coach & AD

Ennis Strength Staff: “The head coach and Athletic Director love the software program; it’s faster for our team which means a more efficient strength program. In this environment, the schedule changes often - sometimes very last minute - and that used to make us really reactive. But now we can simply change the workouts on TeamBuildr in a few clicks and our weight room doesn’t miss a beat.

We often have skill players and linemen split up so the weight room only has 40-80 players in it at one time. Therefore, the iPads on the rack are a huge life saver because there aren’t papers all over the weight room when the next team comes in. The weight room is cleaner.”

What would you say to another coach?

Ennis Strength Staff: “At least try it out! If you’re not committed right away, try the 14-day trial and monitor 4-5 kids and you’ll see how easy it is. Spend some time in the beginning creating all the workouts upfront; after that, it’s like running a program on autopilot and being able to focus on the kids in the weight room 100%. We hardly even worry about programming - we’re simply editing existing programs and coaching quality of reps.”

What do the athletes think about it?

Ennis Strength Staff: “They love it. The players think it’s cool because they have iPads on the racks. The seniors that graduate come back from college in the summer and complain about how they don’t even have that technology at their collegiate programs. A lot of our players like it because they can see who is stronger than who. Leaderboards are always available. They can make gains that display visually on TeamBuildr. It  brings a whole new level of transparency.”