Mt. Lebanon High School

Case Study:

Mt. Lebanon High School is one of the largest 4A high schools in Pennsylvania graduating classes with up to 450 students per year spread across 26 sports. 

Frank Cremonese is the head strength and conditioning coach for Mt. Lebanon. With certifications with NASM, CF Level 1 and CSCS, Frank oversees the physical training for all 26 sports with a specific background in wrestling, football, and track & field. Frank is also the Pennsylvania state director for the NHSSCA.

Transforming a program from Excel to cloud-based software.

Coach Cremonese was using Excel spreadsheets for the better part of his early strength coaching career. After building workouts, Frank would often print them out for the athletes while also writing workouts on 20 or so whiteboards in the weight room. In addition to the paper costs, this was a laborious process that ate a lot of Frank’s time - even on weekends.

Because of the time-consuming programming, little to no tracking of athlete progress was being done at Mt. Lebanon. With such a large group of athletes, sport coaches could not rely on the strength program to relay data on athletes.

Frank understood that the current method of Excel and whiteboards not only added an labor-intensive burden to his day-to-day operations, but also that his current process prevented the strength program from taking a strategic step towards being a data-driven program.

When coming to this realization, Frank assumed there would be some software tools available to solve this problem and looked for an easier alternative to Excel for workout programming, data-collection and something that would also give athletes all-around access to workouts at any given time. At this point, distributing workouts to 1,000 athletes while also collecting feedback for analysis had become an impossible task without a specific tool in-hand.

Researching a Solution

For a while, Frank utilized Google docs and a few software programs only to find that it was still very cumbersome. He discovered the 14-day free trial of TeamBuildr by searching online and decided to give it a shot.

“There was so much value for the price it was amazing. It was loaded with features on top of the most important feature: a super-fast way to program my own workouts. Additionally, it included a tablet module that fit into my strategy of providing tablets in the weight room for streamlining our program. Before the trial was over, I knew this would be solution for our strength and conditioning programming.”

Implementing Weight Room View

After adopting the TeamBuildr platform, Frank then implemented the Weight Room View interface in the weight room. Although the smartphone app was widely used to retrieve and track workouts, the tablet interface offered a more streamlined approach to data-collection process on the floor.

“I still have a lot of athletes and I wanted the absolute best way to track their individual and collective progress. Weight Room View is much more streamlined than any alternative. It eliminates the issue of athletes not having smartphones or having 100+ smartphones in the gym.”

“Additionally, the speed of it is incredible. Input was faster than smartphones. Also, I could check progress as I am watching the iPads in the racks which is something that is really important to me.”

Conclusion

“Importantly, the school was on board 100%. The administration loved the idea because they wanted the strength training program to reflect the school by being data-driven. They got 100% behind the project.”

“Honestly, if you would just give it a chance and take the time to seriously learn it during the 14-day trial, it will be worth it and it will change your system. On Excel, it used to take me 4 to 6 hours to program workouts for the week. On TeamBuildr, I pull up a saved version of the week’s workout, tweak it, and it will take me less than two hours total to create a brand new workout for all the athletes. It’s going to save you so much time.”

“Lastly, coaches with other sports can get on and get all the data on attendance, data, progress. You can run a report for them in one minute or you can give them a login and have them look at anything they want for their team and players.”