My name is Alison Freeman, and I’ve been a triathlon coach for nearly a decade. When I first started coaching, I planned and tracked everything on paper – training blocks, consolidated race schedules so I could see all my athletes’ race plans in one place, and notes on things like each athlete’s schedule preferences.That worked for my first year or so, when I had only a few athletes. Once my roster grew, however, that paper system became cumbersome. So, as I’m always prone to to creating a project out of a problem, I developed a FileMaker Pro database to house everything I used to plan and track on paper. I expanded the database over time, allowing me to plan a Season Road Map, track threshold tests, view training zones, keep notes on athlete conversations, and more.
I believed for a long time that my FileMaker Pro system was one that other coaches might appreciate as well, but I couldn’t quite envision how to translate my single-user platform to a publicly available multi-user platform. Finally, as part of a goal-setting exercise to kick off 2024, I decided to go for it. I spent a few weeks exploring web-based platforms, thinking through functionality and app design, and ultimately decided to build the app myself.
I am a self-taught web designer and developer, with enough knowledge of HMTL, CSS, PHP, and MySQL – and confidence that probably exceeded my ability – to believe that I could pull this off. I couldn’t have done it with the knowledge that I started with, but thanks to an Internet full of resources (including ChatGPT and StackOverflow in particular), little enough going on in my life at the moment that I was able to devote basically all of my non-coaching hours toward coding, and an epic amount of patience from my husband, I managed to get the job done.
Insight CoachPro is a leap above what I originally had built using FileMaker Pro, and I have some great ideas about how to take it another leap beyond where it is now. I hope that it helps you manage your coaching workload – and makes you a more efficient, better coach – just as it’s done for me.