The Challenge: Programming for a full athletic department on spreadsheets
Before arriving at Nichols, TJ Cahill spent four years at Amherst College, where the entire strength and conditioning operation ran on Excel. That meant building every program, every leaderboard, and every group split by hand. When TJ moved into the head role at Nichols in mid-July of his first year, he inherited a program that already used FYTT, which gave him the chance to compare the two workflows side by side. Coming from a spreadsheet-only background, the contrast was immediate and the challenges he had been working around for years suddenly had names.
The biggest pain points TJ recognized in hindsight were the ones every spreadsheet coach lives with: building duplicate programs from scratch when two sports needed something similar, manually rebuilding leaderboards every testing cycle, printing four different programs to handle position-group differences in football, and double-handling testing data by writing it on paper first and then asking an intern to type it into a system later.
"Looking back, I was doing way more work than I needed to. With Excel, you do not realize how much of your time is going into rebuilding the same things over and over until you see what it looks like when the software just handles it for you." — TJ Cahill
The Solution: Programming, groups, and metrics that actually scale
TJ's first nine months on FYTT were focused on getting the year delivered. Once he had room to breathe in the spring, he started exploring what the platform could actually do, and the workflow started shifting fast.
Adding programs and copying across sports. TJ described building out summer programs as "super simple," especially when two fall sports needed similar work. Rather than rebuild from scratch the way he would have in Excel, he copies a program from one team to another and adjusts from there. For incoming freshmen across multiple fall sports, that single workflow change saves hours of duplicate work.
Group-based programming for football. This is the one TJ said he would not give up. Nichols has roughly 100 football players, and instead of printing four different programs for everyone, the bigs, the quarterbacks, and so on, he builds one lift with shared blocks for the full roster and additional blocks assigned only to specific groups. Athletes see exactly what they are supposed to do, and TJ stops managing four versions of the same workout. The same workflow extends to in-season needs: when an athlete needs upper-body only or lower-body only work, he assigns them to that group temporarily and removes them when they are back to full programming.
Leaderboards in five minutes instead of an afternoon. During spring testing, TJ showed his interns how to build leaderboards in FYTT and had every metric live within five minutes. The Excel version of that same task used to consume a meaningful chunk of his testing day. Now testing data flows from the tablet directly into athlete metrics, which means the leaderboards build themselves.
Live data entry on the tablet during testing. For smaller rosters like field hockey and women's soccer, TJ now has an intern enter testing results directly into FYTT on a tablet as the athlete completes the test. The middle step of writing on paper and re-entering later is gone. For larger rosters like football, he still uses paper, but the testing data lands in athlete metrics the same day rather than days later.
Decision trees and automations on the horizon. TJ has started exploring conditional programming logic, including using thresholds to route athletes into recovery or higher-intensity groups based on game-day playing time. He had been doing this manually after every basketball game by moving high-minute players into the right group for the next day's lift. With automations, that move happens for him.
The Impact: Less grunt work, more coaching
What changed for TJ was not one feature or one moment. It was the shift from a workflow built on manual rebuilding to one where the software carries the operational weight, which freed him up to focus on the work that actually drives athlete outcomes.
Faster programming, less duplicate work. Copying programs between sports, assigning blocks to groups instead of printing separate sheets, and building leaderboards in minutes have collectively given TJ back hours every week that used to go into administrative cleanup.
Cleaner athlete experience. Group-based programming means football players see exactly what their position group is doing, with no confusion about which line on the sheet applies to them. That removes a daily friction point in the weight room and lets athletes focus on training rather than parsing instructions.
Faster, more accurate testing cycles. Live tablet entry during testing eliminates the paper-to-software lag that used to slow down post-testing analysis, and gets metrics in front of athletes the same day they were tested.
A platform that keeps unlocking new value. TJ has been on FYTT for nearly a year and he is still finding new capabilities, like leaderboards and automations, that change how he works. The platform that started as a programming tool has become the operating system for the entire S&C department.
Conclusion: Why FYTT for a small-staff college program
TJ's story is the spreadsheet replacement story most coaches recognize but rarely articulate: Excel works until you realize how much of your day is going into rebuilding the same things every cycle. FYTT gave him a single platform to handle programming, groups, metrics, leaderboards, and testing across an entire athletic department, with the depth to keep growing into more advanced workflows like decision trees and automations as he is ready for them. For programs operating with small staffs and full athletic department coverage, that combination of ease and depth is what makes the switch worth it.
