500 Athletes. Two Campuses. One Platform to Deliver.
Harvard-Westlake fields one of the deepest high school athletic programs in the country, and the scale of that operation is the first thing any strength coach notices. The performance staff supports more than 500 athletes across 50 teams, split between two campuses and two separate weight rooms. Running a coherent, high-level program in an environment like that is a genuine logistical challenge, because every team has its own calendar, every sport has its own demands, and every athlete arrives with a different training and injury history that needs to be accounted for.
According to Jeff Crelling, Director of Sports Performance at Harvard-Westlake, their ability to deliver a high-level sports performance program is accelerated by the way they can operate with FYTT.
Individualizing at the click of a button
The core problem at Harvard-Westlake’s scale is not designing good training. The staff knows how to do that. The problem is delivering individualized training to hundreds of athletes without the delivery itself consuming the entire week. This is where FYTT changes the math for them, because the staff can push a full program out to a large number of athletes at the click of a button rather than building and distributing each one by hand.
That speed does not come at the cost of specificity, which is the part that matters most to a performance staff. Coaches can customize workouts on the fly or set them up ahead of time, and they can stand up individual programs for specific athletes without rebuilding anything from scratch. Training history and injury history are straightforward to factor in, which means an athlete returning from injury or a position group with unique demands gets programming that reflects their actual situation instead of a one-size-fits-all template. For a staff managing this many athletes, the combination of fast delivery and real individualization is what makes the whole operation viable.
FYTT allows us to deliver our program to a large number of athletes at the click of a button. We can customize those workouts on the fly or ahead of time and have individual programs set up for athletes at the click of a button.
Jeff Crelling, Director of Sports Performance
The whiteboard: running the weight room in real time
If there is one feature the Harvard-Westlake staff singles out, it is the digital whiteboard, and the way they have deployed it is a good example of coaches pushing a tool past its default setup. Like any strength and conditioning platform, FYTT delivers each athlete’s program to their own profile on a phone or iPad, showing the prescribed exercises and the prescribed loads. The whiteboard takes that individual view and turns it into a single team-wide sheet that looks and behaves the way a coach’s Excel tracker would, except that it updates live as athletes train.
In practice, that gives the coach a real-time read on the entire room from one screen. The whiteboard shows every athlete’s prescribed sets and reps in one place, and it highlights an athlete’s name when they log more weight than was prescribed, so the staff can immediately see who is filling in their numbers and who is exceeding their targets as the session unfolds. Rather than walking the floor to confirm that athletes are recording their work, the staff can monitor compliance and output at a glance.
Harvard-Westlake took the standard setup a step further by connecting the whiteboard to a touchscreen TV in the weight room. Athletes can still log their workouts on a phone or iPad, but they can now also enter their weights directly on the big screen. The day’s workout can be toggled on and off alongside the live data, which means a coach can pull up the session visually and walk a group through it before they train. When the session is over, the staff can export the whiteboard to an Excel file, which they can break down later and use to inform how they prescribe loads going forward.
The staff is candid about where this helps most. The whiteboard is especially valuable for small and medium groups, where it improves workflow and lets the coach confirm that athletes are entering their weights as they go. It removes the friction of a clipboard while preserving the data the staff needs to keep programming intelligently.
The whiteboard feature on FYTT is something that we love here at Harvard-Westlake. It really helps us, especially with small to medium groups, to increase and improve workflow, and we can check and make sure our athletes are putting their weights in as they go.
Jeff Crelling
Why it works at scale
What ties the Harvard-Westlake story together is that none of these capabilities exist in isolation. Fast, button-click delivery is what makes 500 athletes manageable. Real individualization is what keeps that delivery from flattening every athlete into the same plan. The whiteboard and TV mode are what let a small staff actually run a packed weight room without losing visibility into who is doing the work. Each piece reinforces the others, which is why Crelling frames FYTT as a partnership rather than just a piece of software.
For a program operating across two campuses and two weight rooms, that integration is the difference between a system that scales and a set of tools that create more work than they save. Crelling and his staff have built a high-level performance operation on top of FYTT, and their experience is a useful reference point for any program wrestling with the same question of how to deliver individualized training to a large roster without drowning in administration.
I can’t say enough about FYTT and its ability to help us deliver our program to a large number of athletes across a lot of different teams and two different campuses.
See how FYTT scales with your program
If you are managing individualized training across multiple teams, campuses, or weight rooms, FYTT can show you how the platform maps to your current program structure. Book a walkthrough and bring your real setup, and the team will show you how it works the way you do.
