The Challenge: One small staff, 600 athletes, and a platform that fought back
Sam Roome is the Director of Strength and Conditioning at Emory & Henry, where the performance program reaches a larger share of campus than almost anywhere else in college athletics. The department trains more than 600 athletes, which works out to roughly 66 percent of the student body, across a roster of sports that includes a 129-player football team and a 125-player men's soccer program that is larger than most NCAA rosters. Sam personally programs for basketball, volleyball, and football, and he runs the department with two assistant directors of strength and conditioning, Sarai Flores and Tyler Smith. Sarai covers soccer, wrestling, men's lacrosse, and track and field, while Tyler covers baseball, softball, women's lacrosse, women's rugby, and cross country and assists with football. With an incoming class of 298 freshmen to absorb, the three of them are responsible for more athletes than many full S&C staffs manage with twice the headcount.
Before FYTT, the platform Sam used could not keep up with that volume, because every change to a plan meant manual rebuilding and managing different groups, sports, and training percentages turned into a constant cycle of duplicate work. The friction was worst in the summer, when half of his athletes train on campus and half train remotely from home, which meant he needed one system that could reach both groups without forcing him to build everything twice.
"Compared to what I was running before, FYTT makes my job 10 times easier. I am saving 10 hours a week, and that time goes straight back into coaching." Sam Roome, Emory & Henry
The Solution: Programming, metrics, and delivery that scale to the whole department
Once Sam moved to FYTT, the work that used to eat his week started collapsing into a handful of repeatable steps, and the platform began carrying the operational weight that he had been carrying by hand.
Build once, then adjust by group. Rather than rebuilding a plan every time a sport or a subgroup needed something different, Sam builds one program and assigns group-based variants, so a single lift can carry shared work for the full team with additional blocks routed only to the groups that need them. When two sports need similar work, he copies a program from one team to another and copies content between days instead of starting from scratch, which is exactly where most of his old duplicate work used to live.
Metrics and 1RM math that he controls. The biggest difference for Sam is that he decides how each number is calculated instead of accepting whatever his previous platform shipped. For a hex bar jump, he can set the metric to pull from body weight, and he can run different training percentages by sport, holding basketball at 85 percent where football sits at 90. Because the formulas are his, the programming reflects how he actually trains each team rather than forcing every sport through the same template.
One system for on-campus and remote athletes. Delivery reaches both halves of his roster from one place, because athletes in the facility log their work at tablet stations while his remote athletes train from the mobile app over the summer. The on-campus and off-campus groups stay on the same system, which means Sam is no longer maintaining two versions of the same program to cover two training environments.
Fast changes once the season starts. When a plan needs to change, Sam edits the workout instance on the calendar without touching the underlying template, so a last-minute adjustment for one team does not ripple into everyone else's programming. With a department this size, that separation between the template and the day-to-day calendar is what keeps a single change from turning into an afternoon of cleanup.
Sam is also working to move his leaderboards into FYTT so testing results rank themselves instead of living in a separate sheet, which removes one more piece of weekly admin he has been handling by hand for a roster this large.
The Impact: 10 hours a week back, and a system that scales with the program
What changed for Sam was not a single feature, but the shift from a platform he had to fight to one that handles the volume for him, which freed him to spend his time on coaching instead of rebuilding.
Ten hours a week returned to coaching. By Sam's own count, FYTT saves him 10 hours every week compared to his previous system, because the manual rebuilding, the duplicate programs, and the side spreadsheets that used to fill his calendar are gone. That time goes back into the work that actually moves his athletes.
Individualization without the duplicate work. Group-based variants and custom 1RM math let Sam train basketball, volleyball, and football differently from one set of programs, so the individualization that used to require separate builds now lives inside a single workflow that scales to 600 athletes.
One source of truth across two training environments. Tablet stations in the facility and the mobile app for remote athletes keep on-campus and off-campus training on the same platform, which means Sam manages one system through the summer instead of reconciling two.
Conclusion: Why FYTT for a department this size
Sam's program is a stress test that most platforms cannot pass, because a three-coach staff is responsible for more than 600 athletes across a dozen sports, two training environments, and a 298-athlete incoming class. FYTT gave him a single platform to build once and adjust by group, to control his own metrics and 1RM math, and to reach both his on-campus and remote athletes without doubling his work, which is what makes the difference at this scale. For a small staff covering an entire athletic department, that combination of speed and control is what turns 10 hours of weekly rebuilding back into 10 hours of coaching.
