Atler Vision: empower fitness assessment and athlete evaluation.
We’ve been working on a new product for coaches the last few months and I’m very glad it is finally something to talk about. Most likely in a month or two, we are going to release Atler for private beta access and there will be few iterations for early adopters. That will be a way to gather additional round of feedbacks and release few more great features.
This article details about functionality we are working on for official reseales. If you want to get a general idea of what is Atler and what it is not— there is a shorter text about it.
https://medium.com/atler/atler-for-coaches-and-athletes-ee2aebc91d5
So, What is Atler?
In short:
Atler is a software platform which helps coaches enter, store and analyze any fitness assessment results.
Longer?
Atler is a tool helping make fitness assessment for Athletic Development, Head Coaches and athletes easier, faster, more accessible and insightful. Help Development Coaches to easier organize the assessment process, enter results, store data for any kind of testings and clearer results analysis. Head Coaches to have transparent athletic perspective on all available assets. As a result Atler makes a team clearer understand its strength and weaknesses, able to design better training program, monitor progress, have extra incentive for deliberate development process and greater athletic results.
Even longer version and why it has to bring value to a team better than other tools requires some details.
There are particular areas in athletic evaluations which are usually part of a general plan or occur individually if needed.
Meanwhile, there are number of tools to handle athletes data, but we basically have three options. All have own pros and cons (if you are still reading I bet you most probably know them):
- Athlete Management Systems. They are complex, too complex, too expensive and usually have quite poor user interface.
- Niche solutions, which are usually ‘hard-coded’ to predefined methodology and you must follow or let it go. They might be good at what they specifically offer and have ‘a decades of research’, but if you have specific process or custom needs — you have to look for a workaround. Most probably the next one;
- Use Excel or another spreadsheet tool. You don’t have to pay extra for it and also they provide full control over data and analysis. You can do whatever you want. But with spreadsheets a coach literally has to do work Data Analysts do in other companies. It may easily take few days in order to analyze fitness assessment data comprehensively. Getting each player profile, dynamics, evaluate results against norms and averages, rankings, building team profile.
Atler focuses on comprehensive evaluations as on the first place its data structure bases on test sets (batteries) and configurable analytics for complex athlete profiles and their dynamics.
It is specifically designed to handle and analyze any fitness assessment data as, despite Atler has database of default tests, test categories, athlete position/groups and unit, user can easily customize any of them or create new ones.
Atler simplifies, streamlines and improves assessment process as it helps on each stage of the process, from easy data entry with mobile and analytics to results sharing.
Yet it has profound functionality for analysis with team profile dashboard and individual profiles configurable for automatic results assessment to your custom results standards or automatic results ranking within your team. Some insights about it coming in the next article, it will worth to read it!
Atler tries to answer all other tools disadvantages with a powerful, but simple solution. Simple, so that you don’t need to learn how to use it. Yet flexible enough to customize how you look at your team, athletes or tests you run, to be able to fit almost anything.
So, yes, Atler is at extend a niche solution, but for kind of evaluations. Focused on comprehensive assessment practice rather than on being build for particular model, it means to provide neat experience, flexible and powerful functionality for what it focuses on.
** In fact all of the above doesn’t mean that you cannot store operative day-to-day performance evaluation data in Atler. You actually can, but we know it is not optimal for that purpose right now.
True, but why use Atler?
First of all, in order to build meaningful, insightful product we turn to other coaches (users). As any product should. While closed alpha testing we tried to get versatile experiences and worked with coaches of different backgrounds. From elite Kontinental Hockey League level to local sports school. Worked with Head, Strength and Conditioning, Goalie Coaches.
Confirming our own experience, few constant points kept appearing:
- it takes huge amount of time and efforts to handle and analyze all the data;
- coaches usually don’t dig deep into data because it requires a lot of time and data analyst skills;
- process of data handling is messy because of different devices and platforms used for testing and, obviously, a ways to register results — paper or spreadsheets;
- analyze data in dynamics is even harder because it’s getting lost and its structure complexity increases exponentially;
- everyone has different approach!!!
Not all coaches do all the steps to get full analysis and even not all coaches do testings!!!
But we absolutely sure that scientific approach to sport in general, and assessments in particular, is absolutely necessary in order to compete on the highest level, make deliberate progress and get world-class results.
Every single coach who worked with Atler by now emphasized that it is ‘ultimately easy to use’. We like to tell that in Atler coaches need to do just one simple things: enter testing results. That’s it.
Right now we see three major value points Atler brings to a coach and a team:
- it saves a lot of time, physical and mental force for you and your team;
- it instantly brings you visually insightful, comprehensive analytics about you team in general and each athlete in particular;
- it meant to make assessment data a team asset! It will be ultimately easy to share it with other coaches and athletes. Unfortunately, not part of beta release, but there are workarounds.
A closer look
Basically athletes, results analytics and test protocol are the core of Atler.
We have predefined setup for:
- test categories
- a lot of tests for each of them
- units
- athlete positions.
You can reconfigure all of those as you like and, if you need, setup multiple teams.
We have a lot of interesting analytical features so that your data speaks loud. Analytics and insights is what it’s all about, but it deserves separate text.
All that you get just as soon as you enter testing results.
Team Dashboard
Team dashboard has a lot of insightful information. It helps to analyze team results from tree key perspectives as stated above:
- team strengths and weaknesses;
- distribution of results per norms (or statistical distribution if norms are not set);
- individual deviations.
Having that picture from macro to micro level helps you to make appropriate decisions. From defining basis for training program for whole team to identifying athletes with exceptionally good or low results in whole team context. All in one screen.
Athlete profile
Athlete profile is one of the most important functionalities and basically one of the main reason to run assessments. It consists of three main parts:
- athlete profile;
- test results dynamics;
- list of tests.
Profile consists of all test set (battery) data and gives comprehensive overview of an athlete physical profile. It has nice view with ranking based on team results statistical distribution, but read about it in another text in details (coming soon…).
Test sets
Test Set is an entity for test battery or combine or any comprehenfive set of tests coaches need to evaluate fitness shape or profile of an athlete. E.g. Football(Soccer) testing battery, Military Workplace Fitness Assessments, NHL Draft Combine, NFL Combine, NBA Pre-Draft Combine, AFL, MLB Pre-draft Combine, Muay Thai battery, Sprint Swimming, Lacrosse or any other.
In Atler you even may create your battery just one time and than duplicate it and be sure that you have consistent evaluation structure. Thus you get ready for testing in just two clicks. Most importantly you can compare result of different Test Sets results so that you can see it in dynamics.
Tests. Entry and Configuration
Test is an entity to contain all your testing results. As easy as it sounds. No restrictions in method, number or type of results. You can use existing tests, create your own or configure any as you need. So that you can have all the results stored and assessed the way you need.
Huge time-saver is responsive web version for mobile. Just open Atler from you phone, find a test and fill in results. No tons of papers. Later you can even export it if you want to share it with Data Analysis for advanced analysis. The easiest way to get all your assessment data on computer.
Results evaluation / Custom standards
About half of development coaches in elite sports have their one custom results standards. You can set your own rating system for each test and analytics automatically evaluates testing results accordingly.
Besides that, Atler has custom model(!!!) of results ranking based on statistical distribution results. It lets you evaluate results within your group of athletes. It is very helpful to compose meaningful program with reasonable training load. Read about our approach in details in the next article. It will worth it!
Configurations
Each sport, team and coach has some specificities in their process and approach. Thus, tools have to be flexible. Atler has database of default tests, test categories, athlete position/groups and unit, but user can easily customize any of them or create new ones. Basically beyond Teams/Test Sets/Tests/Results backbone you can configure data structure in any way you need.
Export
If you want to give your results for advanced analysis to Data Analyst, don’t want to share web access or need to prepare custom report — you may easily export complete .xls or .csv of your Team, Athlete, Test Set or Test data.
These and other cool things, like Team Profile, Advanced Sharing, Permission Management, Tailored Reports Print/Export and Embedded Formulas are coming with the following release. Hope you like it and excited as we are.
Meanwhile, we are getting ready for private beta coming later this summer. And plan to give early access to 5–10 coaches when complete few key workflows and feel it can deliver real value.
If you want to try Atler and ready to share you experience directly with me please drop a message to hello@atler.app. Please include few lines of details on what’s your position, team/institution, sports, what tests you use, how often and when you perform assessments. Not much, just for us to understand your context.
In any case, if you are a coach and you have thoughts to share — don’t hesitate to contact and say ‘hi’. We always happy to hear feedback and different experiences.
