The Problem

Working in GAA has certain challenges as regards managing a squad of athletes, returning injured athletes to play, and communicating that effectively with technical coaches to plan training sessions and loading over the short to medium term. We were finding that we didn’t all have access to the same information and that it was taking multiple phone calls to get everyone up to date. We wanted to clean up the communication and information flow between the medical, performance, and coaching staff. RYPT has allowed us to succeed in doing that.

The Solution

Planning our training week with centralised injury tracking

The injuries dashboard allows us to centralise our injury information, giving an overview of the current injury list and the return-to-play timelines. We use this to plan the training week and give the coaching staff an idea of the numbers and the individuals available to help with their session planning.

We can also report on this throughout the season use the information to determine the effectiveness of our interventions to prevent injury.

Using readiness questionnaires to make data-led decisions to individualise training

The lifestyle questionnaire assists us in managing the team pre-session and making any late adjustments to session availability. This allows us to manage loads and individualise training based on individual responses, and gives the coaching staff time to adjust their session plans.

Individualising sessions in just a few clicks with pre-built blocks

RYPT’s blocks feature fits in well with this individual management of players. We’ve built a library of training blocks from off-feet conditioning to rehab blocks, depending on the injury site. This means that we can adjust the program easily for those individuals we’re making short-notice decisions on based on the data. It takes less than a minute to build a detailed session for any athlete whose session is being adjusted.

What we Love

It’s been the overall change in our systems that has been the big win for us. Everyone just has to log in to the one platform to access all the information we use in our discussions, no searching for different versions of Google Forms or spreadsheets.

About the Coach

Neil Welch is a strength and conditioning/rehab coach. Neil has a PhD in applied biomechanics and works with the Kildare GAA senior football team as Lead S&C and has his own coaching business, Get My Body Strong, providing rehab and performance programs to individuals and teams.