Today we’re making it official: York University women’s hockey has joined HeyCoach, the app that gives coaches daily insight into their athletes in one place.
The York Lions compete at the highest level of Canadian university hockey. Behind the bench is Dan Church, York’s longest-serving active head coach and the man who led Canada’s national women’s team to gold at the 2012 IIHF Women’s World Championship.
HeyCoach is the one place in the digital world that every coach needs to be because it simplifies your life so that you can spend more time actually in the real world focusing on coaching.
From scattered tools to one place
Before HeyCoach, the Lions’ information lived in separate tools. “It was all disconnected,” Dan says. “It was labour-intensive. As opposed to now, it’s at the tip of my finger pretty immediately.”
Now the whole team works in one app. Every day, coaches can see a readiness score for each player, which tells them who is “right in the zone” and who might “consider a little bit more rest.” HeyCoach also creates a feedback loop that keeps athletes and coaches connected and builds cohesion.
For university athletes, the load isn’t only on the ice. HeyCoach’s direction and insights account for academic stress alongside physical exertion and recovery, so a heavy week in the classroom shows up in the guidance, not just a heavy week at the rink.
It’s about relationships
For the coaches, the technology matters because of the conversations it starts. “The great coaches understand that at the end of the day, it’s about relationships and it’s not about X’s and O’s,” Dan says. Seeing insights on every athlete each day lets the coaching staff start the conversations that build a culture of high performance. For athletes, that means more guidance and more support, and a coach who notices before they have to ask.
That is what we mean by Coaching Intelligence: more coaching for every athlete, less work for every coach.
A full athlete pathway
With the Lions, HeyCoach now supports every level of the athlete pathway: U9 all the way up to U18 AAA, Junior hockey, and now University. A player can start in HeyCoach as a kid and still be using it at the university level.
Want to see how HeyCoach could work for your team? Request a demo.