I recently had a long conversation with my good friend, former pro teammate, and colleague at Techne, Molly Menchel. We were discussing the Time Trained feature in the Techne app.
When I set out to create Techne, I knew one thing: I wanted to recreate for players the empowering experience and lessons I had learned myself that allowed me to realize my long-term goal of playing professional soccer. I wanted to help other players feel the power of personal investment.
A major part of that success on the field, and what has made Techne a success, is the commitment to the concept of compounding effect.
Compounding effect is a belief in the power of doing the right things on a daily basis and seeing and feeling it accrue over time. The Techne app’s primary feature is that it allows players to track the time they’ve spent training, and for them to become aware of how the little bits really do add up. They can even progress through our Training Sock System, which is like the belt system in martial arts.
We often get the question, “How do we know if our players are actually training when they report their time trained?” This is what Molly and I were discussing. We have built a system with very competitive players and work with a number of clubs that encourage and celebrate competitiveness and ambition. Sometimes, the time players have logged in the app is unbelievable, even to our team.
The way the time tracking works is that once players see a brief demo video and read a description of what to do on a drill, they then time themselves for a short interval (1, 2, or 3 minutes) while they work on the skill or exercise. Every minute that elapses is added to their training log. So the time reported has 100% been spent in the app.
Part of our job as educators through the app is to not only help players train on their own and know what to do, but to teach them how to do it, and how to think about it.
Like anything, you get out of your training what you put into it. We now have four players who have reached our Black Sock Level, the highest, which is 1000 hours trained in the app! The bottom line is that any player can log a lot of time for a few months and be on the top of our, or their club’s, Weekly Leaderboards in the short term. But when players commit to the daily practice of intentional training, over time, the results go far beyond the Leaderboards, or even the field.
Molly and I laughed as we joked about how crazy it is what we’ve created. She was my roommate in Kansas City during the pro season prior to the Techne launch and saw the vision literally before day one.
The players who invest in themselves--relentlessly, consistently, and with purpose and focus--will rise to the top. There’s no question in our minds. We’ve seen it in our own playing careers and over the four-plus years of Techne.