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Interview with Apollo CEO, Dave Hancock

Q

Why have you taken over Apollo and created the brand new V2 system?

A

After spending 22 years in full-time sports as a performance director and head Physio, I realized that all the software that is currently on the market is not fully customizable by the user. By assessing and looking at what is currently on the market, I saw professional, collegiate, and even high school teams that still used multiple software platforms.

An example being the athletic trainers using one system, the strength coaches using several systems, and the coaches and scouts will be using different systems.

And what most teams who are a little more cutting edge would be doing is bringing this data in manually through an excel spreadsheet or pivot table that they have created themselves with their chosen calculations. However, manpower to physically enter this data is a full time job.

The way that modern technology is today, a system should be able to easily bring the data in and allow for an instant analysis of the data. It can then give a specific report that can be chosen or changed by the team in any point in time. This is why I have created ApolloV2.

The basis of this is to allow the trainer to spend more time treating, the strength coach to spend more time coaching, and the coaches to have an easy access to a dashboard that assists them in making key decisions around player performance.

Q

How is Apollo different than the industry competitors?

A

I realized that there was a niche for a complete system and that one was not existent yet. In my opinion, other systems front-end dashboards are not visually pleasing and the adaptability of the systems can’t be fully adapted. For example, changing the system’s language to Spanish to cater to your athlete’s needs. You can’t plug and play anything into these systems due to the way that they were built. We have started with a blank piece of paper and thought about the ideal situation for the personnel in modern day sport. The three key elements that we worked around are:

1. Modular and adaptive by the user, it needs to be visually pleasing and tell a story.

2. You need to be able to find any data within the system in two clicks.

3. It needs to alert you when there is a problem within sport or injury. Apollo gives you the support of an experienced team of people who have worked at the very top of sport around the world. That is what I have created with ApolloV2. We have created the ultimate solution.

Q

What can Apollo do for my team?

A

We spent over $3.5 Million and created this system in 18 months with our new engineer team and data scientist team. We have learned from our previous mistakes. We have done our research and spent time going around with different teams in the Premiership, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Olympic teams, and understanding what they are doing and what they are not doing and how they can do it better in a data management perspective.

ApolloV2 will give you an alert when a player is under performing and when there is an injury risk. It will allow the coaching, medical, and performance stay of ANY team and ANY sport to be talking from the same energy around their true objective data. ApolloV2 is a key asset to any team and any coach to assist him or her in making key decisions on performance.

ApolloV2 is built on the latest technology. It is built in modular format, which means you can create your own departments within the system. You can plug and play, and you do not have to change the way you are currently operating and can bring the data in form other systems or software that you are using. There is no interruption and you do not have to start again. But what you do have now, is you have your entire collection of data together; under one hood. This is what a modern day sports software system should be. Incorporating: video, coaches evaluation, medical information, game data, practice data, nutrition, psychology, concussion tests, the well being of the athlete’s sleep and stress.