CrewLAB founders Simon Hoadley and Dominic Pardini spoke with row2k last week about the app, what it can offer to teams and especially to coaches, whether and how it might actually increase boat speed, and the $1.6 million in funding they raised to fund the project.
The company was founded and is run by rowers; Hoadley rowed in New Zealand in Whanganui with and alongside Kiwi legends Mahe Drysdale, Rob Waddell, Nathan Twaddle, Simon Lack, Eric Murray ("Eric Murray used to beat me a lot," Hoadley laughed), and others, and observing the coaching of Harry Mahon, Calvin Ferguson, Dick Tonks, and still others.
Hoadley coached in NZ for several years as well as in Australia for eight years before moving to Los Angeles in 2016, where he became the UCLA men's coach.
Pardini grew up in Newport Beach, and began his time in boathouses as a coxswain his frosh year in high school at the Newport Aquatic Center. He soon outgrew the coxswain's seat to row in the lightweight boats, and after starting at UCLA, joined the men's team, where Hoadley was the coach. During Pardini's time, the team tripled in size, raced at the Windermere Cup and in China, and won silver at ACRA.
Pardini went on to coach and NAC and now at California Yacht Club, as well as in the Pathways program.
row2k: Often a project like yours is born out of necessity or something you see missing in your own direct experience. Is is that the case here, and if so, how did that play out?
Hoadley: Having rowed and coached in three different countries, it was a combination of bringing a whole bunch of different ideas together. All three countries do different things differently, and they're doing some things really well and some things maybe not so well.
I've always liked the idea of trying to innovate a little bit, and the idea was to try to formalize some of these crazy innovations into some software that could other coaches could use.
To me, coaching is really a key element of society. I've got three kids, and they're influenced by parents, by teacher, and then by coaches. There are really good coaches out there teaching really good life skills, ethics and values, and behavioral sort of stuff. And it's really hard to be a coach. From when I started coaching to now, the turnover is just huge. Compared to other hard jobs like driving an ambulance or being an elementary school teacher, in coaching the turnover was much higher.
For a lot of them it was burnout, and maybe under appreciation. The 40 hour weeks turn into 100 hour weeks, and then eventually it becomes too much. We're trying to help coaches find a work life balance and continue on for a long time and support them to do the really key things that provide value to the world at large.
Pardini: It's quite personal for me, because when I graduated from UCLA, I worked in consulting, and I kept coaching at the time. Consulting is a very demanding job, and so is coaching. We had made systems and tools by ourselves to make that work well. Then we looked at all the teams, and everyone is doing the same thing. Everyone's cobbling together a spreadsheet, and an email system, and running a group chat, just try to make it work. There was an opportunity for us to do better, so we jumped in.
row2k: Maybe in an Elevator Pitch style, what problems do you think this can solve for coaches - before they invest any time in it, if you were to speak to a coach on the shore at a race and just had a minute to say this can help you, and here is how?
Pardini: Right; people think of us as like data science or data log company, but more accurately, what we do for teams is increase the communication and the cohesion. In one tool, we have your schedule, your video, got your roster, daily check ins for the athletes. It's a digital team space for your team to connect, it's ts digital operating system for you to communicate, make sure everybody knows where to be and when, and glues the team together.
And because we have lots of experience with data, you put all of your information in here, and you actually do get some performance benefit, you do see you do see trends, and you do see the impact. But first and foremost, it's accountability, and camaraderie, and it's unity on the team.
row2k: What would be the required time investment for the coach, and for an individual athlete, both to get started with the app, and then on a daily basis? And what might it wipe off the table that they are already doing? A coach will ask, I'm super busy, it's April, how much time is this going to cost me?
Hoadley: Almost nothing; we've tried to think about how we can crowdsource all the things that the coaches already doing. So the athletes can upload video and sessions, and so far we have seen athletes are really happy to do it. They are already tracking it on Strava, or GPS, or whatever it is, so we put everything in the same place. So generally it is actually less time for the coach.
Pardini: Athletes pick it up immediately, as it's like any app that they've used, and coaches typically get need a week or two of information coming in to really understand the value. During that startup time of a couple weeks, we have conversations with them to show which functions can help.
Then you get a lot of benefit when you start doing it season over season, year over year, because then you can start to compare. How was my team today compared to my team a year ago, or the year before? Athletes get it immediately, coaches get it after a couple weeks, and then it gets more useful.
row2k: How are you addressing privacy issues? And what ultimately happens to all the data?
Pardini: There are a couple layers of privacy issues, let's talk about each of them.
There's the privacy on the team. People are sometimes close to the chest about workouts even within the team, and it's an opinion of ours is that actually holds the team back. These are the athletes I'm competing with, not against, and let them them help you achieve achieve what you want achieve together. But there are personal things that are available only to the individual, such as wellness checks.
Between teams it is completely siloed; UCLA can't see what USC is doing, and there's no sharing whatsoever between the teams. And that's in contrast with a lot of the other tools that athletes are gravitating towards, like Strava; post something on Strava it's everywhere.
row2k: What about any cool stuff that folks would not know about?
Hoadley: My favorite is the load management tool. I spent a fair amount of time over the last decades really, trying to fine tune a load management tool that doesn't require purely heart rate data. Traditional models primarily use cardiovascular fatigue and fitness. I'm trying to add in the mental and emotional stuff that that we're tracking inside the app, and the muscular skeletal stuff.
With the other approaches, if you do a weight session, the load is zero, which is obviously incorrect. You have a sore back and sore muscles and the tendons get tired. And we also know that during exam periods, there is a detrimental impact on your fatigue and fitness. We add them to the load management tool to give coaches a far better insight into how their team is doing. We've reached out to multiple sports science source physiologist people around the planet to try to help us out, and brought all that stuff together to build a tool that your 14 year old can use, and then the coach can have for the whole team.
row2k: Have you seen where the data explained something to an athlete or coach that they were not aware of?
Hoadley:: Pretty much on every team. You overlay mood and sleep and the training journal and their fitness and their fatigue, and then had the coach said well, this actually fits what I'm seeing, and maybe they take some time off. Or, maybe they see they're in a really good place for that session and they'll be able dial it up a bit.
Also, different athletes respond in different ways to the exact same session, and they can actually see that.
Pardini: you can also indicate what percentage you want, and then the app customizes that to the individual based on their past workouts. So I'll have one goal, he'll have another goal. We'll get a green check if we're within 5% of the prescribed wattage for that workout, then we'll get a thumbs down if we're 20% above, so that steers people into the right zone.
Hoadley: And again, we want to give coaches the tools to be able to get the social, emotional, and the mental stuff that's going on with their athletes as well. They are just critical components; hardly anyone quits their team because the physical training plan was no good. They quit because of social reasons, or emotional reasons, or mental reasons.
row2k: Do you have ever coaches who feel like this is all too much?
Hoadley: Coaches are often wary; they don't want to overload their athletes, but then they find that it's the opposite. Athletes take to it right away, and then one coach described it as 'lowering the temperature in the room a couple of degrees;' it toned down the rumors and the gossip, and the conversations became friendly and the training became easier and camaraderie went up.
My theory on this is that when you get rid of all the direct messages - you know, someone asks a question and you reply as a coach, and then that person knows and they tell their friends and all their other friends, and then the information becomes weaponized. Instead, everything is very transparent. If you do a message, everyone can see it instead of repeating yourself 10 times and maybe saying it slightly differently. we're seeing heightened accountability but in a positive way, and cleaner communication flow in a positive way. Within your team, the trust builds, and you have a happier boathouse.
We are seeing results every weekend, teams that haven't won a dual race in a decade; we had a really good weekend last week.
row2k: Would you dare take a guess of what you think you can add to a crew's speed?
Hoadley: I think we definitely add depth to the results. Your speed is not just one boat, but across the boathouse. I got a text message about a month ago, and the message read ;Our top eight guys are as fast as we have ever seen, our second eight guys are as fast as last year's first eight, our third eight guys are as fast as last year's second eight, and everyone is happy.
row2k: Is there anyone who this is not for? Say, a masters sculler, or maybe a recreational group? And are there people using it in different ways than we have talked about?
Pardini: Larger teams tend to benefit more, especially because we don't charge per athlete we charge just based on the team. So you get more bang, more camaraderie, more everything.
Hoadley: Some countries are using it for the Pathways Programs, and with current juniors, we're really trying to get them to go fast between 2028 and 2032. You can't do that by yourself, and to start building those relationships now. Put it out there that you're doing this work with the idea that you're starting to build some of those social connections, you're starting to build some of that trust, so that when you do come together in the boat six weeks before Junior worlds or U23s. I'm fired up this person made the boat because I know they've been training, I know their history.
row2k: Is there anything that I haven't asked that you felt was important to mention before we started?
Pardini: I think how easy and free it is to get started. It's free; CrewApp is free, use it with your team forever. You can see in our pricing the specific things that we do charge for, but we're trying to get the message out that we spent a lot of time and energy building a product, listening to customers and coaches around the world. We're backed by venture capital and we have some amazing partnerships. It's free to try, it's free to use with your team. So just use it, and your team will be better off.
Hoadley: I would throw in that it's built by rowers for rowers, and we all use it and love it. So we're really committed to the idea of building a tool that makes teams better.
Also, I've still got this idea that we'll know CrewLAB has gone well when we've doubled the amount of rowers in the US. The biggest roadblock for that is that we can't double the number of coaches fast enough. Probably the biggest thing holding back the growth of our sport is just access to coaches, so let's do what we can to help them.
row2k: I wanted to ask about the venture capital piece; you have raised $1.6 million. I know there are rowers involved, but it is unusual in rowing. Was there a phase where you just saw blank stares; rowing?? I do know you're looking at other sports as well.
Hoadley: Yes, you're on your way too niche. What are you guys doing? Is that even a sport, do people still do that? It's been a good part of our journey, kind of sharpening the steel, iron sharpens iron. We had to think about why we were doing it, and is it worth putting this money and effort into it, and can we have the impact that we want to have on teams, and on coaches, and on rowers?
Pardini: it's not easy to raise money, and it also happened to be the slowest market and venture capital in decades. It's very challenging, but what you probably heard here is the stories are starting to come out that are very compelling, about impact that we're having. And that is resonating.
I was in charge of the fundraising, and several times a day I would be asked by people much older, much more experienced, much more intelligent than me, how are you gonna make money on this? Where's it gonna go? This isn't sustainable, this is a hobby for you. So we had to prove that no, this has real impact, there's a real need. It sharpened all of our business strategies and really made us robust for the future.