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The history of Strength Tracker dates back to 1992. It was after James Morton’s first season as a head coach at Friona. They had ended the season 0-10 and they were not competitive in any of the 10 games. As a staff, they felt it would be very important for the off-season to establish discipline and work ethic while making players more competitive.
Coach Morton wanted their testing results to be used where players were competing not only against themselves but also against their teammates. They wanted the testing results to encourage all athletes to be the best regardless of their size.
The formulas that are used in Strength Tracker take into consideration each player's weight. Coach Morton felt that the bigger players should lift more and the smaller players should move quicker. So, Strength Tracker involves both lifting and running tests.
It was amazing how quickly their players bought into the testing results and the competition. Suddenly they had players challenging one another, and players could see the changes in their total points.
Strength Tracker provides the ability to compare athletes to one another on the same scale. The junior high athletes took great pride in the testing results because they knew that their total points were the same points that the high school players used. If they scored more points than a high school athlete then they considered themselves to be a better athlete.
After taking the job at Lubbock Monterey, Coach Morton was introduced to Tom Kotara. Tom played high school ball and is a software developer. Tom had a good understanding of how to create a software program and make it work. He was able to take the original scoring formulas and put them into a program. Even better, it is web based so that it can be easily accessed via any browser.
Strength Tracker has decreased Coach Morton’s workload time of entering information into the computer from over 50 hours per testing cycle to approximately 5 hours. This includes all three of the junior highs, and the total number of athletes from 7th to 12th grade is around 650.
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