I've spent the last 20 years in the world of high-performance sport, and when I built and sold CoachNow I worked alongside coaches in more than 80 sports across 140 countries.

There's a lot of talk right now in athlete-performance and golf performance about AI. Of course there is. There are a lot of cool things happening.

But if you want to build in the world of sports performance, specifically if you want coaches as your customer, spend less time trying to replace them with all the AI bells and whistles for video analysis. Spend more time helping them make deeper meaning out of the media and data they're already collecting, and augment the stuff they don't like to do. Scheduling. Billing. Intake. All of the admin functionality.

So my advice to you, if you're building out there, is to think about supporting the coach and becoming an assistant to the coach, not spending all your time thinking about how you can replace them.

Because in the end, coaching is about a relationship much more than it is about the technical pieces. If you can help a coach have a deeper and more meaningful relationship, and remove all the BS they don't want to do, then you've got something.

Speaking of coaching. Across the entire game improvement economy there are still way too many folks selling spots on a calendar instead of results.

In my opinion, this is one of the main reasons Topgolf turned out the way it did. I met with their Director of Instruction when they only had two locations, and I pitched him Edufii, later known as CoachNow, as a way to build deeper relationships with his customers by enhancing their coaching.

Turn non-golfers into aspiring ones, since they'd actually have a reason to come back and stay engaged. Build a following around getting better, and empower coaches to do on-site, hybrid, and remote coaching.

He got it at a high level, but he was an ex-tour player, not a coach. Sadly, the wrong guy to set the tone in the early days. Nothing happened. They built an pure entertainment company with some basic lessons attached instead.

Whether you're a solo coach, an academy owner, an indoor facility franchisor, or building tech in the world of game improvement, you absolutely need to be focused on delivering an unrivaled experience around the process of getting better.

Instead of just selling slots on a calendar, a spot on a range, or a widget - sell the dream of becoming a skilled golfer and how much fun that can be.

Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊

-Spencer

PS. Know someone that needs to know this stuff?