Velocity based training is huge. As soon as I
got here to Boston, I knew Perch was on
my radar. I wanted something here in this room
to enhance our players and that development because we understood
that quality of care was very important to us.
Sports science has taken off in the past decade.
So now we have the ability to use technology in
our training to really give us the objective numbers,
right? So the subjective coach is saying, I
know what I'm seeing but I just can't pinpoint it
. So now I have technology to back up what
my eye is seeing and really give the player an
understanding of where they're at and what they can do
and where we want to take them. My name
is Jacob Rothman. I'm the co founder and CEO
of Perch went to MIT in 2012 to 2016.
I was a varsity athlete there, studied mechanical engineering
and then just fell in love with, with building
right? Building, really cool unique things and also
fell in love with sports. And around 2015,
2016 was when we first conceived of the idea,
the quantified self movement was taking off. So essentially
being able to use wearables to track your heart rate
, your steps, your calories, but really nothing
was geared towards people that, that like to lift
when you go to a track, let's say,
and you run around a track, like you can
count how many laps you did. But you don't
really know the quality of that run. Like if
you didn't have a stop watch, for instance,
you wouldn't know if you were getting any better,
if you were getting any faster. And that's very
equivalent to, let's say, going to a weight
room without a piece of technology. Like perch,
you can count your reps, you can count your
sets, but you don't know if you're improving,
getting better. You don't know how you compare against
somebody else for each movement. We have our own
criteria. We can track them over time, semester
to semester and the length of the player's career.
So this is our main product that we lease to
our clients. What our secret sauce is is basically
using computer vision and machine learning to track specific objects
. So coaches will essentially take this product. They'll
strap it up to their weight rack up out of
the way, essentially gives the weight rack a set
of eyes and the brand, um, athletes will
walk up, they'll log in via tablet that's Bluetooth
connected to this guy and then that's basically everything they're
good to go if you're old school and you're,
you're kind of resistive to it. Uh I think
you're a little bit behind now. This is just
a way if you really wanna maximize what you're doing
from a programming perspective, it's a no brainer.
We capture about um a dozen different metrics. Currently
, the main ones that a coach might see or
want the athletes to see would be velocity and power
output. So an athlete walks up, they lift
like they normally do. We're able to e effortlessly
capture their sets, their reps, their power output
, their speed, about a dozen different metrics.
We display that in real time, which can motivate
a workout, educate, workout. And then we
give that data to the athlete and the coach so
they can monitor the progress and understand how they're improve
. And for these athletes right from pro to college
to high school time in the gym is extremely valuable
when we talk to strange coaches, that's the number
one thing they want a piece of technology that doesn't
distract them to work out. It just optimizes workouts
. The biggest thing is that we have to understand
that these guys are student athletes, right? So
they got, they have academics, they have tutors
, they have appointments coming up, you have practice
, you gotta go get treatment, you gotta go
see our nutritionist, you gotta go to training table
, you got all these things to do. And
so all of a sudden when your window of time
shrinks with them, you want to maximize it and
you want to be extremely efficient with it. Using
a system like this allows us to give that direct
feedback and allows us to get what both parties need
to show progress. Our clientele includes a lot of
the high profile like college football teams. So University
of Georgia, Oregon, Un C Duke Florida,
Maryland, the list goes on and on the ability
to compete. Yeah, we're going to compete.
You're going to push yourself to new limits, new
standards. It's really a powerful weapon.