Practice is 5% of an athlete's week. Ballogy CEO Todd Young on why we designed the app for the other 95%.
There’s a number I keep coming back to.
The average youth athlete spends about five percent of their week in structured practice. Five percent. The other 95 percent, how they sleep, how they move when nobody’s watching, whether they’ve got anything left in the tank by Saturday, that is where development actually happens or doesn’t.
That’s what we set out to solve in the latest version of the Ballogy app, designed around an all new framework we call MTR: Move, Train, Recover. I recently spoke to Cameron Korab at Youth Sports HQ about where MTR came from and what surprised us as we built it. That full interview is linked at the bottom of this post. But I wanted to say more about the why here, directly, for the coaches, parents, and athletes who read our blog every week.
Move. Train. Recover.
I have trained for and completed three 70.3 Ironmans and one full 140.6. What that training taught me is that recovery isn’t the pause between workouts. It’s where adaptation happens. If you train hard and don’t recover, you won’t get better. You get injured.
The same gap kept showing up in Ballogy’s own data. Athletes were putting in real work on the court, field, and in the weight room. But that work was only a slice of their week. Everything around it, sleep, activity, nutrition, mental load, was invisible to the coach, invisible to the parent, and often invisible to the athlete themselves.
MTR is built to make it visible. Move captures the daily activity data most athletes are already generating on their wearables and turns it into development insights. Train uses our patented Computer Vision AI to track sport-specific drills and weight-room reps in real time. Recover guides cool-downs, tracks rest, and builds smart rest-day plans. And every day, an athlete gets one number, the MTR Score, that answers the simplest question in athlete development: did today build me, or did I waste it?
Leveling the Playing Field
This is the part I wanted to say more about than the YSBR interview had space for.
My son was the original inspiration for Ballogy. Our family drove across Texas to tournaments and invested what we could in his development. But what I remember most from those gyms are the other kids. Kids who were talented and hungry, who just did not have the same access.
Elite academies have long had film review, performance analytics, and real-time coaching feedback. A talented kid in a small town has hard work and whatever a part-time coach can offer in two hours a week. That gap has nothing to do with who wants it more or who is willing to work harder. It has everything to do with who gets seen.
Closing that gap is the whole point. Whether an athlete is in a top facility in Dallas or a barn gym in West Texas, everyone has access to Ballogy’s advanced tools and our MTR framework.
Scouts and coaches aren’t just finding who has the best resources anymore. They’re finding who can actually work hard and play. That is the outcome the whole framework is designed to produce.
Elevate Your Game
The new Ballogy app is live now, and it is free to download.
If you’re an athlete, download it and try MTR. If you’re a coach, set up Coach HQ and see what a day-one baseline on your whole roster feels like. If you’re a parent, this is the honest answer to the question every sports family asks: is all of this work actually adding up?
For the deeper dive on where MTR came from and what surprised us building it, read Cameron Korab’s full YSBR interview here: Inside Ballogy’s MTR Launch: CEO Todd Young on the New Framework for Youth Athlete Development.
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