How Liam programs over 100 athletes a week at a time

One system for the floor and for online#

Liam Evans (@evans.performance) coaches both in person and remotely, and is responsible for well over 100 athletes. He was primarily an in-person coach before moving a large part of his roster online, and the two sides used to be two different jobs.

They are now one. He runs his in-person athletes and his remote athletes out of the same platform rather than switching between systems to get the full picture on anyone.

"Obviously I will use Relay for both in person and remote, which is great. You only need one system to essentially cover both."

The daily report that decides who needs a message#

The part of remote coaching that fails quietly is noticing. An athlete cuts a session short, or answers a questionnaire honestly, and nobody reads it until the next scheduled call.

Liam set up a report that lands in his email every day, so the reading is done before he starts.

"I've set up a daily report to be emailed to me to go over what the athletes did the day before, if anything was flagged, if anything needs to be changed, if everybody's good or somebody needs a check-in."

The output is a short list of people, not a dashboard he has to interpret. It tells him who to message and why, and he sends the message.

Week to week instead of a month at a time#

Liam used to write a month of training per athlete, run it, and review at the end of the block. The problem with a month is that it decides in advance what the athlete's next four weeks look like, and athletes have tournaments, games and injuries that do not wait for the review.

He now programs a week at a time, with each week built on the last.

"The reason that week-to-week is helpful is that now at the end of each week, the athlete will fill out a quick check-in or communicate to me anything. And then for the next week, I can either keep the progression the same as it was planned out for the whole month. Or if something popped up, they have a tournament, a game or an injury or anything like that, then I can just change their program for that week."

The athlete feels the difference before they can name it. What they said at the end of the week shows up in the training they get on Monday.

"Which then as an athlete makes them feel a part of the process, and we're essentially accommodating them and their every need."

Sunday: the next week arrives as a draft#

Programming a week at a time for a hundred athletes is only sustainable if somebody else does the reading. Liam runs a scheduled task every Sunday, over the Relay MCP, that goes through the week each athlete actually had before he opens anything.

"It goes over each athlete's week of training, what they did, looks at all their weights. Did they go up? Did they stay the same? Did they decrease? And then matches that with what their wellness questionnaire or their check-in at the end of the week says."

What comes back is not a recommendation to read. It is the next week, written.

"And then it builds me a draft of the program that I've already written. But then I can either just say, cool, yep, that progression is good, and just send that into Relay and it gets updated. Or if I see that something needs to be changed, then I can go in and change that, because Relay has essentially made me aware of something that's popped up or something coming up that needs to be modified."

The coaching decision stays his. What the task removes is the hour of looking up what happened before he can make it. Our guide to Claude scheduled tasks walks through the same setup.

Writing the program however he already writes it#

Liam does not compose training in a builder. He composes it on paper, on a whiteboard, or out loud, the way he did before any of this. Relay is where it lands, not where he thinks.

"I've done programs where I write everything down on a piece of paper and then I speak it into the Relay system using the AI, the voice mode. Or what I also like doing is just writing things down on a whiteboard or a piece of paper or even just like a Word document, and then take a screenshot of that, upload it, and it automatically populates into the workout."

Both routes go through the same thing: the Workout Composer takes a spoken sentence or an uploaded file and turns it into structured sets, and he edits from there instead of typing every exercise, rep and note by hand.

"So like even creating the workout, the initial workout, which then we go through each week, even that process has become much more easy and more enjoyable, I would say."

Profiles the automation can read#

The Sunday task is only as good as what it knows about the athlete. Liam keeps that in the athlete profile notes rather than in his head.

"In each athlete's profile, I can write down basically everything from my intake with them. So their previous injuries, their previous training history, anything that they told me about themselves or their sport that I need to know, I put in their profile."

He updates a profile when something changes, an athlete moving into their off season for example, and everything downstream changes with it.

"So now the system understands more about each athlete when it gives me or feeds me back any information."

Growing without the coaching getting thinner#

Liam's reason for building any of this is the one he had before he had the tools. He wanted remote coaching to feel like coaching, to the athlete and to him.

"It's just kind of really enhanced the quality of service that I can bring in multiple ways. It has always been a goal of mine, to improve that quality so that it feels essentially more fulfilling to me as a coach."

The systems are what let the roster grow without that going backwards.

"Even as I scale up with the number of athletes, the quality still remains, because I have these kind of automated systems running. Instead of me having to look through each athlete individually on their profile or text them individually and ask how things went, I can just see it all right then and there and then make any necessary adjustments."

He put the same thing in writing when we asked him for a testimonial:

As a coach who's tried almost all platforms out there, Relay felt like I finally found the right one. Others had some good features and different reasons why I liked them but with relay I finally feel like I have everything I need to not only give the athletes the best training experience but also myself the best coaching experience. I'm responsible for well over 100 athletes so having a software that lets me be more efficient programming for them as well as monitoring all of them is a game changer. After speaking closely with the team I also know how much they care about listening to the needs of coaches and I know the platform will continue to grow and get even better than it already is.

His advice: do not start with all of it#

Liam's warning to coaches looking at Relay for the first time is worth more than a feature list, because it is the honest version of what a platform this wide feels like on day one.

"It could be overwhelming with how many features there are, but you don't have to use every single feature. I think that's important for coaches to understand, or to see how the features kind of mix in with the workflows and the way the systems and everything of how you already do things."

Pick the ones that match how you already coach, and let the rest wait.

"Just see which features work for you and kind of create a base system for how you do things. And then once you have that, then you can continue to build on it. And honestly, it feels like the possibilities are endless."

Start where Liam started#

Liam started with one system for both halves of his coaching, then added the daily report, then the Sunday task. None of it arrived at once.

If your programming is split across more than one tool, or you are growing a roster and can feel the coaching getting thinner, start free and begin with the part that matches how you already work.