As the grand spectacle of the Rio Olympics just neared its end, aspiring athletes around the world are immersing themselves in training camps and endless instructional sessions.
The desire for fame and glory drives young Olympic dreamers to the practice fields, filling the weight rooms, and emptying the wallets of parents around the globe.
But Olympian hopefuls are not alone in this passionate drive for fame; aspiring football players, basketball players and just about every athletic competitor unload enormous sums of money on training and coaching.
Currently, 65% of modern adolescents -- affectionately called Generation Z -- participate in at least one sport.
"Several hundred dollars every week is a small investment for a child's future," says every passionate, starry-eyed parent. The over-passionate parents, who could never make it themselves, throw money to whatever camp has the most recognizable name to it.
We witness billions poured out every year for the sake of these improbable (sometimes impossible) dreams.
With all the endless round-trip drives to camps, conferences, and programs gorging on tremendous returns, one startup capitalizes on all this money being unloaded into personal coaches and intimate training sessions.
Meet CoachTube. CoachTube is not simply an instructional sharing service: it is an online institute for furthering coaching and player potential.
Dedicated to sharing coaching and instructional content from reputable coaches from dozens of sports, including basketball, baseball and football, CoachTube establishes an academic approach to coaching the coaches of everyday sports.
Connecting viewers to the likes of Urban Meyer and Tom Izzo, CoachTube grants viewers access to content that would otherwise cost them thousands of dollars.
There are already plenty of coaches who offer instructional clips on YouTube. However, as we have seen in the success of startups like Coursera (Academics), Lynda (Jobs Skills) and Craftsy this generation demands a higher quality learning experience. CoachTube premium full courses do exactly this for massive fragmented space.
For example, if you wanted Urban Meyer, head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, to teach you running drills or Tom Izzo, head coach of the Michigan State Spartans basketball team, to show you rebounding drills, CoachTube enables you to do just that.
CoachTube allows aspiring athletes to glean the knowledge of these and other luminaries without paying vast sums of money.
The Adrian Peterson Football Camp, a camp run by Vikings' running back Adrian Peterson, was priced at $200. The camp, which was merely sponsored by Peterson (he was not present at the camp), hosted several hundred participants driven to gain experience in the field.
Imagine the millions of aspiring athletes across the world who would want to learn from the great "AP." An instructional video from Peterson himself would be vastly more valuable, at a fraction of the cost.
According to David Matlock, a student athlete at Stratford Academy and staff writer at YouthLogix, "Teens prefer on-demand videos with a quick and simple objective, where they receive the message at their convenience."
Matlock has written extensively on youth marketing, and he claims that young consumers will trust a product if it is reliable.
"On Friday night football games with the entire school watching, it makes sense they don't want to get their online training from the same place they watch viral cat videos, and where they learn how to do the nana dance," Matlock said.
Reputation commands the consumption of modern buyers, and modern athletes and coaches trust a good name.
Urban Meyer and Tom Izzo are almost as credible as it gets in the sports world, and any instructionals they produce have the trust of the consumer. CoachTube manages to accomplish what many EdTech content providers fight so hard to establish: trust.
EdTech and E-learning software is an industry far beyond simple online tutorials, and it is a highly lucrative field with over 51.5 billion dollars circulated worldwide by 2016.
CoachTube is not a fad. It is another piece of evidence of the shift to digitizing all useful (and useless) information.
Even though there is no escape from grinding on the gridiron or a hard day on the pitch, technology is nipping at the heels of coaching camps and paving the new age of EdTech.