Now this is a story all about how...

Hey there! 👋

I'm Isaac Vazquez, the founder and creator of HopSquad. I am a lover of all things track and field, especially the field events, and particularly the jumps! I currently coach high school jumpers, and I compete for fun on the side.

HopSquad started as an attempt to solve my own problems as a coach and athlete. Below is the story of how it came to be. Enjoy!

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I started coaching in 2017 as an assistant jumps coach for the local high school girls track team. I had competed in track and field for about a decade, and had a solid understanding of the jumps, but I immediately realized how difficult it was to take what was in my head and communicate it in a clear and concise way to my jumpers. (Which I did not do well at first 😅)

I had a great time that first season. It was SO much fun, even though I spent most of it learning how to manage a group of 30 girls AND teach them ALL how to long & triple jump. It was great and I learned a ton.

However, one downside of that first season was that I found myself spending hours, literally HOURS writing workouts for the next practice. Sometimes I would write a week's worth of workouts, but almost always it was a day-to-day situation. And even though it was really fun, it was very time-consuming. I felt myself slowly getting stressed out about practices, and struggling to keep up with my other responsibilities at home around the house.

I also found myself wishing I had a way to keep all my coaching related information (athlete names, PB's, performances, etc) in one place, and not in a notebook that I would inevitably lose.

I searched the internet for something that did all of that, but I couldn't find anything I liked.

So, I built a very bare-bones web app for myself that I could store my athlete's name, graduation year, and PB's. It wasn't anything special, but it was a helpful tool for me.

One fall evening, I was in bed thinking and it occurred to me: other coaches might also have these same problems. And at that moment I realized I should build a proper tool that other coaches can use too. So, at 2am I grabbed my phone and started furiously typing out all the feature ideas that came into my head for the app. I was getting more and more excited as I thought about it. The next day, I started sketching out some of the ideas I had written down the night before, and started realizing that this was a huge undertaking. There were a LOT of pieces, but I was confident I could finish it before the next track season started (lol, good joke 🤦‍♂️).

Spoiler alert, I didn't.

So I kept building, and using it myself during the season. Pretty much any spare evening or weekend I would spend it trying to make HopSquad a real finished product. I had lots of help from family and friends, pointing out what was terrible about it and encouraging me about the good stuff. I was sure I'd complete it by the next season.

But I didn't.

So I kept building. I was having a TON of fun refining it, and adding features that I wanted. My brother-in-law, Tyler, a fellow track nerd, was always game for brainstorming new feature ideas, and we would geek out everytime we got together. The problem was we had all these ideas, but limited time to execute on them. One day, I was talking with my wife and realized that I needed to give this thing way more time than I was currently able to. And my wife kindly and supportively agreed. So, I quit my day job and started building HopSquad full-time.

BEST. DECISION. EVER.

I was coaching, training, and building HopSquad. What more could I ask for! It felt like a dream!

Well, after nearly THREE YEARS of designing, building, bug-fixing, and repeating, HopSquad is finally finished! And I'm so excited to share it with everyone! This is just version 1.0, and I'm excited to continually make it even better and more useful.

Anyway, I hope you like it!

Thanks for reading, and for giving HopSquad a try. You can contact me directly if you have any questions at isaac@hopsquadapp.com. I look forward to hearing from you!