Mike Weaver back on the ice
Mike Weaver was skating on thin ice.
As a former NHL defenceman, he was visiting Eabametoong, a remote First Nations village in northern Ontario. Thanks to a December shipment of 45 hockey bags filled with donated equipment from families in southern Ontario, the community had just formed its first girls’ hockey team.
Donning his skates as a guest coach, Weaver quickly realized his 11- and 12-year-old rookies needed a wider variety of drills than he’d expected. Normally, coaches keep their inventory of drills — power play, four-on-four, breaking out of your own zone — on clipboards. But Weaver’s files were back in Toronto, 900 kilometres to the south.
Fortunately, Weaver had a smartphone — and his own coaching app, CoachThem. He quickly pulled up his favourite skating and stickhandling drills on-screen. “There was a wide range of skills on the team,” he says. “I had a game plan, then I changed it, and then I changed it again on the ice.” The players were soon stopping, starting and carrying the puck at their own speeds, unaware that their personalized drills had just been called down from the cloud.
Weaver had just become one of the first beneficiaries of the app he’d dreamed of for four years. His company, CoachThem Inc., just launched the app Jan. 30 — three days before his trip to Eabametoong. Now he hopes that 98,000 coaches across Canada will find CoachThem as helpful as he did. Because, he says, “Better practices make better players.”
In its first two weeks, CoachThem has registered 500 coaches for a free trial, as well as four associations (Weaver says wholesaling through amateur hockey associations is the best way to scale the company). Now he’s counting on a few per cent of them to opt for the paid service, at $5 a month. But Weaver’s plan is to expand CoachThem over time to include other sports, such as basketball, football and soccer, and make CoachThem a global skills-building phenomenon.
He describes himself as a “fivefoot-eight, undrafted puck eater.” For him, blocking shots was as important as scoring goals. A reliable, mobile defenceman, he played Tier II junior hockey in Bramalea, Ont., and sat through two NHL drafts without hearing his name called. He was heartbroken, but undaunted. “I knew the odds of getting to the NHL were slim. To succeed, I had to look past the bumps and stay focused on my goal.”
Weaver accepted a hockey scholarship from Michigan State University, where he won a league award as Best Defenceman and picked up a telecommunications degree. Then he pursued pro hockey as a free agent, signing with the Atlanta Thrashers. Winning two championships with the Thrashers’ minor-league teams, Weaver finally reached the NHL in 2001.
He lasted 14 years, playing 663 games for the Thrashers, Los Angeles Kings, Vancouver Canucks, St. Louis Blues and Florida Panthers before finishing his career with the Montreal Canadiens. But in 2004, he had used his education and sports training to open a hockey school. At Defense First, he still teaches young players the lessons he learned: know your role; work hard even when no one’s looking; and enjoy the game, because it may not last.
In his last few years in the NHL, Weaver used the experience of running the school to plan another business: a coaching app. For the school, he had developed numerous drills, but they were all on paper, hard to manage and tricky to access. In Florida, he and goaltending coach Robb Tallas tried coaching software, but they found it slow and awkward for drawing up drills.
Weaver sees drills as the heart of hockey — as precious to coaches as recipes to a chef. Weaver’s and Tallas’s vision was to produce a smartphone app that would let coaches easily access and create drills, and share them with their assistant coaches — or anyone else.
When the Canadiens didn’t re-sign him, Weaver jumped at the chance to pursue his vision. “I knew I had an opportunity to do other things,” he says. “We can change the way coaches plan practices.”
As CEO of CoachThem, he shares ownership with Tallas, who oversees business development, and Stephen Elliot, a coder who is now chief information officer. (Making Elliot a partner, says Weaver, was cheaper than paying to get the app built. “I am very efficient in using my connections,” he says. “It’s probably one of Canada’s cheapest startups.”)
Weaver insists his app be easy to use. So many “hockey dads” start coaching teams, with no experience. If he can get coaches at all levels sharing more challenging drills through CoachThem, Weaver believes the quality of instruction will grow. He even wants the pros in his marketplace: “We’ll be going after NHL coaches and asking them for their 10 favourite drills.” He also intends to revolutionize other aspects of hockey, such as video replays and off-ice workouts.
For now, however, Weaver needs revenue. He says 60 per cent of visitors to CoachThem. com sign up for the one-month free trial — but the jury is still out on how many will become paying subscribers. To move the puck out of his own zone, he’s doing publicity on radio and TV talk shows.
For now, the target market is just Canada, he says. “Once we get this right and move into other sports, then we’ll jump into the States.”