The fine team over at Nibletz covered the CoachUp launch today. They did a nice job covering the launch and discussing our mission to become the destination to find a private coach in any sport. Check out the full text of the article below: 
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A new startup has launched out of Cambridge Massachusetts this week called CoachUp. The premise is simple, in fact it’s surprising that no one had attempted this before. CoachUp connects personal coaches with athletes for any sport.
Co-Founders Jordan Fliegel has been a professional, personal basketball coach for the last five years. In an interview with nibletz.com he told us that before CoachUp personal coaches relied on Craigslist, word of mouth and ads in Ice Cream Shops. Some personal coaches have the advantage of being team coaches at the same time and can offer their services as a personal coach on the side. The same way some teachers tutor.
“For athletes (or the parents of young athletes), it is really hard to find a good private coach in their sport, in their area, at a price they can afford, at a time that works for them. After all, most private coaches don’t have websites. Even if you can find a coach through a referral, it is very hard to compare that coach with others, even harder to verify the accuracy of that coach’s reviews (if they have any), and impossible to know if there may have been a closer, cheaper or better matched option elsewhere.”
The market for personal coaches is more lucrative than some may think. Kids, especially teenagers and high school students often use their sport of choice as a vehicle to get scholarships and go onto higher education. They sometimes rely on the use of a personal coach or athletic trainer to refine their sport and better their skills.
Because a lot of their clientele are parents looking for a coach for their kid Fliegel and co-founder Arian Radmand take vetting coaches very seriously. Right now, while the service is launching in the Boston area, coaches go through a phone interview, and if parents want to run more extensive background checks CoachUp has an affiliate relationship with a background company.
The interface on CoachUp is intuitive and very easy to use. The user can look up a coach by sport and then sort them by distance from your home or child’s school as well as price. The user can then decide if they want to purchase one introductory session with a coach or session packs of five or ten sessions with that coach. CoachUp takes a small percentage off the transaction to keep the lights on.
The coaches on CoachUp have a variety of backgrounds. Some are former professional athletes, college athletes or coaches for their sport at local high schools or colleges. The pricing is set up by the coach. All the payments are handled online for a number of reasons as Fliegel explains:
“Collecting payments in person is stressful – often clients don’t show up with the right amount of money, or coaches have to deposit a check, which requires a separate trip to the bank. More importantly, coaches bond with their young clients during training sessions, and find it very awkward to accept payment from a parent in front of a child after the session is complete. Paying in advance through CoachUp eliminates these concerns”
As the CoachUp community grows coaches will also have ratings from their clientele along with feedback so that future clients have a better idea of what the coach is like before they start working with them. Of course there’s also the option of doing one session before going back and booking more.
After earning his MBA Fliegel worked at Zintro Inc an online marketplace for information sourcing. He realized that he could create a similar online market place for personal coaches, which until now, didn’t have one.
CoachUp is currently serving the greater Boston area but Fliegel has plans for rapid expansion, opening up the platform across the country.
CoachUp also offers a 100% money back guarantee.
Some controversial baseball news from the high school ranks made the rounds of the sporting blogs last week. Our Lady of Sorrows (that’s not a made up, ironic name, but actually the name of the school) was slated to play Mesa Prep for a state high school championship, but chose to forfeit the game rather than play against a girl.
15 year old Paige Sultzbach, the female player in question, sat out 2 regular season games against Our Lady of Sorrows in deference to their beliefs. Her mother said, ‘”This is not a contact sport, it shouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t that they were afraid they were going to hurt or injure her, it’s that (they believe) that a girl’s place is not on a field.”
Like this:
Launching CoachUp
By Jordan Fliegel
Today is a much anticipated day for the CoachUp.com team. We have been working really hard to get CoachUp.com live, and are really excited to be in business! CoachUp private coaches have already started giving lessons in Boston, and we are thrilled to see all the positive feedback from parents, athletes and coaches.
Though it is a small step in a long journey, launching today means a lot to all of the people who have worked so hard to bring CoachUp to where it is today. There are too many people to thank here in this post, as bringing the vision for CoachUp to life was a true team effort. Our incredibly sharp employees, gracious investors, trusted advisors, hard-working interns, and talented coaches deserve all the credit. The larger Boston startup community has been so supportive of what we are doing, and again, there are too many people for me to thank by name, but you know who you are, and I hope you take as much pride in CoachUp as I do! If I can ever be of assistance in any way please let me know!
When you are working on a startup it’s easy to get lost in your exponentially expanding to-do list, but I think it’s important to take a moment to celebrate milestones. I’m so thankful for all the amazing people that I am fortunate to interact with every day at CoachUp, and am really excited to be launching today.
At CoachUp, we have a tremendous opportunity to build a company that will positively change this country – helping kids achieve their full potential in sports and in life, helping people become happier and healthier through sports, and by supporting the incredible private coaches who make it all possible. I hope you will join us!
Darrell Etherington May 9, 2012
Selling your skills online is becoming a standard for service-based professionals and people willing to do odd-jobs to make some extra income, via startups like Zaarly, TaskRabbit and Exec. More and more, niche players are also seeing big opportunities to collect related skill offerings in a central online marketplace, and Cambridge, MA-based CoachUp is launching today to appeal to private sport coaches and athletes looking for training.
Private sports coaching is a large industry in the U.S.; a recent report suggests that it’s a $6 billion market, with positive annual growth and hundreds of thousands of coaches working in the space. CoachUp wants to become a central hub for all that activity, providing a place online where professional sports coaches can offer their services, be rated and reviewed by students and broaden their potential reach. CoachUp CEO Jordan Fliegel, an active personal basketball coach and former college and professional basketball player, told BetaKit in an interview that the idea behind the company just came naturally from his own experiences coaching, and working in and around the online skill marketplace space.
“I was a professional basketball player, and have been a private coach in basketball part-time for the past five years,” Fliegel said. “Then I actually started working for Zintro, another online marketplace in information sourcing. I headed up their business development team there, so I learned a lot about online marketplaces as a business model, and I knew about private coaching, and immediately recognized that there was a real pain on both sides, for people trying to find students and for people trying to find qualified coaches.”
To address those needs, Fliegel teamed up with technical partner and co-founder Arian Radmand to create an online tool that allows students to search for coaches by a variety of criteria, including location, specific sport, price or rating, and students can then book them directly through the site or by calling a 1-800 number. For now, CoachUp makes money by charging a mark-up on the coach’s fee for each session booked in exchange for its services, but the company also intends to offer premium services for a recurring subscription on both sides of the equation in the future.
CoachUp’s biggest challenge might be proving its worth to coaches and athletes in terms of forming a lasting relationship; after all, once connected through the service, both sides could arrange future sessions privately and avoid CoachUp’s fee. But Fliegel believes that CoachUp offers more than just matchmaking services, including streamlining the payment process and offering package booking of multiple sessions, helping coaches source new clients, and providing a feedback and analytics tool for coaches that could help them significantly improve their practice in the long-term.
There’s another challenge for CoachUp, too; services like UK-based Teddle provide general-purpose online booking tools for service professionals like online coaches, and general purpose tools like Zaarly and others mentioned above provide not only the opportunity to find private coaches, but also to have them bid on lessons for a potentially better deal.
CoachUp offers a couple things that those other services don’t provide, however, including a knowledge and familiarity with the specific industry of professional sports coaching, as well as an application and vetting process for new coaches, who are also subject to perennial review and de-listing should any red flags get raised about their service. The site also promises a full refund to any student athlete disappointed in the results of their first training session with a coach booked through CoachUp.
Backed by an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors including Michael Dornbrook, Ron Rubbico and Scott Heller, CoachUp is debuting in the greater Boston area with over 100 coaches on board, and plans to expand to the rest of U.S. in time. The market it’s targeting is definitely a big one, so we’ll see if the startup has what it takes to bring together this currently scattered and unfocused space.
Read More: http://betakit.com/2012/05/09/coachup-launches-to-connect-athletes-with-private-coaches
by Walter Frick
Not everyone who’d like to take a private tennis lesson is a member of a private club. Ditto golf. And for other sports, finding the right person to provide private coaching is even more challenging. That’s the problem that CoachUp hopes to solve as it formally launches in Boston today.
CoachUp is an online marketplace to help connect people with private sports and fitness coaches, who have been pre-screened by the company and will be rated by the CoachUp community.
CEO and founder Jordan Fliegel claims that sports coaching (not just private) is a $3-7 billion market globally, without including fitness training.
“Private coaching is in every single sport,” he said. “It’s just most private coaches don’t have websites, they don’t know how to market their services.”
Lots of former professionals and current assistant college coaches are looking to supplement their income with private coaching, according to Fliegel, and more than 100 private coaches in Boston have already signed up for CoachUp.
“Coaches are really kind of flocking to us,” he said. “We want to get really good coaches on our site and we want to make it a really good deal for them.”
The site’s launch today extends to greater Boston, with the hope of expanding to more cities starting in the fall. The company has raised an undisclosed amount from angels, has a staff of five, and is already collecting revenue.
Fliegel played basketball at Bowdoin and then professionally in Israel, before going to business school, and has done his share of private coaching. Before starting CoachUp, he worked at Zintro, an online expertise marketplace.
“I know private coaching and I know online marketplaces,” he said.
He and his team dominated a recent Boston startup 3-on-3 basketball tournament. Whereas most startups pick hackathons or pitch sessions to demonstrate their prowess, Fliegel saw the tournament as a chance to garner some attention for CoachUp, and to demonstrate why he and his team are the right people to succeed in the sports market. They won the final game 15-0.
Read More: http://bostinno.com/2012/05/09/coachup-helps-you-find-the-personal-trainer-right-for-you/
Becoming Great at Any Sport
The Olympics.
They’re right around the corner.
So we think it’s time you familiarize yourself with all of the events. And by familiarize yourself with, we mean master.
Obviously, you’ll need a few instructors…
Introducing CoachUp, a brand-new site for finding and hiring a local Red Auerbach for the sport of your choosing, launching today in Boston.
Devised by a Cambridge-born former professional basketball player (in Israel), this is basically like Match.com for sports, sourcing professional coaches and trainers for you to spruce up your game, whatever it may be.
So let’s say your too-fit-for-his-age boss barges into your office and informs you that your salary review discussion in two weeks will take place at his house. On his home squash court. After looking up what squash actually is, you’ll go to this site, scroll through the available coaches and book one. Then, you’ll crush a bunch of returns against your boss… but not too many (and if you don’t, they’ll refund your money and put it toward another coach).
About those coaches: they include the head squash man from Tufts University, a former New England Revolution player, a Boston College golf instructor, the US badminton coach and even a tennis trainer who once beat Andre Agassi in a friendly match.
No, not Steffi Graf.
CoachUp connects athletes, private coaches
By Ira Kantor
Wednesday, May 9, 201
A new startup launched today gives athletes the chance to swing for the stars by connecting them with private coaches at the high school, college and professional levels.
CoachUp, which works out of Intrepid Labs in Kendall Square, has over 100 private coaches in the Greater Boston area serving multiple sports. Those interested in becoming a private coach with the startup have to make it through a vetting process, including a multi-step application, phone interview and reference checks.
Coaches are also vetted by community-generated reviews and by an internal grading system to ensure that they continue to provide high-quality coaching, said co-founder Jordan Fliegel, a former collegiate and professional basketball player turned private coach.
“I founded CoachUp from my heart, with the simple idea that the world would be a better place if every person who has an athletic dream could receive the help they need to achieve their full potential,” said Fliegel. “At CoachUp, we are working hard every day to make that vision a reality.”
People can search by city and sport to find coaches in their area, sort the available options and use a credit card to book their coach through the company’s website. Coach prices vary from $39 to $149 per session, the company said.
By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
A Cambridge native who played professional hoops in Israel is getting ready to launch a new online marketplace for private coaches. CoachUp founder Jordan Fliegel took the wraps off a test version of the site recently — and among more than 100 golf, squash and baseball coaches on CoachUp, you’ll also find Fliegel himself, offering his advice on “attacking the rim with limited dribbles” for $69 an hour.
Fliegel grew up in Cambridge, and played varsity basketball at Bowdoin College before spending two years on the rosters of pro teams in Israel and Europe. A broken foot led to the end of his playing career, but while based in Israel, he also started taking business school courses at Tel Aviv University. (He finished his MBA locally, at Brandeis.)
As Fliegel worked in business development for Waltham-based Zintro, he also did some private coaching in town, and the idea for CoachUp started to take shape. The site targets middle- to upper-income parents who have kids in middle school or high school playing a sport competitively, and who naturally want to see their kids improve.
Coaches who offer their services through the site name an hourly price, and CoachUp adds a small mark-up. “We’re never going to take a penny from a coach,” Fliegel says. The site will encourage users to purchase five or ten coaching sessions at once, with discounted pricing on those packages. Fliegel says that CoachUp will interview coaches before allowing them to list on the site, and will check references. “We’ll also be collecting data on how many clients come back to purchase more lessons, and getting community feedback,” Fliegel says. “Over time, the best coaches will rise to the top, and the worst will sink to the bottom.”
Fliegel says he’s trying to wrap up a $100,000 fund-raising round before the site’s official launch; angels already involved include Mike Dornbrook, formerly chief operating officer at Harmonix Music Systems, and Scott Heller of CoFlow Investing. Fliegel says that Sheila Marcelo, CEO of the personal services marketplace Care.com, has been an advisor.
The company has five employees, and recently moved to the Intrepid Labs shared office space in East Cambridge.
Two Boston startups to improve your golf swing
Boston Business Journal by Galen Moore, Web Editor
Date: Wednesday, May 9, 2012,
Two Boston startups have set up innovative ways for players and coaches to connect, and both are touting ways you can improve your golf game.
UberSense started with former Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS) research scientist Krishna Ramchandran’s terrible slice. Its first product was SwingReader Golf, a mobile video app to analyze a golfer’s swing. Since then, it’s expanded to tennis, baseball and other sports.
Now, 600,000 users have installed its mobile apps for iPhone, and seven olympic teams and a handful major league baseball teams are also using the service, said Ramchandran. UberSense pitched investors at TechStars Demo Day last week.
UberSense installs software on the iPhone that enables slow-motion video at high resolution, allowing a remote coach to provide a detailed analysis of everything from a golfer’s swing to a runner’s gait.
Boston VC Rob Go (NextView Ventures) is a fan. “I have already spent $15. I’ll spend more,” he said between sessions at TechStars Demo Day. “I could be in India and get coached by a great pro.” Boston Seed, Atlas Venture , Ty Danco and Joe Caruso are investors in Ubersense, which is looking to complete a $750,000 seed round.
CoachUp, a second startup, announced itself publicly Wednesday with a service that connects players with coaches and lets them buy coaching sessions. Golf, badminton, baseball, basketball and basketball coaches are listed on CoachUp. The service doesn’t have any of the high-tech video bells and whistles that UberSense has, but focuses on admin support like payment processing, scheduling and reviews of coaches that use the service. Founded by a former Israeli pro basketball player, Jordan Fliegel, and a software engineer, Arian Radmand, CoachUp will take a percentage of the fees paid to coaches through the service.
We’ve become a fatter nation over the past half century; few people dispute this, and rising obesity rates have been well chronicled in the media and in scholarly writings. Combine rising overall wealth, fast food, and a more sedentary lifestyle focused around TV and computers, and it isn’t hard to see why this has happened. This trend has caught the attention of everyone, including Michelle Obama, whose Let’s Move campaign encourages kids to be more active and have fun doing so. They present a lot of compelling data, which can be summed up with this quote from the first lady:
‘The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.‘
We came across a recent article that presents more compelling statistics, including that obesity is now contributing to an additional $190 billion per year in medical spending. Suffice it to say that the data indicates that this is an epidemic of serious proportions that is now costing the country a lot of money.
How A Private Coach Can Help
As a business run by sports coaches for coaches, we have seen firsthand the impact that playing youth sports can have on kids. Academic articles have suggested that and enjoyable experience in youth sports leads to lifetime participation in sports, and thus an active and healthier lifestyle. Working with a private coach has an obvious benefit for young athletes who are working toward becoming better high school or college athletes. But a secondary, less visible benefit is forming a positive, mentoring relationship with a person who loves and is dedicated to sports. This can have benefits far beyond on the field performance. Learning how to play a sport properly leads to a love of the game – and a love of training and practicing in a positive way – that sparks lifelong interest in active and healthy living. While it’s great to reach pinnacles of achievement as a young athlete, it is perhaps more important to nurture a love of exercise and sports in young people, and we look forward to participating in that effort.
