KC Royals Coaches Eiland, Sveum Teach Baseball To Youth With App

How Coached Came To Be

Coached is the creation of 28-year-old entrepreneurs Robin Allemand and Will Ellis, who met each other as teammates on the same high school baseball squad. After their high school days, Robin went on to play collegiate baseball at Williams College while Will gave up the game and attended Brown University. But the two remained in contact as they continued through school.

After college, Robin and Will remembered all of the poor mechanics and fundamental mistakes that they had seen from many players coming up in youth baseball. Robin said:

"“The problem is most people don’t have the right coaching for their kids, and it doesn’t end up being successful—or a fun thing—for the kids. And they don’t reach the pinnacle.”"

Since Robin Allemand had the good fortune to have made contacts in the baseball world through his collegiate career, the two hatched a plan to create an app to solve the problem.

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After struggling to get exactly what he wanted from application designers in an earlier startup, Will Ellis taught himself to code in Swift—a programming language specifically created for Apple iOS devices. Meanwhile, Robin worked his contacts to see if he could recruit baseball men that might be willing to participate as instructors.

Word of Robin and Will’s project worked its way up the chain, carried by baseball lifers captivated by the possibility of connecting developing players with proven coaches. The pair caught a break when their idea reached 16-year major league veteran, and current Detroit Tigers hitting coach, Wally Joyner. Joyner, who played four seasons at first base with the KC Royals from 1992-95, proved to be the Pied Piper that helped carry news of Robin and Will’s dream to baseball men at the highest-level of the game.

As often happens with truly innovative concepts, qualified people quickly jumped on board. When Kansas City Royals pitching coach Dave Eiland heard of Coached from Joyner, he thought it was a great idea. Eiland said:

"“We [Eiland and Dale Sveum] were approached by Will and Robin, and we were hesitant at first because there’s a lot of different things out there on the internet and these different gurus and this that and the other thing and people are getting tricked buying these things. We called these guys and they wanted to get the right people involved. We thought it was a tremendous idea and we were all on board.”  “Father’s coaching can only take them so much, and Little League coaches can only take ’em so far, and we thought this was a great idea to help kids out: not only in the immediate area, but around the world.”"

Two months after Robin and Will committed to the project, they released Coached for free download from the Apple store. The pair are also working on an Android version.

Next: The Benefits Of Coached