Zach Herbst's My GA Online poised to change the game for football coaches everywhere

Zach Herbst stands beside a monitor featuring his brainchild, My GA Online, a web-based football athlete management system that automates or streamlines a bevy of menial tasks. My GA Online saved Cy Ranch 300 staff hours last year - an eternity in the time-management-obsessed world of coaching. less Zach Herbst stands beside a monitor featuring his brainchild, My GA Online, a web-based football athlete management system that automates or streamlines a bevy of menial tasks. My GA Online saved Cy Ranch 300 ... more Photo: Tony Gaines / HCN Photo: Tony Gaines / HCN Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Zach Herbst's My GA Online poised to change the game for football coaches everywhere 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Since the Bill James Baseball Abstract burst onto the scene in 1977, the world of sports has advanced steadily into the Information Age, despite a kind of veteran-driven inertia.

Charles Barkley's 2015 Inside the NBA on TNT rant (in which he alleged, "analytics is crap," called Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, "one of those idiots," and went on to question his romantic success in high school) notwithstanding, conventional wisdom has nearly caught up to reality.

The reality is: whomever controls the information – has the most data, can sort through it most efficiently, knows how to implement the wealth of information that can now be easily gathered – holds a significant advantage.

Zach Herbst wants to play that disruptor role in Texas high school football.

Herbst is the prototypical young coach. The freshman offensive line coach at Cypress Ranch High School the last two years found himself tasked with the football equivalent of busywork, keeping rosters up to date, tracking attendance, doing all the little things that keep a team running but don't usually earn game balls.

Herbst stands to gain considerably more than a game ball, though, if his My GA Online, billed as a 'virtual graduate assistant,' takes off.

My GA Online, a sleek, color-coded, do-it-all deck that streamlines football teams' information management processes, grew out of a cumbersome Excel project that Herbst kept on behalf of Cy Ranch Mustangs Football. He managed and tracked thousands and thousands of data points for more than 350 athletes, meanwhile trying to distill the glut of numbers and words into something his head coach could use to make decisions or improve the team.

Over time, as Herbst encountered new needs or requests and noticed deficiencies and flaws in his system, he refined his process tirelessly, striving to grow more and more efficient. The job of collating the multitudes of data points is not a coveted one. Managing the rosters, two-deeps, attendance information is a 'well, somebody had to do it' kind of job.

Nobody has to do it anymore, though, says Herbst. He wound up saddled with a profoundly undesirable year-round chore, more or less, because he was the young guy on staff who had a knack with computers. In turn, he employed that technological knack, along with the lessons he learned from his early efforts, in creating My GA Online.

"Usually, the most tech-savvy coach is the guy in charge," Herbst said. "With depth charts, a lot of coaches have it on magnets or boards. Or it's on Excel, and then you change that, and you go into Word and you change that, or it's Google Docs. You make one change, you have to put a kid on a roster, take a kid off a roster, make sure their jersey's correct. There's four or five more tasks you have to do. This does them all automatically."

Less Time Working, More Time Coaching

Where Billy Beane and Daryl Morey brought analytics to bear in scouting and personnel at the pro level, Herbst hopes to chip away at the mindless, rote tasks that plague football operations, leaving more time for anything and everything else.

Cy Ranch test ran My GA Online last year, giving Herbst a clear, concrete look at precisely what impact his brainchild would have on football operations.

"The slogan we have is, 'Spend Less Time Working and More Time Coaching,'" Herbst said. "We figured out that this saved our staff about 300 hours this year. As a staff. One hour as a staff is fourteen guys, fourteen hours. If I spend less time on [menial tasks], I can watch more film. I could grade papers, be a better teacher in the classroom."

Cy-Fair ISD Associate Director of Athletics Kirk Eaton, the head coach of Cy Falls Football prior to taking the administrative job, saw Herbst's automator in a presentation and was instantly struck by what it could potentially mean for Texas high school football.

"I was amazed at the implications of this one tool and its impact," Eaton said. "While you're working on your depth chart, you're also working on your roster. You're killing two birds with one stone, and in coaching, being efficient with your time is everything."

The platform's existing functionality is impressive. An athlete database, sortable by every conceivable metric, like class, position, athletic period and anything else, underlies every facet of My GA Online's functionality, and the interconnected, live-updating depth charts – like gameday depth charts, roster and two-deep – ensures that every personnel move is motivated by data and supported by the wealth of knowledge in the database.

Even attendance, which applies to not only football players from the varsity level down to freshman, but also the conglomeration of ancillary support, like trainers, is tracked and automated.

Herbst's My GA Online website also offers a glimpse into the rapidly expanding functionality of the suite, including a customizable grading sheet used to assign value to gameday or practice performances, a bevy of practice-oriented options like Practice Builder and Practice Script that enable a head coach to see at an incredibly granular level exactly how time is spent during practices and how it might be better spent.

Herbst also promises that, in the foreseeable future, My GA Online will collect all the various, disparate and far-flung pieces of recruiting-related data, from Hudl links to social media handles and offers, grades, test scores, etc. What before might have taken hours, collecting and arranging pieces of data from a variety of sources, will become a quick, easy, sharp-looking one-click task: less time working and more time coaching.

Eaton said that he knew, almost instantaneously, as Herbst demonstrated the functionality of the platform, what kind of value My GA Online would have offered him as a head coach.

"When he showed me all the things you can do with it, I was instantly impressed," Eaton said. "I spent so many hours on stuff like that. If I'd have had it, it would have streamlined it, taken that off my plate and allowed me to do something else. I could have been spending more time on things like special teams film breakdown. And it'll get you out of the office earlier."

Herbst's stated goal – a suite of different tools that, taken collectively, will add the value of a graduate assistant – is lofty, but the 300 hours My GA Online saved for the Mustangs is auspicious. In the near future, Herbst sees My GA Online removing all but the most vitally human tasks from the to-do lists of coaching staffs.

"What I really want this to turn into is an extra assistant coach that does everything else instead of video breakdown," Herbst said. "This can save you time. You have all your kids in one place."

For the love of magnets

Having the information in one place, knowing how to isolate, manipulate and utilize data, one-click options for sharing, drag-and-drop functionality that live-updates across several different rosters and charts – the various My GA Online offerings cover a wide variety of tasks and chores, but they all have one thing in common, says Eaton.

"I've been coaching a long time, and when I look at things over the 23 years I've been doing it, the things that have given coaches time back in their schedule?" Eaton said. "Those are huge in the coaching game."

Slowly, but surely, as Herbst sits down with coaches and colleagues and demos the platform, he's seeing responses similar to Eaton's, when – like the former Cy Falls head coach – they are open to the concept that their current system is imperfect or flawed.

"Once coaches see what it can do, they're like, 'oh, I really like it,'" Herbst said. "And for $300 a year, it's really not that expensive for a coach. With $300, I'm saving you 300 hours. But it's just getting past that hurdle."

The hurdle is almost ludicrous, when viewed holistically. The lone obstacle between Herbst and potential clients is often no more profound or serious than a deep-seated love for magnets or whiteboards or whatever serves as their current status quo. That, however, will change once he lands a marquee Texas high school football program, Herbst believes.

"It's been a struggle," Herbst said. "I thought it would take off like that, but of course, it never does. But you stay on the ground, stay on people, and you hope eventually you get that big break. And when big schools start using it – if Katy High School is using it, if Cypress Ranch High School is using it – then it must be something good."

A leap of faith

Landing the big-name program is key, but Herbst is in no hurry. Haste is antithetical to efficiency, and rather than rush his platform and risk underwhelming coaches with a buggy or incomplete product, he is happy to be a well-kept secret for now. In the meantime, My GA Online continues to grow, develop and evolve as does Herbst.

"I work on it every day," Herbst said. "I just spent three hours working on tutorial videos, putting them together. I've learned how to use iMovie. It's making me learn a lot more stuff, and I'm getting out there, and I'm talking to people. It's exciting, but it's just really daunting."

Herbst says that he only gets one shot to make a big, sweeping first impression, and if that means another 10 or 11 months before he hits the coaching clinics circuit to tinker, learn and improve, that suits him fine.

"We used it through spring football, and we think we found all the flaws," Herbst said. "But there's tons of stuff that can pop up. That's why I don't want to push it. I don't want to put out a bad product, waste coaches' time. Ideally, I told myself if I could have 20 clients, I could cover my costs and everything would be fine. The next year, I can double it to 40 and by year five have 500 clients."

All the data and analysis in the world can't eliminate risk. The world into which Herbst is launching My GA Online is the same world that chose VHS over Betamax. Herbst can make coaches better, but he can't make them smarter or more self-aware.

Eaton knows the danger of inertia all too well – citing a touch of egomania in most head coaches – but he is sanguine about the platform's long-term prospects. Eaton remembers a time when Hudl was brand new, and he sat in front of his computer, thoughts racing with how the game was about to change.

Eaton had the same feeling again, seeing Herbst jet through the multitude of simple, interconnected My GA Online functions. Herbst stands to change the game, himself, if he can just manage to convince a coach here and a coach there that their process isn't as unimpeachable as they might think.

That's a tough sell, of course, but Eaton says that based on what he saw – both of My GA Online and of Herbst's vision more generally – he's still betting on the salesman.

"A lot of people don't do things in life," Eaton said. "They say it's too hard, whatever. I admire Zach. He took a leap of faith, and I think it's going to pay off for him, I really do."

To learn more about My GA Online, visit https://www.mygaonline.com where visitors can sign up to receive more information or demo the platform.