This week, we caught up with Oscar Moreno, sport performance coach at Tap Athletics and Ben López Jr, sport consultant. The two men, based out in California, have a longstanding partnership with McLloyd and have been using our GPS technology to empower their athletes and create positive social change.
Meet Oscar & Ben
Oscar (right): I grew up playing baseball and soccer and continued playing throughout high school and college. After a short break, I returned to the baseball scene as a coach in 2017. A year later, I was introduced to the world of sports performance for which I quickly took a great interest. I made the move to my current gym, Tap Athletics, in 2020. I quickly introduced to Les Spellman and McLloyd, and Tap Athletics started using McLloyd’s solution shortly after that.
Ben (left): I am passionate about helping people realize their true potential through their athletic endeavors. After my collegiate baseball playing days were over I made the transition into private baseball training/coaching, and eventually became a physical education teacher for a number of years, before starting a career in sports marketing with Body Armor sports drink. I met Oscar in 2021 at a local baseball facility. He introduced me to McLloyd and the rest is history. I am a believer in the power of data, in McLloyd as a company, and the direction in which data is taking sport at all levels.
McLloyd takes pride is working alongside driven and innovative coaches.
We knew that McLloyd and GPS tracking was what was going separate us from the others and allow us to take things to the next level and make that big jump into understanding our athletes that much better and elevating their performance. I believe in McLloyd and what it has to offer and everything that it has benefitted me, myself, my athletes, and the clubs I have been lucky enough to work with.
Oscar elaborated on why he uses our system:
“McLloyd is a solution for those who seek to develop and improve their athletic performance. It can give so many insights into the demands of the games, it tracks the improvement so that you can eventually prevent injury thanks to the data collected over time
Most clubs and teams track everything correlated to the ball but they don’t track the athlete himself or herself, which is a mistake. For us, one of the most important metrics is the workload. Like that, we make sure the athletes are ready to endure the workload they face during games. It’s very good to use within a team because athletes can grow individually and more efficiently to make the whole team better. From a coach’s perspective, it’s very user friendly and gives me back so much data that I can then utilize and analyze over time, picking up on trends and patterns that will subsequently guide my coaching. We are also able to pick up on unbalances, say if the athlete uses certain muscle groups more than others. Finally, the injury prevention dimension is so important.”
This kind of technology is up and coming in Baseball, because it’s a unique sport with complex movement patterns that coaches and players must be aware of.
Oscar and Ben are proactive McLloyd users, having fully integrated the system in their day to day coaching. “At first, we started integrating the trackers with our own individual clients. Then, we started blasting content, getting on social media and reaching out to clubs, teams, colleges and high schools, introducing people to the system and doing demos on testing days. After that we come back and give them the reports to help them get a better understanding of their athletes’ performance“, says Oscar.
McLloyd & Tap Athletics in the Dominican Republic
Oscar and Ben’s work recently gave them the opportunity to take part in an exciting projet in the Dominican Republic:
We were in the Dominican Republic doing demos for the Orioles, Reds and Angels affiliate teams. We went to these combines and used McLloyd tech for those testing sessions.
This took place in a wider context of Tap Athletics involvement in on the island. Indeed, Tap Athletics also has a non-profit association called “for the athletes” that focuses on helping with the less fortunate in marginalized nations. This non-profit is in the process of working with the Edupor Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the Dominican Republic that is committed to finding college athletic and academic scholarships for Dominican and latino student athletes who have been identified as scholarship candidates. Edupor is looking to take the data that McLloyd provides and empower their athletes with player profiling in 2023 for baseball as well as soccer and track & field. Edupor CEO Leonard Polanco says that McLloyd has made quite the impact on the island. The foundation has plans to add an English program in 2023, merging academics and sports, thanks to a partnership with Diamond English.
Together, we try to provide a better environment for these kids to grow multi-dimensionally and help them grow as athletes and as humans.
McLloyd is proud to play a part in such exciting projects and to associate its brand with Tap Athletics and its work in the Dominican Republic.