Last summer, while training together twice a day in preparation for their upcoming soccer seasons, Brown University students Alex Cooper-Hohn and Abby Carchio quickly realized that the most rigorous part of their training was not the actual workouts. It was the 30 to 45 minutes the two spent scouring YouTube and the internet beforehand to plan and create their routines.
Cooper-Hohn and Carchio discovered they were not alone — many players couldn’t afford a personal coach or the high expenses associated with joining a second team during the offseason. To even the playing field, the two launched Trainsolo, an app that helps aspiring and collegiate soccer players easily create the workouts and training sessions they need in order to stay fit over the offseason.
“The overarching mission is to optimize planning and execution of non-team training sessions, especially for players that can’t afford personal soccer coaches because the pay to play is huge in sport in America,” Cooper-Hohn, co-founder of Trainsolo, told Rhode Island Inno.
Trainsolo creates curated training sessions for players based on their skill level, objectives, and time. With every drill, Trainsolo also provides clipped match analysis, giving players both added motivation and the ability to transition their hard work into realistic match scenarios.
Trainsolo also provides specific fitness tests for specific college soccer programs to help aspiring collegiate players understand the physical demands required to compete at a high level.
What so many people don’t realize, said Cooper-Hohn, who plans to walk on to the men’s varsity team at Brown this year, is that the varsity season for college players is just seven months of the year. But to stay competitive, players need to train year round and it’s that other five months where players can really get a leg up on their competition, he said.
But in order to take full advantage, you need money. According to Cooper-Hohn, the average cost for a training session with a personal coach is $60, while it can cost more than $2,500 to join a separate travel team.
“When we looked around us we saw so many players struggling to train on their own because there was a lack of affordable guidance,” he said. “Trainsolo tries to mimic what a personal coach would do.”
Cooper-Hohn and Carchio, who recently graduated but captained the Brown University women’s soccer team to its first Ivy League Championship in more than 20 years, first came up with the idea. Then they linked up with Greyson Gerhard-Young, a computer science student and club soccer player at Brown, who helped them build a minimum viable product.
With their many years of soccer training, Cooper-Hohn, Carchio, and a soccer player from Rutgers University, Parker Solowey, filmed 400 drills for the app.
So far, the company has been beta testing the app on TestFlight, where they quickly built up 100 users. The team soon plans to release Trainsolo to the masses on the app store. At this time, Cooper-Hohn said the company plans to charge a small monthly subscription fee to use the app.
The goal is to try to grow users to 1,000 later this summer. Cooper-Hohn said Trainsolo first plans to target aspiring college soccer players in North America.
There are 11 million college and high school players in the U.S. About 1 million of those want to play college soccer every four years and Cooper-Hohn said the team thinks they can capture about 10 percent of this sub-market, or 100,000 users.
After releasing Trainsolo on the app store, Cooper-Hohn said the team will look to eventually rebuild the app to make it even more personalized, so players can pick workouts based on the position they play and use previous drills to algorithmically create workouts. They also hope to eventually have college coaches film and submit drills on the app as well.
Long term, Cooper-Hohn said the company wants to expand horizontally into Lacrosse, Basketball, and Rugby, other sports where the same “pay to play” problem exists.
“Trainsolo’s end goal is to be the most accessible and advanced non-team training application that provides driven players the means to succeed no matter their income,” he said.
