Tennessee-based Plyomat helps athletes across the world maximize their potential
Strength coach Rich Burnett built a subscription-free alternative to pricey switch mats. Now Ashleigh and Drew Walters have bought in, and orders are coming in from collegiate and professional sports programs across the globe.
When Rich Burnett couldn’t find an affordable, no-nonsense way to measure how high and fast his athletes jumped, he built one himself, by hand, one prototype at a time. A few years later, the testing mat he created, Plyomat, has drawn investment from a pair of Tennessee investors and is turning up in high school, college, and pro weight rooms across the country.
For various sports, jump height and reactivity speed matter; for example, reactivity time in football could make the difference in catching the ball for a touchdown. Jump height can be the differentiator for high scorers in basketball or standout blockers in volleyball. For serious athletes and coaches, these types of metrics matter; however, the technology to gather those metrics can be very expensive.
Plyomat started in a high school
Burnett felt that burden firsthand with his college and high school athletes. He spent five years in Division I strength and conditioning at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, rising to head strength coach from 2014 to 2016. Then transitioning to a position at Greater Atlanta Christian School, where he ran a performance program training hundreds of student-athletes a day.
“I had an idea of what I wanted in my head and ended up approaching an engineer with it,” Burnett said. “It wasn’t initially a business idea. It was simply a tool I could use to help train my athletes.”
The Plyomat prototype he developed alongside the engineer worked. It started as a pretty basic “switch mat.” Meaning, an athlete stepped on, jumped, and the mat read metrics like jump height, ground contact time, and reactive strength, and a host of other numbers coaches can use to track power and elasticity over a season.
For Burnett’s purposes, it worked well. He rolled out the technology to his students and posted videos online of his Plyomat prototype showing its functionality in a weight room.
“I had hundreds of videos of me implementing it with students, getting feedback in real time. And I started to get a lot of questions about it online – like, can you make this for my program?” Burnett said.
Transitioning to a business
Burnett saw the opportunity and started selling early-stage prototypes to interested parties. In fact, he said one of the earliest adopters was the Iowa State Football program.
” I sold prototypes that were easy enough for them to use without it being too crude. But when I got a request from Iowa Football’s program, as well as Mike Boyle, the well-known strength and conditioning coach in the Northeast, I knew I had a viable business,” he said.
The business, by Burnett’s account, technically launched in March 2021.
During this time, Burnett became close friends with Lee Smith, an 11-year NFL veteran who also had a heart for investing in young athletes. The two decided to relocate to Knoxville in 2022 to build Triple F Elite Sports Performance on Solway in Knox County. There, Burnett helped design the layout, the equipment, and the testing system for young athletes. He made the mat part of the programming.
“One of the reasons Triple F has been such a good partner to Plyomat is that we can track what sorts of data and performance indicators really move the needle for athletes,” Burnett said.
Over the past four years, Plyomat has been tested, reconfigured, and perfected through the jumps and feedback of hundreds of student-athletes. Today, Rich serves as Director of Athletic Development at Triple F, as well as CEO and Founder of Plyomat.
Scaling up the opportunities through new investment
Ashleigh and Drew Walters found out about Plyomat and its capabilities through Triple F. Their sons trained at Triple F and saw their football performance climb. It eventually led the Walters to try some of the adult classes, seeking the same health and mobility benefits.
The Walters family moved to the Knoxville area a couple of years ago, after the successful sale of their manufacturing company Onex in Pennsylvania. The couple took over the business at a time when it was failing, completely turned it around, and have been focused on helping others do the same ever since.
For example, Ashleigh now facilitates the UT Center for Industrial Services‘ Tennessee Manufacturing Extension Partnership (TMEP) peer group, helping manufacturers sharpen their operations. She also mentors young companies through the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s mentor network.
“When we moved back to Tennessee, we were actively looking for investments in the area, but could never seem to find the right fit,” Ashleigh said. “And the day we met Rich, we thought, now that’s a guy and a product we can invest in.”
And the investment, which led to co-ownership, came at a great time.
Recently, the company rolled out a modern mobile platform that connects to the Plyomat, offering athletes and coaches valuable insights about their performance and improvement. It also has scoreboards to cultivate team competition and tracking.
Setting Plyomat apart from the competition
Burnett is the first person to say that Plyomat isn’t the first switch mat. The technology is known and used by sports programs everywhere. But while Plyomat isn’t the first, Burnett said it is by far the most accessible, cost-wise, for fee-sensitive programs.
Whereas traditional athletic switch mat technologies may charge thousands of dollars for the mat, and an additional recurring monthly fee to access a corresponding app. Coaches, like everyone else, are feeling subscription fatigue, and the owners of Plyomat are battling against it. And their approach is working.
Plyomat charges one flat fee of $1000 to give teams access to one mat and the companion app.
It’s perhaps one of the reasons why the Plyomat is chosen by high school, collegiate, and professional sports departments and weight rooms across the United States and in 50+ countries.
“We just had our biggest purchase ever with James Madison University buying 17 Plyomats,” Burnett said. “They’re doing something that no university has ever done, which is to totally integrate their entire system of how they evaluate performance.”
With the new partnership with the Walters and a newly launched app, Burnett said Plyomat is well-positioned to continue making an impact on professional sports teams and athlete performance across the world.
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