When it was all said and done, Michael Mancinelli had been a major contributor on three straight state championship teams; it was an impressive run that included a 33-game winning streak. Mullen High School, where Mancinelli enjoyed a rarified streak of success as a high school football player, was dominant from 2008 to 2010. Such excellence provides opportunity.
“I think we had more than 20 guys in my class go on to play college football,” Mancinelli says.
And he was one of them.
But Mancinelli did not just go on to play at just any place. His pads took him to the Ivy League, where he played four years at Harvard, winning three Ivy League Championships — including a senior season that saw the Crimson go 10-0, a perfect campaign capped off by a four-quarter shootout against Yale hosted by College Gameday. While Mancinelli ultimately didn’t find his way to the NFL — like his Harvard teammate Adam Redmond — his football journey led him to professional opportunities only afforded to the type of person who earns three degrees from Harvard — a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. in Engineering and an MBA.
Three state championships. Three Ivy League Championships. And three degrees from Harvard. That’s an unusually dynamic resume, and football — or perhaps more importantly, football coaches — are who Mancinelli typically points to when dishing out credit.
“At Mullen and Harvard, I was very lucky to have coaches who put hours of time into motivating me, showing me the value of hard work over a long period of time, and advocating on my behalf,” he says. “For example, I would have never dreamt of going to play football in the Ivy. League if it wasn’t for the encouragement and advocacy of Dave Logan and Det Betti.”
Logan, a familiar name to anyone who follows Colorado high school sports, was Mancinelli’s coach at Mullen. Betti, who now coaches the offensive line at Cherry Creek under Logan, was Mancinelli’s high school position coach. Both, he says, helped him greatly along the path to where he is now.
That path has led him to Tully, an online application designed to help those who ultimately helped him. The idea behind Tully is to provide a tool for amazing coaches to make an even bigger impact.
How?
In 2024, there seems to be an app for everything. But when Mancinelli and Redmond — a teammate and NFL player turned business partner — along with Tom Smithhisler, a partner and the founding engineer of Tully, analyzed the tools in which high school and college coaches have at their disposal, the app they envisioned was nowhere to be found.
So Tully was born.
“We don’t want to replace the coach,” Mancinelli says emphatically. “We love our coaches, and we’re trying to amplify their effect. We are not trying to be an ‘artificial intelligence’ coach. That’s not what this company is.”
What it is: Tully is an app designed to help coaches implement and evaluate a teambased training program. It’s designed to win championships, not necessarily earn individual scholarships. Sure, individuals benefit greatly, but the net impact is on the team.
To be clear, there’s nothing cookie cutter about Tully; one size does not fit all.
The customization begins on the front end, and the sequence generally follows a pattern like this: A coach or athletic director works directly with Tully to create a set of measurables — bench press, squat, pull ups, sit ups, anything that makes sense for their team. From there, the program is entered into the app. A QR code is created, placed in the weight room or practice facility and then scanned by everyone on the team. From there, student-athletes implement the workout and self-report their progress. Once they do, coaches have access to all of it, allowing them to assess the progress of every individual on the team. Furthermore, so does Tully.
And this is where the background of the company’s founders comes into play. Everyone associated with the development of the app has a strong background in data collection, data analysis, athletics and implementation. What could conceivably take an entire coaching staff hours or even days to collect and evaluate, is now available in mere seconds.
“It’s like a wearable — like your Apple Watch or FitBit, for example — but without the hardware or cost,” says Mancinelli. “We handle the data, which saves our coaches two-to-five hours every week.
“In a high school, especially in football, even if you do have 15 assistants, they all can’t be everywhere. Essentially, Tully is a mechanism to keep track of compliance.”
Tully, headquartered in Dallas but with a stronghold in Colorado, works with over 40 programs nationally – including Valor Christian and Cherry Creek – impacting more than 10,000 kids along the way. As football season approaches, Tully has more than one million data entries. The more they grow, the more they know.
Logan himself uses Tully for his Cherry Creek football team.
“Tully provides personalization for each athlete, while still focusing on the team,” Logan says.
Much like Peloton, Tully creates a community. But unlike the wildly popular cycling apps and machines, Tully relies on the expertise of coaches around the world. In the process, the metric to evaluate athletes within the team or across the country are established. With the “Tully Score,” athletes cannot only create friendly competition within their own school or program, but they can measure themselves against similar athletes around the country.
Mancinelli, who plans on being the boots-on-the-ground representative for Colorado, knows that Tully works.
“We’ve created the a common ground for athletes to compete with each other, stay motivated and stay engaged,” he says. “And their coaches can access all of it.”
Today, Tully offers a simple line of products. Tully Tracking, a flexible metric tracking system that allows coaches to track anything from sleep to squats, lets coaches see where their athletes stand relative to the entire Tully user base on major metrics like bench, broad jump, and 40-yard dash. The Tully Programming Toolkit lets coaches can write workouts, training programs, and practice schedules and share them instantly, while Tully Stats provides easy and fun data collection tools for in-game statistics.
For Mancinelli and his partners, Tully is more than an idea or “side hustle.” It’s what they do. It’s a product they hope revolutionizes how coaches work with their teams. It’s a passion, one meant to give back to those who gave them so much as athletes.
“Colorado athletics are in the top tier across the country,” says Mancinelli, “and Tully can provide a basis for amplifying and showcasing Colorado’s amazing high school athletes.”
To learn how your school or team can join the Tully family, visit Tully.app for information on products and pricing!
