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The SportsBoard Blog

2015

It’s late spring, the time of year when our spring-sport customers are in "showtime" mode.

Congratulations to all of our customers on their seasons; whether they improved on 2014 or reached the NCAA tournament, we would like to think that SportsBoard played a pivotal role in their success. Here is a quick recap of SportsBoard’s top spring performances by sport:

  • NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament: Four customers earned bids: Ohio State, St. John’s, South Florida, and Georgia State

  • NCAA Women’s Softball Tournament: Eight customers earned bids: San Diego State, UCLA, Missouri, Dartmouth, Louisville, Northwestern, Notre Dame and North Carolina

  • NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Tournament: Five of the remaining Elite Eight are customers: Penn State, Princeton, Syracuse, North Carolina and Northwestern

  • NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Tournament: One of the remaining Final Four is a customer: Maryland

The best part about SportsBoard’s assessment functionality is that it addresses coaches’ needs for most of the calendar year.

  • During the off-season, coaches can use SportsBoard for recruiting, which is paramount to building a successful team and mine for those "diamonds in the rough."

  • During the summer and off-season, coaches can use SportsBoard for camps to generate additional revenue for compensating staff or supplementing their budgets.

  • During season, coaches can measure player efficiency by stat-ing the less obvious stats, those NOT on the scorecard. SportsBoard’s ability to support custom stats for each of its college customers enables coaches to track and measure exactly what they want.

Today, coaches are asked to do more and more, all in a 24-hour day on a year-round basis. SportsBoard enables coaches to find time they wouldn’t otherwise have, and do more in less time. That’s money, and it can make a difference between winning and losing.

MAY6

CEO Snip-It: Recruiting Insights from All-Star Girls Report’s Deep South Classic Raleigh, NC: April 25-26, 2015

Impressive doesn’t begin to describe this event! With more than 400 girls AAU basketball teams and nearly 600 hundred college coaches present, All-Star Girl's Report (ASGR) opened the 2015 Girl's Basketball recruiting event season with the Deep South Classic last weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Deep South Classic also marked the launch of ASGR’s new mobile scouting service app, powered by SportsBoard. Starting June 1, 2015, ASGR will bundle its mobile scouting service app with its annual scouting service subscriptions, so that coaches can quickly and easily access scouting service data anywhere, anytime.

ASGR is the first scouting service in the country to take its scouting service to an app that runs natively on an iPad/iPhone rather than just in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.

Being first to market isn't news for ASGR, as they continue to be trailblazers with many forward-thinking, game-changing initiatives they have launched over their 19 years of being in business.

We appreciate and value the partnership we have with ASGR, and are excited to assist them as they transition into the modern-day world of mobile player assessment!

APR22

SportsBoard Advisory Council: An All-Star Team of Successful Industry Leaders

SportsBoard is thrilled to announce the formation of its Advisory Council, consisting of three highly-respected and renowned leaders from the amateur sports and technology sectors.

Sue Enquist, former All-American softball player, softball assistant coach, softball head coach and athletic department development director at UCLA. Sue earned 11 national championships while being a player and coach there. One of the most highly-regarded authorities in amateur sports, Sue brings her views as a coach and then an outsider to the ecosystem, starting with grassroots athletes playing club ball who then get recruited by college coaches, who then get considered/selected to play professionally.

Dean Stotz, retired 37-year coach at Stanford Baseball who continues to run the highly-acclaimed Stanford Baseball Camps, arguably the best baseball recruiting camps in the country. Back in 2012 when SportsBoard was launched, Dean inspired us to create a camp solution for his three elite baseball camps, which began with video evaluations. Now Stanford is incorporating PDF evaluations into its offering for combine testing and subjective feedback, and will be delivering all content to athletes and their parents using SportsBoard’s Player Locker. Dean continues to inspire SportsBoard with new ideas for our product.

Doug Brown, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at NetSuite, one of the five largest software-as-a-service enterprise software companies. Traded on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: N), NetSuite employs nearly 3,000 staff and operates 23 offices around the world. With 14 years of service at NetSuite under his belt and an organization of more than 250 professionals in his organization, Doug’s validation of our technology and our approach give us the “stamp” of approval to be considered “legit” for organizations of all sizes.

“Now that we’ve matured as a company, it is time for us to take the next step and form this Council,” said Gregg Jacobs, SportsBoard’s Founder/CEO. “With validation from all of these experts about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, SportsBoard’s potential reaches far and wide.”

APR15

CEO Snip-It: Recruiting Insights from Elite Club National League (ECNL) - San Diego

It was great to see such an awesome turn-out at this past weekend’s Elite Club National League girls soccer tournament in San Diego. And it was even better to see so many so many coaches using SportsBoard to recruit and capture data about athletes they came to evaluate.

Although the wind created challenges for those dealing with printed roster packets, those using SportsBoard were unaffected. While not an obvious benefit of going paperless, SportsBoard is not challenged in wind or rain whether you use it on iPads or iPhones.

It was great to see coaches sharing the various ways they use SportsBoard – from importing recruiting board players into the game schedule, different ways to pool players, and capturing text notes with bluetooth keyboards rather than typing.

SportsBoard offers many features, much like a spreadsheet, word processor and email all in one system and can be used year-round for:

  • Recruiting: tournaments and ID camps
  • Season: measuring player efficiency through customizable stats, tagging video, and scouting opponents
  • Camps: Assessing players and generating PDF and video evals
  • Strength & Conditioning: Integrating custom strength and condition programs from your strength coaches for your team so you can assess their progress off the field as much as you do on the field.

Our integration with HUMANeX AthleteX offers an incredible and unique solution for coaches to integrate talent profiling data with other data coaches collect about their players and their recruits pertaining grit, will-to-win, passion and other intangible behaviors.

At events like the ECNL and many others, going paperless is the future, and the future is now. SportsBoard is THE most comprehensive mobile player assessment solution available today, and empowers coaches to capture, store, analyze and share scouting data unlike ever before.

APR2

CEO Snip-It

Every day, the world is getting more and more connected, and that applies to amateur sports, too! College coaches have less and less time to ingest more and more data, and their world has seemingly gotten more complicated by the influx of sensor-based technologies.

If you’ve been following us over the past few months, you have seen that we’ve announced partnerships with Diamond Kinetics and Zepp (both for baseball and softball swing metrics), and Zybek (for sprint and pro agility shuttle times). Through these partnerships, we are creating a more connected world, meaning that coaches can use these products in combine environments and watch the data all land in SportsBoard without a single keystroke on the computer, or using pen/paper and Excel.

This scenario is slowly becoming the standard for travel ball environments. Last summer and fall, Triple Crown Sports and Premier Girls Fastpitch used SportsBoard on iPads to digitally capture test results in real time on the field, a good start. This summer, both companies will leverage the integration we have completed with Zepp and Diamond Kinetics to aggregate the data without even entering it into an iPad, and then distribute it to leaderboards and online faster than ever before.

In amateur sports, we’ve entered a new era. Technology will continue to streamline and expedite the measurement collection and publication process. And that will only make it easier for college coaches to screen talent initially, formulate recruiting strategies that are efficient, and ultimately win more!

2014
JUL2

SportsBoard Goes “Enterprise”

Back in summer 2011 when I first started designing SportsBoard, I thought that large sports organizations might want to use it one day. When I presented the concept of SportsBoard to several successful college coaches, they validated my vision. Now, three years later, my team and I are proud to share that this vision is becoming a reality!

  • U.S. Women’s Soccer is now implementing SportsBoard to track scouting and development of all players on its national pool radar, from youth teams up to the national team.  
  • IMG Academy is now using SportsBoard for all sports programs to track development of its full-time resident athletes as well as the thousands of athletes who participate in their camps.
  • For golf, the Callaway Junior World Golf Championships at Torrey Pines Golf Course in La Jolla is offering a branded app powered by SportsBoard so that coaches who attend can recruit digitally.  
  • For girls basketball, All-Star Girls Report, US Junior Nationals, RoundBall Academy and End-of-the-Trail are all offering a branded app powered by SportsBoard so that coaches who attend these tournaments can recruit digitally.  
  • USA Archery, our 2nd national sports governing body, is implementing SportsBoard for its national coaching staff! 

SportsBoard now streamlines player assessment processes for over 300 colleges, including iconic coaching staffs at UCLA, Stanford, North Carolina, Florida, Duke, Kentucky, Michigan, Cal, Georgetown, Harvard, Clemson, Maryland, Memphis and many more. Our customers are winners, with over 80 national championships to their credit, and they are using SportsBoard to gain a competitive advantage in recruiting, season, strength & conditioning and their camp businesses. 

Tom Bowen, Athletic Director at University of Memphis, says: “When you are competing at the highest level, you need every advantage you can get.  As a coach, I couldn’t afford NOT to subscribe to SportsBoard, given the potential advantage and upside it offers!”

Join us – the sooner you go paperless, the more time you and your staff will have to coach your players, which should translate into more wins! 

MAY29

The U.S. Soccer Women’s National Team Adopts SportsBoard

SportsBoard is proud to announce its newest and most prominent soccer customer yet, the U.S. Soccer Women’s National Team. Ranked No. 1 in the FIFA women’s world rankings for the last seven years, the USWNT will be tapping into SportsBoard’s revolutionary mobile technology to develop a women’s scouting database.

“We’ve looked at so many programs over the years, but the simplicity and detail of what SportsBoard offers is going to be great for us,” said Jill Ellis, the new USWNT Head Coach. “SportsBoard’s technology allows us to catalogue the development of every player in our scouting network.”

All U.S Women’s Youth National Team coaches and some 40 national team scouts will use SportsBoard to scout and record technical, physical and health-related data.

Many of the perennial powerhouse NCAA women’s soccer programs rely on SportsBoard for recruiting, season and camps, including 22-time national champion North Carolina, as well as 2013 national champion UCLA, Florida, Duke, Virginia Tech, South Carolina, San Diego State, University of Washington and more.

“We are thrilled to be working with Coach Jill Ellis and the U.S. Women’s National Team coaching staff,” said Gregg Jacobs, SportsBoard’s CEO and Founder. “We look forward to exceeding USWNT’s expectations of SportsBoard and to working with similar organizations in other sports in the near future.”

2013
DEC16

SportsBoard Feeling Chameleon’s Impact

Have you ever done something expecting a certain result, only to be pleasantly surprised by the actual result that follows?  That’s what’s happening with SportsBoard Chameleon, our newly-architected and released version of our mobile player assessment solution.

Just look at the list of clients who have subscribed to SportsBoard since releasing Chameleon:

Basketball
North Dakota State University (W)
University of Memphis (M/W)
Nothing-But-Net Basketball
Connecticut College (W)
Florida State University (W)
Purdue University (M)
Nike Grassroots-Westview HS (B)
Nike Grassroots-Christ the King HS (B)
Nike Grassroots-West Linn HS (B)
Nike Grassroots-Mater Dei HS (G)
Nike Grassroots-Westview HS (B)
Nike Grassroots-Newark-Memorial HS (B)
New England Recruiting Report
Santa Clara University (M)
St Johns University (M)

Baseball
St Thomas University
Cal St University - Northridge
Go-for-the-Show

Golf
Future Champions Golf Academy

Ice Hockey
Princeton University (W)
SUNY Cortland (W)
SUNY Brockport (W)
Boston University (W)
New England College (W)
University of North Dakota (W)
Brock University (W)
Planet Hockey

Lacrosse
University of Findlay (W)
University of Delaware (M)
Sherry Sports (W)
Wheeling Jesuit University (M)
University of Denver (W)
James Madison University (W)

Football
National Underclassmen

Soccer
Dominican University (M, W)
Santa Clara University (M)
University of Kansas (W)
East Carolina University (W)
University of Hawaii (W)
University of New Mexico (W)
Holy Cross College (W)
Princeton University (W)
Air Force Academy (W)
West Carolina University (W)

Softball
Penn State
Presbyterian College

And there are many more jumping on board weekly!

For some, the decision was based on just wanted to go paperless.  For others, it was more about going paperless AND being able to customize skills and stats. 

Don’t get left behind….#getwithit and #gopaperless.

OCT2

SportsBoard: The Next Generation

We all learn how to do things better the 2nd time around after we’ve had some experience….no matter what we do, in work, sports, relationships, everything.  That same scenario applies to building software.  

SportsBoard is proud to announce the launch of Chameleon, the 2nd generation and newest version of its iPad-/iPhone-/cloud-based mobile player assessment solution. 

Chameleon represents a complete re-write of our former “Scout” apps we previously created for 12 different sports.  Chameleon enables coaches to completely customize their data models for rating skills and capturing stats, all driven from their SportsBoard cloud account so that all iPads being used by a coaching staff contain the exact same data models for recruiting, season or camp purposes.  

From our first generation apps, which contained ratings- and stats-based data models we collected from highly-experienced coaches in their respective sports, we learned that coaches have their own unique systems for skills and stats. In line with how closely we work with our customers, we decided that we needed to devise a way to support customizable data models without compromising SportsBoard’s architecture.  

So, a year ago we started planning for this, and in summer 2013, we developed it.  Now we are adding customers at faster rates than ever before, and we are signing up big customers in sports such as golf and water polo, since it’s so simple to alter the data model for virtually any sport!

Why “Chameleon”?  Because Chameleon is flexible enough to support any number of sports, not just the 12 we created apps for. Rather than coding the sport-specific content in the apps like we used to do, we sync down the sport-specific content when a customer logs in.  By re-engineering this design, the same app can morph, like a Chameleon changing colors, into whatever sport and stats the user desires. 

We’ve got hundreds of college programs on board, now high schools and clubs are signing on for tryouts and player evals. Join them on this crusade to make player assessments paperless and take efficiency to a whole new level. No matter what sport or level you coach, give us a shout to learn more!

JUN17

The Gender Gap Even Applies to SportsBoard

When SportsBoard launched its revolutionary iPad- and cloud-based player assessment solution 15 months ago, it didn’t really think about how its customers would split across collegiate men’s and women’s sports programs.

But the data is interesting….. women’s sports programs account for nearly 70% of SportsBoard’s 160 NCAA clients, so the gap is real. This tendency was underscored last month when University of North Carolina Women’s Lacrosse was joined by the UNC’s Women’s Soccer and Women’s Basketball programs as SportsBoard customers.

These programs are all elite in their own rank: Lacrosse just won its first national championship, Soccer won its 22nd championship last fall, and Basketball has captured eight ACC tournament titles and a national championship in 1994. All have turned to SportsBoard for streamlining their recruiting operations and measuring and tracking player performance.

“I have never been a technology person, but the business side of me knows that this is the wave of the future,” said UNC Women’s Basketball Coach Sylvia Hatchell, a three-time national coach of the year who will be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in September. “I am never too old to learn, and I am wise enough to know that we have to keep up with the latest technology to remain competitive.”

Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance, known for his analytical approach to the sport, has seemingly always been a step ahead of his competitors, on the field and off. So it makes sense that a coach with his pedigree of success wouldn’t want to fall behind technologically.

“This is the future,” Dorrance said. “SportsBoard’s revolutionary app will help us become more efficient in recruiting future Tar Heels and keeping us in a good position to win, every year.”

Jenny Levy, the sixth-winningest coach in NCAA Division I women’s lacrosse history, became the first North Carolina coach to go paperless when she began using SportsBoard’s breakthrough mobile technology last year at recruiting events.

“Ultimately what most college coaches are looking for is a way to recruit more efficiently and effectively,” Levy said. “SportsBoard allows coaches to be more thorough and more efficient with their time.”

“When we started with Coach Levy, I knew we were on to something at Carolina,” stated Gregg Jacobs, Founder of SportsBoard. “I could just tell from the way in which she spoke about the importance of data that she would be a great customer and that others at Carolina would follow her lead. It’s starting to happen, and we are thrilled about it!”

APR17

SportsBoard is Evolving…..Fast!

With the first quarter of 2013 now behind us, I marvel at the transformation that SportsBoard is undergoing.

With the signing of University of Maryland’s Athletic Department late last year, we shifted our focus to athletic departments and have discovered a lot of interest there. Now actively engaged with more than 50 college and universities at the department-wide level, SportsBoard’s blend of assessment and contact management functionality for recruiting is really hitting a nerve. And we now offer Softball and Tennis to our family of products, enabling us to support up to 18 different sports programs at all levels of collegiate, and even high school, sports.

During Q1, we also shifted our focus to camps, where we have received substantial interest in our mobile player assessment solutions from a video and PDF evaluation perspective. Camps have always wanted to deliver better evals more efficiently to their customers. Before SportsBoard, these evals were hampered by technology; now, SportsBoard enables camps to capture eval data easily and distribute evals within hours of camps end, not days or weeks, and without adding loads of administrative staff.

This “paperless” crusade we embarked on 18 months ago is gaining more and more momentum every day. The resistance to changing from paper to digital is declining by the week, and it’s exciting to see.

We live in a 24/7 world now. No matter what business you are in, to be most competitive, you need information from which you can make better decisions as quickly as possible. Our mission here at SportsBoard is to enable coaches and camp operators save time, save $$$$, and improve productivity and efficiency.

FEB1

Striving To Be Like No Other

At SportsBoard, customer service starts during the sales process.  If we can’t deliver timely, high-quality customer service during the sales process, why would you ever adopt and use SportsBoard for a process that is so vital to your coaching success?

Customer service must continue after customers subscribe, and it comes in the form of answering calls/emails any time of day. We do our very best to exceed your expectations, not just meet them, but we are not perfect and there will be times when we make mistakes.

That said, we continue to receive great feedback about SportsBoard and how quickly we are able to add new features. Katie Doolittle from Towson Women’s Lacrosse recently said “I can’t believe how quickly you guys added Grad Year to the Export feature.  I asked for it one day and it was there the next; you guys are awesome!”

So, our first priority is to deliver solutions and customer service that exceed our customers’ expectations.  Step #2 is delivering a product that is continually and perpetually enhanced. Listening to our customers’ needs and enhancing SportsBoard to meet those needs is paramount to our customers’ (and our) business success. We will never be one of those software vendors who “finishes” its products. Every single week we are adding new features and capabilities to SportsBoard to make it the “super-system” for assessment. This commitment is evidenced by the 300% increase in functionality in SportsBoard since our initial release in February 2012!

SportsBoard contains new recruiting features that enhanced our original version, like: 

  • Functionality equivalent to that of Front Rush, Scoutware, Scoutforce, Team Desktop, Field Level and any of the other vendors like them. We have already started converting customers from these vendors, with Georgetown women’s lacrosse blazing the trail, followed by Towson women’s lacrosse, and University of Rochester women’s lacrosse.
  • We now interface with ACS; ACS logs into SportsBoard every night, grabs new assessment entered since the previous day, and posts it into ACS.  We are designing interfaces to JumpForward, ARMS, and Blue Chip Solutions so that coaches who use these systems for compliance can still realize the paperless benefits of SportsBoard!

SportsBoard now also can be used for more of the calendar year than just recruiting activities.  As a result of signing on Duke Men’s Basketball, we now offer to all of our customers: 

  • Auto-tagging of video: through an interface with SportsCode/Gamebreaker, SportsBoard enables coaches to live-stat and auto-tag games and practices within minutes of completion. 
  • Player Efficiency Ratings (PERs) reporting: coaches can defined a +/- value to every stat they collect and generate a report showing the most efficient players in highest-to-lowest order. 

For camps, SportsBoard also now offers a way to generate more revenues from camps. Camp directors can collect and distribute video and PDF evaluations for campers within minutes of the end of the camp using SportsBoard. The benefits SportsBoard enables for camps include:

  • Tangible, objective assessment for high school athletes to forward to college coaches and middle school athletes to learn from.
  • For elementary school athletes, video evals are “souvenirs” or keepsakes which are much more dimensional than ribbons or trophies.
  • Increased camp revenues from evals.
  • Enhanced customer experience, increasing loyalty/repeat business and strengthening your brand.

Simply put, our mission is to make SportsBoard so functional and easy-to-use that coaches at all levels of sports can’t live without it.  We believe our greatest service to our customers is to provide the absolute best product today, and a roadmap for on-going efficiency gains into the future.  We will never sit still on our product.  

By doing all of this, we hope to change impact coaches’ lives in ways they could never conceive of before. And if we are successful, then we will have provided a tremendous service.  

JAN10

Our Favorite SportsBoard Tips

Shot Charts using “Simple” mode for rapid entry of shot data.
—Pierce Freeman, iOS Developer

Designating games to “watch” on game schedule. After uploading event schedules to your SportsBoard Server account, on Scout-Setup-Games you can designate “watch” games which appear highlighted in green on the SportsBoard Server, iPad app, and iPhone app.  The ability to view an entire schedule and quickly identify the highlighted games is very convenient, powerful and time-saving tool during the chaos at any event!
—Stephen Kiraly, Inside Sales

The ability to visually track shooting tendencies as well as a goalies performance against those tendencies. This is a great tool for coaches or parents looking for the upper edge.
—Deanne Brock, Inside Sales

Use the analytics to your advantage to view your top players based on your ratings of them!
—Jack Dagley, Inside Sales

Have “auto-Noticed” on, so when any type of note is recorded for a player, the status changes to “Noticed”.
—Spencer Homich, Inside Sales

Using weights to find recruits that fit the program best.
—Mitchell Cde Baca

2012
DEC31

Our Favorite iPad Tips

Pinch with 5 fingers to close the current application.
—Pierce Freeman, iOS Developer

Keyboard shortcuts for commonly-used sentences/phrases, perfect for text notes in SportsBoard Apps.  Once acronyms and their respective meanings have been created, you can quickly plug in the abbreviation and the full sentence will display.  Thus saving time spent staring at the iPad screen typing!
To do this go to Settings—>General—>Keyboard—>Add New Shortcut
—Stephen Kiraly, Inside Sales

Now you don’t need to rely on third party software to type smiley or emoji characters as the iOS 5 and 6 include a built-in Emoji keyboard.
To type a smiley or emoji character, tap the “International” key on the keyboard (or touch and hold the key, then slide to Emoji), a plethora of emoji characters are then at your fingertips.
On my device upgraded to the iOS 6, the Emoji keyboard is enabled by default. In the iOS 5, you can enable it in a few steps:
1. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard
2. Tap “International Keyboards” and “Add New Keyboard…”
3. Select “Emoji”
Apple: “iOS: Understanding emoji”
—Deanne Brock, Inside Sales

Closing apps you have open to improve performance (double-tap home button, hold down any app, and hit the red minuses)
Apple: “iOS: Force an app to close”
—Jack Dagley, Inside Sales

Double-tap the spacebar at the end of your sentences to add a period and a space to start the next sentence.
—Spencer Homich, Inside Sales

Settings > General > Accessibility > Invert Colors
Apple: “iOS: Configuring accessibility features”
—Mitchell Cde Baca

DEC21

SportsBoard Welcomes the Terrapins

image

SportsBoard is proud to announce its first department-wide customer: The University of Maryland. 

As they prepare for their jump to the Big 10 Conference, the Terrapins committed to a large block of SportsBoard subscriptions which will initially be used by the football team and men’s and women’s basketball teams. Baseball, soccer, tennis and others will follow next year.

The department plans to use SportsBoard for recruiting, scouting, player development, player efficiency ratings (PERs) and integrating with their video editing systems.

“We are thrilled to be the first college program to adopt SportsBoard’s revolutionary technology throughout our athletic department,” Maryland Athletic Director Kevin Anderson said. “SportsBoard’s paperless system of recruiting and assessing players will make our coaches more efficient and that should translate to more victories in all playing venues.”

We look forward to helping Maryland take advantage of significant cost savings and efficiency gains from utilizing SportsBoard, and to seeing them blaze the trail for other athletic departments to consider.