SportsBoard

Striving To Be Like No Other

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:15:00 -0800

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.

Our Favorite SportsBoard Tips

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:31:00 -0800

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

Our Favorite iPad Tips

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:56:00 -0800

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

SportsBoard Welcomes the Terrapins

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:07:00 -0800

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.

As We Close Out 2012...

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:46:00 -0800

…I reflect on many things in both my personal and professional life. The Newtown tragedy has humbled every person on this planet who has a caring, sensitive, humanistic bone in his/her body. And the incident should make all of us step back, appreciate whatever we have, and not take one breath for granted.

With that said, I have always been extremely grateful for my wife Valerie (20 years of marriage) and sons Scotty (19) and Matt (17), our close family friends, and the good health that we (“knock-on-wood”) all have.

Through this SportsBoard venture I started 17 months ago, my “family” has grown substantially. My gratitude also extends to the investors who believe in my vision, my employees who got behind my vision, and our early adopting customers who embraced our vision. I thank all of you for your belief in me, your support of this quest, the fun we’ve had thus far, and the significant fun we’re about to have.

Our mission is simple: make SportsBoard better and better every day, and provide the best customer service coaches will get from any vendor, period.

On January 1 of this year, we only had addressed just two sports (soccer and lacrosse) and we were able to attract seven very early-adopting customers. Thank you, first-seven below, for your faith in the concept of SportsBoard and our ability to execute, and embracing the product before it was even on the iTunes Store:

Collegiate Women’s Lacrosse: Stanford, Loyola (MD), Princeton, Penn, Fresno State
Collegiate Men’s Lacrosse: Penn
Collegiate Women’s Soccer: Florida Atlantic

Now, we have 10 products that support 17 different collegiate sports programs and more than 100 college customers ranging from the biggest, globally-renowned programs—like Duke men’s basketball—to small junior colleges—like Columbia Basin.

Why are we so excited? Here are just a two of the reasons we can share now:

Today, we signed on our first department-wide customer, University of Maryland, which we hope paves the way for many department-wide commitments we sign from schools far and wide
Through our relationship with Duke Men’s Basketball, we designed some of the coolest and most time-consuming and mission-critical features possible: a new interface to SportsTec’s Sportscode and Gamebreaker video analysis products. This interface eliminates the hours coaches spend manually tagging film, and accelerate their ability to review that video so they can adjust strategy and improve chances of winning more quickly than ever before!

Our mission is simple: make SportsBoard better and better every day, and provide the best customer service coaches will get from any vendor, period.

For those of you who are already customers, thank you for your support. For those of you who are not yet customers, we look forward to serving you.

Whether coaches use SportsBoard for recruiting, season or camps, we make an impact on their processes, saving time, generating revenues, or both. We are changing the rules of the game, shifting the paradigm, creating an advantage for those who adopt.

The time is now. Don’t be left behind. Join the revolution today!

On behalf of our entire team at SportsBoard, we wish everyone a very safe and happy holiday season and a very prosperous 2013!

— Gregg Jacobs, Founder / CEO

The Story of SportsBoard

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 12:31:45 -0800

When I first thought of SportsBoard seven years ago, the concept was to design an app that could enable coaches to replace the traditional clipboard with a digital version.

Why wouldn’t coaches want to get rid of the paper and streamline their workflow if they could work more efficiently and have the ability to make better, more informed, data-driven decisions?

But seven years ago, there was no iPad. So, 17 months ago, we started this crusade and, oh, what a ride it’s been. Over the last eight months, more than 100 colleges, ranging from D3 to the largest D1, have adopted SportsBoard. And, in this eight months, oh, how the product has grown. We started by addressing on-field, on-court player assessment specifically for college coaches to use when watching athletes at recruiting events. Now SportsBoard is so much more…

“Over the last eight months, more than 100 colleges, ranging from D3 to the largest D1, have adopted SportsBoard”

For college coaches specifically, it’s the only system that addresses recruiting and assessment in one database. This means that coaches have the ability to use SportsBoard throughout the entire recruiting process: from the initial web site questionnaire through email and phone call exchanges, highlight reel reviews, tournament assessments, campus visits and the offer/commitment process.

For coaches at all levels SportsBoard can be used during the season and is:

The only iPad App (thanks to Duke Men’s Basketball) that generates player efficiency reports and captures in-game stats to feed SportsTec’s SportsCode and GameBreaker products within minutes of the end of a game or practice.
The only iPad App that streamlines the distribution of team and individual scouting reports to coaches and players.
The only iPad App capable of evaluating players with ratings, text notes, photos, or video.

Stanford Baseball pioneered SportsBoard’s use for camps this summer, using Baseball Scout to streamline collection and distribution of evaluation reports and video evaluations. SportsBoard enables camp directors to generate reports and video evals for campers, parents, and coaches to watch a player’s shot, or swing, or face-off, or goal-keeping tendencies.

“We are changing the rules of the game, shifting the paradigm, creating an advantage for those who adopt.”

And that’s what we’ve done in eight months. Imagine what we will have done in the next eight months. We will never stop making SportsBoard better and better and better.

SportsBoard is revolutionizing how coaches collect and use data to gain a competitive advantage, and execute tasks more efficiently. We are changing the rules of the game, shifting the paradigm, creating an advantage for those who adopt.

The time is now…don’t be left behind. Join the revolution today!

— Gregg Jacobs, Founder / CEO