KATHIE: At SUSA, I’m the Director of Academy Operations so I do all the registrations,  oversee tryouts and send out the invites. I also set up the PlayMetrics platform for our organization to best fit our needs.

STEVE: I’ve been with the club since 2011. I started as a coach, then was a director overseeing a portion of our competitive side, and now I’m the Executive Director. So I’ve seen and touched on all different aspects of the club.

JONELLA: When I first started in 2015, I was President of the club, but I was doing a lot of stuff that a typical Director of Operations would do. Eventually, I moved solely into that role so we could separate the two and give me back some time to truly focus on what needed to be done.

STEPHANIE: I’ve also been with the club since 2015, as a parent to start. Over the last few years, though, I’ve moved into an administrative role.

STEVE: Players registered for tryouts in one platform and that information was downloaded into spreadsheets and given to coaches ahead of time. They used them during the evaluation process to form their teams, so we’d get those spreadsheets back as a final roster after they’d sent their email invitations and players accepted. Then we’d have to import them into two different platforms - one for communication and scheduling and another for registration. Parents would then have to click a universal link, pick the team their child had made, and register for the right team. As you can imagine, that didn’t always happen correctly. Too many moving parts that made it really challenging.

JONELLA: We didn’t really conduct tryouts before we became Rush Wisconsin West because the old club was recreation only. Part of the reason for bringing Rush into the area was to build out a competitive soccer club that ran kids through tryouts and formed teams that way.

KATHIE: We were the club that had multiple platforms. We had one for registration, one for tryouts, and one for team communications, which meant we had to bring everyone up to speed on how to use three different software tools. People were registering for tryouts on one platform and we’d have to download all the information and upload it to a new platform so evaluators on the field during tryouts had all the information they needed. Then we’d have to build the teams and generate the invites in one place, and transfer the final rosters to ANOTHER platform so we could communicate. It was download upload download upload, which was pretty frustrating.

JONELLA: Our whole tryouts process was difficult. We had to upload the players from one platform to another so rather than invite them to their teams, we had to pull everybody over ourselves for registration. It just took extra time.

KATHIE: There was always a big disconnect internally as to who was responsible for adding all the players to the different platforms for each team. So we had to check and see: did the coaches add all their teams, did they do it correctly? It was a big frustration. We would have some players coming in at the last minute and coaches were letting them train, saying they’ll invite them to the team. Nobody ended up telling us so we had players who were participating that hadn’t been formally invited nor had they registered and paid.

STEVE: We definitely had a handful of system issues and user error too. Whether it was a family registering for the wrong team, or players who didn’t register at all but still got added to our scheduling and communication platform. We had players just flying under the radar and playing without paying or signing any waivers. 

KATHIE: We’d also run into issues like someone didn’t get evaluated correctly or even recorded, so when we’d go to send out the invites, kids would get lost in the shuffle. Then we’d have kids that accepted their spot and made their payment but didn’t get loaded to the communication platform so they didn’t know where they needed to be.

JONELLA: The reason I brought PlayMetrics on was because there were so many things in our old platform that were difficult to do.

STEVE: During our check-in process, if anyone arrived without having registered previously, we’d have to handwrite their information into printed versions of our spreadsheets and hand them to the right coach for evaluation. But it was still up to the families to then go online and register correctly so we had their contact information. Which, of course, didn’t always happen.

KATHIE: In the past when we had walkups, we’d have to write everything down by hand and then afterward, go in and create a profile for them on our registration app. At the end of tryouts, it wouldn’t be uncommon for us to have to go in and create profiles for about 40 or so households so we could register the kids. But it wouldn’t be synced with the pictures so we wouldn’t always remember who’s who.

JONELLA: Because we have so many kids, we have a lot of volunteers that help us with tryouts and we set them up by player age to make check-in a bit easier. The volunteers would then take the player pictures if needed and assign all the numbers for tryouts.

JONELLA: I think one of the big improvements was that we don’t need to have different platforms for different things. For instance, if we want to send an alert to our entire club, we can do it through PlayMetrics. Basically, the parents now have one app on their phone where before they had three or four. PlayMetrics has streamlined everything and made it easier. For everybody.

STEPHANIE: We previously relied a lot on docs and spreadsheets. Now, with PlayMetrics, it’s a lot easier because we have the rating system and they can build out our rosters for us ahead of time. It’s a smoother process to run our tryouts just with those added features alone.

STEVE: Tryouts happen over one week, and we have 51 travel teams, so it can be difficult for our directors to fully engage in each tryout session. With PlayMetrics, if a director can’t make it to the session, they can still go in and easily see where players fall in the process. Also, the changes we saw to our communication process in terms of being able to offer players a spot on the roster were night and day as well - so much easier. 

KATHIE: We used to have a running joke each night of tryouts about how many errors we had per day. We never had zero. Sometimes a coach couldn’t ID a kid, or a new player would show up and we didn’t capture all their information. With PlayMetrics, we didn’t have that. By the third night, we had zero errors and zero lines for check-in.

STEVE: Tryouts in our region are kind of like the wild west. For the most part, there are no rules for when tryouts are held. A lot of clubs will host “ID showcases” in the winter for players from other clubs to come and see what it’s like to play for them, so unfortunately that can lead to kids moving clubs in the middle of the year. I would love to think that over time, this will no longer be the case.

KATHIE: We’re pretty buttoned up in our tryouts process. From a tactical and technical standpoint, what goes on out on the field is very predictable. The directors and coaches have meetings on how they’re going to run tryouts, what they’re going to look for the players to do, and what the expectations are going to be. I don’t know if there’s physically any other way to do what we do and get the results we get.

JONELLA: I have seen clubs in some other states that are doing something like an open or free training event where they’re analyzing kids so they can later access them for team formation. I haven’t seen that here in Wisconsin yet, but it’s probably going to come eventually. 

KATHIE: I’m not really aware of any clubs in our area charging for tryouts, although I guess that could maybe be a thing in the future. The tryout process is a large part of a club’s growth. That’s where you’re going to add a fourth or fifth team in an age group. So to prohibit people from coming to a tryout because there’s a fee involved - I don’t really see that for us.

STEVE: My hope is that over time, the competition can just stay on the field and we can have more collaboration off the field. At the end of the day, we’re all in this to have as many kids as possible playing soccer and learning the life skills they need.

STEPHANIE: Everything is so easy to access. That said, if we need to reach out to tech support, the response is pretty much immediate. I would highly recommend the platform just from the customer service aspect alone. 

KATHIE: I would say the ease of communicating with our membership. The ease of contacting exactly who you need to contact is amazing. It takes me less than five minutes to send an email to the whole club.

STEVE: I think one of my favorite things about PlayMetrics is the scheduling feature. As an organization that holds camps and trainings and has our own facilities, the ease of being able to manage everything in a way that allows us to prevent double bookings is huge.

JONELLA: We like the fact that you can put in player numbers and pictures right there on the platform when they check in and it will show up on the coaches’ phones when they’re managing them on the field.

KATHIE: The other ways you can message people outside of email is also very handy. I find myself using my physical email less and less. Ninety percent of what I’m doing internally is messaged through PlayMetrics.

STEVE: I’m also excited about utilizing the evaluation tools for tryouts. Being able to score players in a completely customizable and uniform way across our entire club gives directors and coaches the oversight they need to fully understand where players are in the process.

KATHIE: The carding process was dramatically improved when we moved to PlayMetrics. We had everyone carded by the second week of August which has never happened before in the history of SUSA since I’ve been registrar. Also, in the past, it used to be an email inbox clutter for me and could take me weeks to get out. Now, we’re able to message everyone, get waivers back, and upload them to the carding site in 48 hours. 

STEPHANIE: The time it took between tryouts and team invites was shortened from a couple of days to a couple of hours when we moved to PlayMetrics. You could send one blanket message to everybody because their emails were already in the system whereas before, we had to upload everyone’s contact information and THEN send it out per team.

STEVE: Our club has a lot going on. We have recreational and travel teams, we have our own facilities, we have camps and training programs. So being able to manage all that within one system and provide a consistent customer experience across our programs has been really important.

JONELLA: If a player wants to join my club, I request the transfer from wherever they’re coming from within the state, then the state office has it immediately in their inbox to manage. There’s no middle men, no arguing, no more meetings - all of that was eliminated. It happens now within two weeks instead of two months.

STEVE: Like most clubs, we’re a nonprofit, so resources - especially human resources - are limited. Any time we can increase efficiency is really powerful.

STEPHANIE: Having a state association that uses PlayMetrics has been huge for us too because it’s cut so much of the time we had to spend adding games and uploading players. We didn’t have to do the back and forth anymore because we’d load everything once and then the state would populate it out to everybody.

STEVE: I would say do your due diligence and make sure you find the best fit for you. PlayMetrics has definitely been the best fit for us and I think it is probably for most clubs out there.

JONELLA: From the time I started my journey with PlayMetrics, I felt like my questions were always being answered and answered quickly. I tell everyone I run into who asks that PlayMetrics is the best out there. 

KATHIE: Don’t be afraid of change. Don’t be afraid to consolidate your platforms. One-stop shopping really does make you more efficient.

STEVE: We’re seeing a professionalization in this industry lately and PlayMetrics is certainly pushing clubs in that direction. Even smaller, volunteer-run clubs can benefit from a platform like this from a user experience perspective.

STEVE: Our customers have a lot going on in their lives, so interacting with an organization that has a platform like PlayMetrics has made their lives easier and allowed them to enjoy more family time rather than having to sift through all this information in various places. That’s been pretty invaluable.

KATHIE: I was initially dragging my feet on moving over to PlayMetrics. Change is not easy, but when we met with the team and went through the specifics features such as Team Accounts made it easy. To know that our revenue streams could be combined into one visual platform that’s transparent to those who need to see it is really a considerable improvement to how we run our business.

STEVE: I love the way it’s going, especially into governance as well. I think the more impact the platform has on the entire soccer ecosystem, the easier it will be for us and other clubs.

JONELLA: I’ve looked at a lot of products. I’ve used a lot of products. I think PlayMetrics is the best product on the market. Whatever you are doing, keep doing it because you’re doing an amazing job.