CONOR: “You have to be extremely organized and transparent. People want to know what they’re signing up for so they can manage the rest of the activities that all their kids do.

BARRY: “I think in order to be a good rec director, you have to have the passion for getting kids to play soccer.”

BARRY: “Recreation sports are amazing for kids because you have the social dynamics, the opportunity to learn from somebody that’s not your mom and dad, to have skill acquisition and really instill a growth mindset that if you practice, you will get better at something.”

WAYNE: “I think every single kid on the planet has a right to play the sport regardless of their individual circumstances. It would break my heart if I knew somebody wasn’t signing up because of money or something.”

CONOR: “I love rec because it has allowed my daughter to go and find the thing she loves without me being a pushy parent. I get to sit and watch her fall in love with something, gain confidence, run around and laugh. This is the foundation of what we do; without a rec program to sow the seeds of love for the sport, we're not able to get to where we are.”

WAYNE: “It is also really important for the community. For example, when we moved and our boys joined teams, that’s how we made friends as a family.”

BARRY: “We’re looking at a magnitude of hours - something like 80,000 or 120,000 hours over the course of the year - of kids playing soccer in a safe, fun environment. That speaks for itself in the impact it’s having in the communities.”

MIKE: “I think the biggest thing is the disparate range of parental involvement. You have some parents who are running from thing to thing, or they have other children who are in other activities, and trying to balance all of those things. Then you have parents who are convinced their kid is the next superstar... so it’s trying to distribute information to the whole spectrum that’s the most challenging.”

CONOR: “One of the things we have struggled with in the past was the communication piece between club to volunteer coach to parents. We were using mail merge and lots of spreadsheets. Now we’ve reduced the number of spreadsheets and have been able to get everything into PlayMetrics, which has been nice.”

BARRY: “Rec is soccer at scale, so it’s incredibly important for us to have systems in place to provide a quality product. PlayMetrics does our website, player registration, team building, scheduling, communication, messaging, and alert systems for all parties involved. So it allows us to provide a quality product efficiently with a small staff across 300+ soccer teams per season.”

BARRY: “I really like the ability to custom filter the information when we’re building teams because we have 300+ teams over five different locations and thousands of kids and we try to meet a lot of requests in our recreation program. That’s a big quality of life feature.”

WAYNE: “If I wanted to see on a particular team how many times someone has or hasn’t been to practice, you can use data to see that, whereas with other platforms, you’d have to go back and check every single one. It wouldn’t give you that data.”

CONOR: “Our past process was super time-consuming. There was a lot of sweat equity that went into using our old platform and relying on volunteers to disseminate information. If they got busy with their own lives and weren’t able to get the information out, we didn’t really have control over that. It was challenging. Since moving to PlayMetrics, we have more control over the messaging in a more efficient way.”

MIKE: “Being able to communicate effectively. I asked myself if we are able to tell all 18,000 people we have tryouts coming up, but are we also able to send something directly to two teams that are playing each other in a couple hours? Essentially, are we able to reach people where they are? PlayMetrics quickly proved that it was going to be that platform for us.”

BARRY: “The communication piece is incredibly important. PlayMetrics uses notifications, which are very similar to text messaging, so if somebody’s in our recreational program, I have the ability to send them a text in addition to an email. I can also alert an entire team, an entire coaching staff, or break it down by program.”

WAYNE: “When I first saw PlayMetrics, I was like: ‘That looks pretty cool.’ You can access the roster and place players on a formation. You can take registrations, do college profiles, and upload session plans. It’s everything we previously used, but all in one. We can get rid of other subscriptions and put it all together instead.”

MIKE: “For us, it really boils down to field management. We are able to delay or shut down a facility and there is an immediacy of getting that information out - even for people who are standing next to me. We can send a message saying there’s lightning on the field so we’re going to go ahead and cancel this game, and there’s a parent standing next to me that says: ‘I was just about to ask you that question but I already got the information from PlayMetrics.’ That has been so wildly and comfortingly better.”

BARRY: “Even though I’ve used you guys for several seasons now, things keep getting added that are helpful, but more importantly I keep learning: “Oh, this is the way I’d like to do something.” And there’s typically a way in PlayMetrics that allows us to do it in that capacity.”

CONOR: “To be completely honest, we moved to PlayMetrics, not for the rec program, but for our junior academy and competitive programs. This is just a really nice bonus for us, and it’s a BIG bonus for our parents to have the schedule in their hands. We never used to do that; we didn’t have the system for it.”

WAYNE: “We can also basically eliminate people going and taking too much of a coach’s personal time, which is really important to me. Back in the day, we had parents crossing boundaries, and texting coaches at 10 o’clock at night. We used to have one big group chat. On PlayMetrics, you can do individual chats or private messages.”

MIKE: “Another thing I wanted was mobile accessibility. As an administrator, being able to go on my phone instead of having to bring my laptop to every facility or field is important, but also I know from a parent’s perspective, having to register and find out game time from a desktop or laptop isn’t always convenient either.”

MIKE: “The amount of no-shows or people showing up at the wrong facility for the wrong game or wrong time… that’s almost dropped to zero. Obviously with a recreational program, you’re never going to have 100% attendance, but now nobody’s ever showing up for a facility in Smyrna when they’re supposed to be in Marietta. That problem has essentially eliminated itself.”

CONOR: “For me, I’m saving so much time communicating to parents and updating billing, scholarships, and discounts. I actually built discounts in advance so I know exactly what the percentages were that we wanted, and when I go in and add that discount, it’s immediate. That has been the biggest time saver.”

BARRY: “I can go in and assign all 3,600 kids in a season in a realistic work week, and I wouldn’t be able to do that with previous platforms; I would be tapped out at maybe 400 kids. Now, instead of going from registration data, pulling the report, looking at the report, and then going back to a different spreadsheet and clicking through six different tabs, it’s just: ‘Okay, I’m going to filter by these filters’ and can assign 10 kids at a time based on the request.”

BARRY: “If it fits into your business plan, you’ll be happy with the product. It’ll do the things you want it to do and then you’ll start to learn new ways to do things better. I’m sure most rec directors have creative solutions to things, but PlayMetrics provides a very nice template for best practices.”

WAYNE: “The question I’d ask is if you have five separate ways of doing communication, coaching sessions, evaluations, college profiling… and you’re using five different things to do them, why wouldn’t you condense all that down to one platform?”

MIKE: “I would start by asking yourself: ‘Why are you not providing your membership with the best possible support you can?’ One of the things I’ve been super impressed with is PlayMetrics’ ability to listen and take action. You may only have 150-200 kids, but why would you accept less than what you can provide to your membership? Do the work. Don’t be afraid of putting in a little elbow grease and provide kids with an experience they deserve.”

CONOR: “I can understand how it could feel overwhelming, but just having a team app for parents where they can access all the information they need and communicate with other families - that would be worth it in and of itself because you’re bringing simplicity to your customers that you maybe didn’t have before.”

WAYNE: “I always say youth soccer clubs are in a constant state of precariousness and evolution, because there’s something brand new coming around the corner all the time. You could be brilliant today and in big trouble tomorrow. So if you don’t keep moving forward, either of those things can cause you problems eventually.”

MIKE: “We’ve been in the Atlanta market with PlayMetrics for two or three years now, and the number of Atlanta clubs that are now switching over to PlayMetrics is a fairly telling sign of how successful that transition has gone, not just for us, but for our members.”

BARRY: “The system will work and it will work well. PlayMetrics is constantly updating and improving. It’s not a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’. The PlayMetrics system I use now in my fifth season is different from season one and even last season.”