How One Long Island Club Found the Right Platform for Scale
Situated in the neighborhood of Central Islip, Long Island, SUSA Academy is in quite a good position - literally and figuratively. With their headquarters overlooking five pristine turf fields, the team is able to take in a practice or two while they’re hard at work reconciling late fees and managing budgets.
But things weren’t always that simple. Life with their previous software system left them chasing down parent volunteers to cover reimbursements, scrambling to verify which parents actually paid, and patching together multiple tools just to get through tryouts season. The team was stretched thin and losing ground.
When they found PlayMetrics, things changed.
Here’s the story of how SUSA Academy went from managing chaos to managing with confidence.
CHALLENGE ONE - Financial Control Was in the Wrong Hands
Kathie Fleischer, SUSA’s Director of Academy Operations, manages nearly every operational detail behind the scenes. Her role spans player and tournament registrations, coach travel coordination, and player finances – from setting and publishing tuition to managing 80 Team Accounts, entering budgets, setting up fees, and chasing down payments.
She’s no stranger to the software meant to support all of it. “I’ve been in my role for over ten years, so I’ve worked on a dozen different platforms. Most are not great.”
And with SUSA’s previous systems, the burden fell squarely on her shoulders. “With our past software systems’ limitations, I was doing all of this by myself. I couldn’t do it alone.”
Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen
Kathie ended up having to enlist the help of parent volunteers to manage some of the day-to-day operations, including acting as team treasurers. It didn’t always go well.
Financial control - especially for a club of our size - needed to be removed from the volunteer level. PlayMetrics allowed us to do that for the first time.
KATHIE FLEISCHER
Director of Academy Operations
Reimbursements were delayed. Money moved into the wrong accounts. “When you have thousands of dollars sitting in an account,” Kathie explains, “that’s not something that should be touched by anyone except our internal staff. We certainly should be able to maintain control over how that money is handled, and on our previous systems, we were not.” The finance team often didn’t know who had paid, who was behind, or - in some cases - where the money even was.
Making matters worse: players whose parents hadn’t paid a penny were showing up to practice, while others were being held off rosters simply because their parents hadn’t accepted a team invite. “With over 1,400 members to keep track of, the cross-checking became too much,” she said. “We needed a better way.”
CHALLENGE TWO - Fragmented Tools and No Support Were Making Everything Harder
Another major issue that plagued the club was fragmentation, or more specifically, the need for more than one software system to manage operations. There was one platform for tryouts and evaluations, another for registration, and a third for team communications – none of which were talking to each other. Data had to be moved manually between systems, and teams couldn’t be built automatically.
Our DOC’s shouldn’t have to be checking multiple sheets just to do one simple task. Having everything in PlayMetrics has freed them up so they can spend that time more valuably.
KATHIE FLEISCHER
Director of Academy Operations
Chaotic Tryouts Seasons Were the Norm
That fragmentation hit hardest around tryouts season, when speed and accuracy mattered most. Parents regularly gained access to team communications without completing registration. Player evaluations were being done in siloes, and when it came time to make player selections, everyone would have to get in a room and talk through their evaluations because the data wasn’t centralized. “We’d have multiple hours-long meetings about each player,” Kathie shares. “It was a complete time-suck.”
There were even times when the team wasn’t sure whether or not a kid had even shown up for tryouts. “A lot of things were getting lost in the shuffle. We’d have emails come back to us saying they were getting an invite to a team and they never even came for tryouts.”
No Support When it Counted
Exacerbating the operational chaos was a near-total absence of customer support. When errors occurred, there was no one to call. “Little things would compound on each other,” said Kathie. “If something got sent out with the wrong fees and people started agreeing and paying, we couldn’t walk that back because we never had access to customer support.”
It wasn’t until competing platforms came to pitch them that SUSA realized just how much they’d been missing. Kathie reflected on the moment when their previous provider finally came to see them. “We said to them, ‘We’ve been working on your platform for eight years and you don’t even know our names or how many teams we have.’ That was a big shock to them.”
It was also the moment the SUSA team agreed: it was time for a change.
SOLUTION - One Connected Platform. Every Problem Solved.
SUSA evaluated several platforms before making their decision. “When we were able to really dig into the platform, we realized PlayMetrics had much more to offer us in the areas we were experiencing the most pain.”
Team Accounts and Other Deciding Factors
The feature that moved the needle most was Team Accounts. “That was the reason we wanted a demo, and it was ultimately the reason we signed,” Kathie said. For the first time, SUSA would have a clear, centralized view of every team’s finances. No volunteers. No guesswork. Just full control back in the hands of the organization.
We can run all 80 Team Accounts, all 101 teams internally in this office because of PlayMetrics.
KATHIE FLEISCHER
Director of Academy Operations
In addition to Team Accounts, seeing how rostering worked in action was a huge selling point for the team. “We couldn’t believe how easy it was to build rosters and for coaches to then be able to communicate with their teams’ parents directly in the app.” That, combined with the fact that invites were sent from the same platform the team was set up, eliminated the issue of people who hadn’t paid gaining access to team information.
Kathie also recognized the communication benefits moving to PlayMetrics would afford. “The communication tools on our old platform were so unreliable that I was sending emails from my SUSA email account to ensure they were received.” Being able to do that in the same place where she was working on everything else helped streamline her process and get things done more quickly.
The access to customer support was the cherry on top, as Kathie and the team had been burned in the past by a lack of response from support. “The PlayMetrics sales team sold us, but the customer support time sealed the deal.”
RESULTS - From Damage Control to Running the Show
The first tryouts season on PlayMetrics set the tone. Kathie could finally step out of sending team invites and give that responsibility to the coaches who were actually building the teams. “That task alone used to end up being most of my Memorial Day through mid-June,” recalls Kathie. “Now, coaches can go into Team Assignments, and send those invites with a few button clicks. It’s a huge weight off my shoulders.”
Improvements Across the Board
Another place they saw marked improvement was the response rate for accepting team invites. According to Kathie, the time it took for families to accept the invitations was cut in half. “Nobody dragged their feet. In the past, people would sit with these invites in their inbox for weeks and we never knew why. Was it because they weren’t receiving them or that they couldn’t see it right in the app with everything else? It was probably a combination of many different factors.”
Today, invitations are right there in the mobile app, and with zero reported issues of not receiving notifications, Kathie and the team have complete confidence that messages are going through.
Financial Empowerment and Renewed Accountability
Budget season is no longer a headache. All 80 team budgets were completed within two days. “We used to dread budget time – it was so stressful. Now, that stress is gone.”
The ability to embed signed agreements into individual accounts has dramatically improved accountability. When a parent disputes a registration fee, Kathie can point to the exact moment they signed a document that explained what registration fee they owed and when. “So when they say they don’t know they had to pay a particular fee, I can actually show them the date and time of their signature.”
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
SUSA Academy continues to expand, and that growth would not be possible without a platform that was fit to grow with them. “Even this past year, with the addition of the third ECNL boys team, we were able to maintain efficient operations because we had a system in place that supported that.”
Without having to manage team invites and fight with outdated systems, Kathie was afforded more time to focus on the financial side of her role: managing budgets, reconciling Team Accounts, providing refunds where needed, and collecting past due funds. “This past year with PlayMetrics has been a dream. I feel like I can semi-retire next year!”
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