The Hockey Think Tank Podcast

SHORT SHIFTS - TRYOUT BEST PRACTICES WITH SKILLSHARK CEO NEIL ANDERSON

On today’s SHORT SHIFTS episode, Toph welcomes the CEO of SkillShark, Neil Anderson, to talk about the innovative way their product makes the tryout and evaluation process so much easier and more efficient for organizers. TEN MINUTES ON THE CLOCK STARTING NOW! As a partner of ours, remember to use our discount code Hockey20 when you visit SkillShark.com We appreciate every listen, download, comment, rating and share on your social sites!

Duration:: 16m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

TEN MINUTES ON THE CLOCK STARTING NOW!

As a partner of ours, remember to use our discount code Hockey20 when you visit SkillShark.com

We appreciate every listen, download, comment, rating and share on your social sites!

(upbeat music) Okay, here we go with another short shifts episode. We got 10 minutes on the clock. But today we're bringing a guest, guys. Today we're bringing a guest and our guest is Neil Anderson. And Neil is the CEO of a company called Skill Shark. And we wanted to bring him on here. He's a partner with us. And it's an unbelievable, unbelievable product. And we all know that tryout season either has just happened for some, but most, it's right around the corner. And so this is just an unbelievable value ad for tryout season. So Neil, welcome to short shifts, hockey think tank podcast. You ready to rock and roll? - Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So Skill Shark, I wanna introduce you to our listeners here. What can Skill Shark do for youth hockey organizations? And what's the backstory? Why did you start this company from the onset? - Yeah. So my background, I'm an engineer by background and I played competitive sports growing up. But I recently, well, it was probably about eight years now. I took over a U18 program in the city that I'm from. And the thing that I found during tryouts was that it was all pen and paper, primarily driven process. And there were a ton of problems with tryouts. Some of which is like you have to do data entry twice. You do it, spend all this time putting it on the paper. And then some unfortunate person has to take that stack of paper and do hours of data entry. And very little was being done with that data, right? You put it in the spreadsheet and all they're doing is averaging the numbers and try to work out scores. And yeah, very little was being done. And at the end of it, if you have upset parents, you were saying, "Hey, why didn't my kid make the top team?" Which happens all the time if you're a coach and you're involved with tryouts. You cannot show them hand scribbled sheets from the evaluators and think you're gonna win any argument with them. Nor can you share that spreadsheet which has all the other kids scores. So it's a very tough battle to win there. Yeah, and plus every single coach listening to this podcast, when is the last time, do you remember growing up that you ever received formal feedback saying, "Here's what you did well, but here's what you need to work on." Wouldn't that have been great to have? And we make it really, really easy. - So talk about how you make that easy for the customers because again, feedback is so incredibly important. Transparency in the trial process is something that I think so many more clubs need to have, right? So how are you helping to kind of elevate that transparency? And how are you helping to make the trial process easier from a talent identification standpoint and a selection standpoint? - Yeah, great question. So what's driving this whole thing is that here's a really interesting staff that if you don't know, out of all young kids and start playing youth sports, 70% stop by age 13. And in the top reasons why they stop playing by age 13, in the top reasons is that they just don't have any confidence that they're playing the sport well. So the benefits that we bring to orgs is we save them a huge amount of time. They no longer have to do data entry twice. They just enter the data right onto the mobile app like through their phone or tablet, whatever they have. They can record videos, they can add evaluator comments very, very easily. And you can have instant player report cards and be able to draft teams immediately after the evaluation instead of doing hours of data entry. The other thing that we do for orgs is we make the data actionable, right? No longer is it just a spreadsheet that you've got to write custom formulas and that kind of stuff to try to make sense of it. You can just run different types of reports for whatever you're trying to achieve. Drafting is incredibly easy. One of the best stories I can remember is we had a sports org. The first year they used Skill Shark, it was a group that had, after tryouts, they would separate the kids onto 16 teams. And they said normally we'd start Monday night after the weekend and it would take us three days to draft all, you know, you got the boardroom filled with papers and binders and sheets going missing. And this, the first time they used Skill Shark, they finished all the drafting in about an hour and a half. He was home after two hours and he's like, what the heck just happened? Like, wow. I got hours back in my day. So that's really cool, actually. So not only can you use this for like, let's just say from a hockey standpoint, your fall teams where you're trying to evaluate and you're picking teams based on like, hey, the top kids are gonna be on the A team and then B team and the C team. But also you can use this potentially in the spring for like a spring league or a summer league where you're trying to like make even teams. And so you have like rankings and then all of a sudden you take the top and the bottom, you put them on the same team and then boom, boom, boom, all like that. So I didn't realize that. That's a really cool utility too. - You can evaluate the kids as many times throughout the year as you want. And you know, another great use case that we have a lot of customers use them is the athlete self assessment thing. So think, you know, me speaking as a coach, things that are important in my coaching philosophy would be things like, you know, that athletes understand how important it is to be coachable and how, you know, team attitude rather than just thinking about themselves and their own stats. So you can set up questions to the kids saying, how would you rate yourself as being a coachable athlete and listen to advice from coaches? How would you rate yourself on your team attitude? How would you rate yourself on work ethic? Whatever questions you want that help drive your philosophy down to the kids. And from the kids perspective, they're thinking, "Hey, if coaches asking me this, maybe it's pretty important. Maybe I should be thinking about it." - Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, it just gives you so much more as a coach of a window into your players and their own self assessment and self reflection and an accurate and honest self reflection is such an important part to an athlete's development and growth. And as a coach, if you can get a little bit more of that window into it, that's huge. And this is a time saver for that too. Because now you can have some information, you can send out these questionnaires or these surveys or even if it's like a daily thing that these kids are trying to do. And then all of a sudden now, you don't have to go out every day and gather all this information by paper or conversations or whatever. And then when you do have your conversations with the player, you already have the data there and you can have a conversation, "Hey, your self reflection's awesome." Like, I see this and this and this and you and you have, that's great. Or it's like, whoa, you think you're being a good teammate? Well, you just told Little Johnny that he sucks the other day. So I don't know about that. It's a great teaching tool. - One of the biggest things we bring to organizations and not just organizations, but academies as well. And we do all sports, but picture a hockey academy or a hockey program that wants to, like they're concerned about athlete development and every single sports or an academy should be concerned about that, right? It should be a top of priority. For you to distribute developmental material, like developmental videos on how to skate backward better or the proper skills for whatever it is that you're measuring on the ice. To distribute that manually would be incredibly time consuming. In SkillShark, you can set up rules saying any kid during the tryout that scored lower than blanket of 10 on skating backward automatically gets given a developmental video on that topic that the group deems age appropriate and skill appropriate. And it appears at the bottom of the kids report card in a section called recommended resources. So it's a fantastic way to distribute material so that the athletes get better and the parents who don't know the sport as well as the coaches get that material and can work with their kids on the weekends. - That's amazing. Yeah, and having the ability to have those videos, it's development at all times. (laughs) Think of all those parents that don't know the sport as well as the coach. And if they could, they don't want to be that parent that's always pestering the coach, but if they could, they would absolutely say, "Hey, coach, "what do I need to work with my kid on the weekends?" And I'll do it. But most people just want to stay quiet and not ask for it. But I guarantee you, it's beneficial. - So what's some of the feedback that you've gotten from? I know you work with a lot of different organizations and we'll get into that. Like, what's some of the feedback that you've gotten from some of the hockey directors or some of the coaches or some of the parents or even some of the players that have been using this who kind of went from pen and paper or as far as trials are concerned or just no kind of like feedback throughout the year. Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure there's like a lot of like hockey parents listening to this in their car being like, yeah, my coach didn't talk to like kid one-on-one once the entire year. - Well, the important thing, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. - No, I just say, what's some of the feedback that you've gotten from some of the people who've used it and changed over? - Most of the time when we're doing, you know, setting up an account for a brand new hockey organization which we just did multiple ones this week, usually the response is, oh my gosh, where has this been? And there's other products on the market that they try and it really, we're very proud that we get comments all the time that we have the best interface, the most features, the most well-rounded solution out there on the market. The usual response is a jaw hitting the table and they just, wow, like they can do so many things that they've never been having the ability to before. - Yeah, and as someone I would say who is, let's just call it not very tech savvy. You know, I got the chance to see this and use it and for people who aren't very tech savvy, like it's so easy to use, which I think is really important, just because, you know, a lot of, again, this is a time saver, a big time time saver, and the fact that it's so easy to use. And like, I know this for a fact, like your guys' customer service is like absolutely insane in just how you guys are able to fix issues when they arise and stuff like that. So like, just from a technology standpoint, what I would say is it's just like for cavemen, even, it's such a value add. And is that some of the feedback you've got? I'm sure that some of the feedback you've gotten is like these hockey directors, you know, who've been hockey directors for 30 years and they've been doing this one way forever and we all know that hockey directors who've been doing things for one way forever aren't necessarily wanting to change, but then eventually they do and then it's like this whole new world opens up. That has to be the case too, huh? - Yeah, data transparency is not going away. Probably, you know, hockey out of all the sports that we deal with definitely has a reputation for having the most passionate parents involved in the process. And sometimes, you know, a lot of hockey programs may not want to give up that feedback 'cause they're afraid about what the response is, but like so many programs know that data transparency is not going away. And you're going to have to start sharing that eventually because that same kid that gets a soccer reporter, a baseball report, it's going to happen in hockey. They're just going to expect it when the tryouts are done. And 99% or 95% I'll say of the parents, they're going to use it in the positive manner. They're going to take the feedback and try to work with their kids to get better. And they'll be more informed why the kid didn't make the top team potentially. - Yeah, parents are a little bit less apt to throw a fit if there's a why to it. Now, some parents will still throw the fit and not agree with the people who are evaluating. - I will, at least they haven't. - I'll share this discussion. And this was a hockey program. One of our first ones out of the gate, there was an upset parent that didn't know why his kid didn't make the top team. He went to the group and you're never going to win an argument when you're showing hand scribbled sheets from the evaluators or the spreadsheet. But they just turned the monitor around and said, okay, little Billy was ranked 55 out of 120 kids on skating and ranked here on shooting. And this is by 12 independent evaluators. So maybe you need to work with Billy on these two things. - Well, that's another thing too, right? Neil is that like you can do this anonymously, right? So the evaluators can be anonymous in terms of which even adds more to the fairness, I guess, let's call it, of the evaluation process. - Yeah, it can be done in the anonymous mode. And the evaluators just see, I'm evaluating Black Jersey 13 or Red Jersey 4, that kind of thing. - Yeah, that's awesome. Well, good stuff. Well, we've got you on here for a bit. But the last question I have here for you is, I think one of the really cool things about what we do with our youth organization Blueprint, which you guys are a partner of, is like the diversity of the kinds of clubs and the amounts of clubs that we work with is insane. We're working with clubs all over North America, small, big, big city, small town community club, academy, all that kind of stuff. And so you guys work with so many different youth organizations, but not even just in hockey in other sports as well. So if you can, just talk a little bit about some of the clubs that you're working with and hockey and outside too. Some of the groups that we deal with and these are organizations across the globe by U-triple SA, which is one of the largest youth sport orgs on the planet. They were one of our earliest partnerships and they use us at the highest levels for their all American games. Basketball Canada, the Czech National Softball Team, Softball Canada, the country of France uses us across the entire country for all their baseball and softball programs. But most recently, our biggest press release and this just got released like two days ago as we just signed a multi-year contract with Players Way, which is an arm of the Major League Baseball Players Association. - Very cool, very, very cool. Well, that's awesome. So for everybody listening right now, like again, you guys know who listened to us. We don't do these kinds of things for products and companies that we don't believe in and can provide huge value to you. And we also have a little bit of a discount for you if you would like to use that. So if you go to SkillShark.com, you can use the coupon code hockey20 and you'll get a discount on your SkillShark, I don't wanna call it subscription, but your SkillShark subscription. Yeah, there we go. (laughs) Neil, anything to add before we go? - No, the discount code on the screen will get you 20% off any one of our plans and our team is here to support you. - Awesome, so SkillShark.com, discount code hockey20, 20% off. That's a heck of a deal, guys. Neil, thanks so much for coming on for this short shifts episode and look forward to this partnership. I think it's gonna be awesome. - Good to be here. Thanks. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)