Articles
VNN x Rapid Replay Top Plays in High School Sports: March 19, 2021
VNN’s Romy Glazer counts down the top plays in high school sports from athletic departments across the country.
Watch as Romy Glazer from VNN reviews some of the highlights from VNN Network schools this week. Plays come from high schools such as Curtis (WA), Lake (OH), De Soto (KS), White Knoll (SC), Sprayberry (GA), and A.L. Brown (NC).
How VNN is building diversity, equity, and inclusion into our business
VNN’s Director of Human Resources Hallie Condon talks to Romy Glazer about the release of the our 2021 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report including our process, goals, where we stand and where we’re going, along with tips for corporate teams looking to improve their company’s DEI index.
Romy Glazer: So really exciting day. We came out with our DEI report, diversity, equity, and inclusion. We should talk about that because it’s big day for VNN. What is that report?
Hallie Condon: Sure. So this is the second report we’ve done. We did our first DEI report and action plan last year after a lot of the major civil unrest. So initially I think we were like, let’s do this report and show that we’re actually doing something besides just making a statement about the fact that we care. So we kind of had to take a look internally at what our current demographics are, because that’s a pretty easy place to start. But our demographics not very diverse, at least from a racial, an ethnic perspective, and sort of okay, well, we want to be better, so let’s take the steps to do that.
So basically this plan was kind of an iteration on what we were going to, what we wanted to do, and putting together some sort of goals and numbers around it, but also like I said before, putting a little bit of pressure on ourselves by saying, putting in writing, saying we’re going to do it, because I think at VNN, if we say it’s part of our values, if we say we’re going to do something, we’re supposed to do it. So we did that last year, but then obviously you want to show what the results were from the work that you did last year, and the obviously it’s one of those things that’s a continuous thing, it’s never like you did this, good job you’re done, it’s continuous work. So our report basically just shows sort of the things we were able to accomplish last year, and then our goals for this coming year, and what we’re going to do.
RG: Sweet. So what are some of the questions that you asked employees about last year?
HC: Sure. So from a simple demographic level, I basically asked people kind of how do you identify. I went beyond this, but white, black, middle eastern, asian, you know. Okay so how do you identify racially or ethnically, gender wise how do you identify, and we don’t like, I don’t like to limit gender identity either just to male or female, because obviously there’s a lot of people that don’t identify that way. So we try to be, I guess that’s a way we try to be inclusive too, so that finding out if people identify as LGBTQ, so all of those kind of identifiers, having people fill those out. But then beyond that, asking questions like how important do you feel like the ENI is to leadership, questions around fairness, like do I feel I’ve seen discrimination racially, by gender, any of those kind of things. Asking questions about if people feel like their voice is heard within the organization, and then questions about belonging, so how do individuals who work here feel like they belong here, do they question if they don’t have anything in common with people, all of that kind of stuff. So we measure, you know, again both demographics.
But also questions that would tell you about how people feel like we are working in an inclusive environment.
RG: Cool, and so you’re basically setting a baseline of, kind of who people are and what they identify as, and then being able to kind of map that against some questions about how they feel the company, their attitudes to the company, and how they feel they’re treated and all those sort of things.
HC: Yep!
RG: Cool. And so last year we did this, you know early in the year. And we did okay, I mean some of the things were okay, but there were a few things that stuck out back then right?
HC: Yeah so obviously like I said earlier, demographics and lack thereof, like different demographics stuck out. So we obviously need to do something about that. And then there were some other categories. Fairness is always one of those that I think is really difficult, and it’s a lower scoring in general. I think, like I always kind of assume that one may be the lowest score, it’s not our lowest scoring, but it is, I believe it’s close. It’s like our second to lowest category. And then also leadership was one of the lower ones, and I think that is in part just because we haven’t done anything like this before, and so without I think, outward communication about doing stuff like this, how else would employees know that you care about it.
And then so another big revelation out of that information, was that female employees really didn’t rank VNN very favorable. The scores female employees in comparison to male employees were significantly lower in terms of how inclusive they felt like VNN was. So that was something that obviously I think was alarming to leadership and we wanted to change that. We want employees to enjoy working here.
RG: Right, right. I mean sports industry too, so you know VNN’s makeup is mostly male identifying people and a little bit less female identifying people correct?
HC: Yeah.
RG: Cool. And then, so were there any, you know last year as we kind of look at where we were, I mean was there anything that ranked really high, or higher than you thought?
HC: So what’s really interesting is so even though people ranked VNN kind of lower in some of these categories that I’m like, these things seem like people. Like fairness for example, but then they ranked VNN so high in belonging, and so I was like, that’s really interesting to me, that you felt like that. So some of that is, did we ask the right questions, did we ask enough questions in these categories, because your sense of belonging feels high, but then there’s these other things. So some of it is just trying to interpret the data that you’re working with too. But it’s funny, because obviously the data is all anonymous, but sometimes when I see it, I’m like I wish I knew who this person was because I would really like to ask them why did you rank this this way, because it’d be nice to get the feedback on it.
So that’s kind of one of the difficult parts there too, because I want to know so I can help solve the issue. But yeah, belonging ranked really high.
RG: Yeah it’s so interesting though, I mean that you know someone can feel like they belong, but also not believe that it’s fair. Which, I don’t know that’s so interesting. So we just did the other survey what, a few weeks ago for this year?
HC: Yeah we did it at the end of January.
RG: Oh right right. And so there’s some differences that kind of came out this year, which I thought was really interesting. I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about that?
HC: Sure sure. So demographics wise we increased our underrepresented minorities. So we were at 3% last year, and we’re at 12% I believe this year, so that’s encouraging. We, I think it really kind of shows too that I think we were just being complacent in the sense we weren’t thinking about it actively, so I think when actually think about something, oh hey, I’m making improvements because I’m actually just putting it top of mind. So that was great. We increased female representations, so that’s good too. But then we also all of our, so we split up sort of the results, looking at them based on gender, and then we also look at underrepresented groups as well, we were able to do that this year, look at the responses that we got from employees that were in underrepresented groups in each one of our categories.
So I don’t obviously have any data to compare rankings with underrepresented groups, but female employees we say an increase all categories except for one. And so I felt like, and it was a significant increase, like double-digit increases, I think in all three of the categories that they scored VNN more favorable in, and so that one to me was really encouraging, like we’re starting to do some of the right things. Obviously I would love these scores like favorability ratings to be higher, but the fact that we’re making positive movement I think is great.
RG: Yeah that’s great. Why do you think that was?
HC: So I think one of the big things was A, like with doing these kind of surveys and these kind of reports, we’re showing that we actually care to ask people how they feel, what they may feel good about at VNN and what they don’t feel good about. I think the other really big thing I think was the employee resource group we started last year for women. I think that was really beneficial in the sense that it gave people a place that they could safely talk to one another. I think it also for in HR and having a lot of, not control over policies and procedures and stuff like that, but obviously I work on those, but it gave me a lot of feedback from people, like what do you actually want as an employee, or what do you feel like is beneficial for you, or what is missing for you. So I think that helped me too.
But then also there’s that portion of building a relationship with other people that you work with, because we’re remote this year, that’s been really difficult, because there’s just not that casual opportunity for conversation, so I think this group kind of helped people form more connections with each other too, so I think that was also kind of helpful.
RG: Cool, so I mean that’s great. It’s good to see some progress, and I know we’re going to issue this report out to the company here probably in the next few days. I guess the big question is like, where do we go from here?
HC: Yeah so one of the things, and this is one of those when I was talking to you earlier about content creation, and how it’s never perfect, or you keep coming across other ideas, and you’re like I want to add this , and there’s so much of that with DEI stuff, especially right now, and you’re like oh my god this would be such a great idea, like I really want to do that. So part of it is like okay, got to be realistic here about what we can actually do, but one of the things I noticed and wish I could have changed in this year’s survey is, I didn’t do a very good job of accounting for intersectional identities, so when you look at our data, you’re looking at men, women, underrepresented minorities. If you’re an asian male, like you’re fitting into two of the groups that we’re ranking. But you being lumped in with, so say your LGBTQ, you being lumped in with a straight white man when we’re just looking at how men view VNN, it’s not giving me, it’s basically like papering over your perspective potentially.
So one of the things that I really want to do this upcoming year is kind of start measuring more in the same surveys or whatever we do, your identity, and then also how you’re ranking things, and obviously we have to be a little careful with that because I still want people to feel like they have some anonymity or whatever in this, so I guess limitations on if we don’t have this number of people in this group, then I’m not going to publish this person’s results basically, because I want people to feel like they’re comfortable to give me honest feedback. So that’s, we’re really going to look at intersectionality and start kind of breaking that down a little bit more.
And then one of the other things that I think is important that we did not, I’m ashamed to say we did not do, one of the things that we had set out to do last year. But again, we’re committed to doing what we say we’re going to do, so one of the important things that I think is really unconscious bias is a huge thing. And so while I worked on that with some individuals one on one, like our head of inside ad sales, I worked with him on this, because we were really hiring for those roles is part of the reason we did that. So a lot of that was figuring how we structure interview to mitigate bias, but then also, and I’m sure he hated me so I’m biased when I did this, but we would talk about every candidate he talked to, and I would really push him on why is it that you don’t want to move this candidate to the next step.
So basically I started off by saying, telling me that a culture you’re not moving somebody forward because you didn’t feel like they were a culture fit, is not an acceptable answer. You need to tell me why based on these skills or competencies that we’ve set up why they’re not moving forward based on that, because if you just say culture fit, there’s a good chance that you just don’t click with them, so it could be a biased thing playing in. I don’t know, it could be a lot of things, but so that was one of the things we did. But we’re going to do an unconscious bias training for all managers or people who work here that basically have input into hiring and any terminations I guess like that, but that would also be like people that have ability to do performance reviews and things like that. So that’s something we’re going to do. And then we’ve really I think as a company over the last year, we’ve really fallen off with performance management. So that’s another thing that we’re going to be building this year, but I think taking into account biases and things like that, will be a big part of creating that plan. So those are just a couple of the things, but I’ve got other stuff planned too that I’m excited about.
RG: This is so great, I mean even you said intersectionality makes a lot of sense. Unconscious bias, I mean that’s, I mean you know we laugh, we’re talking about VNN, we’re a company, we’ve got maybe 170 employees right now, I mean it’s a big challenge, just startups in general, it’s like every day you read something about it, so you know it seems like it’s a need just across the board for everyone.
HC: Yeah. It’s interesting too because, I think one of our women’s resource groups, one of our meetings someone brought up, and I can’t remember who it was, like, well, as a start up you’re sort of just like trying to keep your head above water all the time, so I think a lot of times startups aren’t necessarily thinking about DEI, because they’re thinking about how do I keep my head above water, how do I keep my doors open, but I think what’s being missed there is that this kind of work benefits all employees.
So number one, it’s benefitting all of your employees, it’s not just benefiting those who are in underrepresented groups or, you know, identify differently than, I don’t want to say the norm, because that’s not right, but identify just differently than like, sure, I’m not like pale and male I guess.
RG: Exactly that’s fair enough.
HC: So that, but then also, inclusion metrics are pretty closely tied to engagement of employees, so belonging for example, is really closely tied to employee engagement. So if you’re looking to increase the engagement of your employees, which I would think that you are because in that turn again, helps your company, you know it seems like this would be something you would want to invest in, but so I, obviously the situation last year, I guess with all the civil unrest, it’s terrible, the fact that we’re having to, like that seems like that’s what has caused these conversations, but I really feel like it’s been a great opportunity for us, and I guess again to take a look at ourselves and what we’re doing right, and how we can be better.
RG: Exactly, exactly, and that’s the goal, continuous improvement. We’re going to do this again and again and make goals based on it, and go from there. So if there’s anybody that maybe watches this video that you know, wants to do more at their company or wants to learn from what we’re doing, what they could do? Could they reach out or anything like that?
HC: Well obviously, connect with me on LinkedIn, talk to me, I’ll help you, because I’m also, starting this last year, the I was first person to say I had no idea what the hell I was doing. So I was like what, oh my god, there’s so many companies do these reports, but there’s no guide anywhere that’s like, here’s exactly what you should do, abcdefg, follow these steps you’ll get it. So really I think a good place to start is just measure something, measure what your demographics are. You can find a lot of pretty good information online about what type of questions to ask. A source that I really love personally is Culture Amp, their website and their blog has a lot of great information, Paradigm is another one, they’re kind of like leaders in this sort of work.
So I really utilize those tools a lot, but then I think just trying, one of the things with a startup that’s difficult is you don’t have money to work with. So people, when they do these reports and they want to create an action plan, they have big dollars to work with. I don’t have that, so it’s really like trying too be creative too, and talking to the people that you work with, you know what I mean. Because there’s a good chance that the people you work with are going to have some sort of idea on like, they took this survey, you know what I mean, so it’s likely that they kind of have an opinion on what it is that they need, but that would be, I guess the other thing that I would suggest is talk to the people you work with.
What are people telling you that they don’t like, you know, what do they like maybe do more of that. I think a lot of it too was it’s trial and error, because I was so nervous to get the survey results this year. I tried hard, but it’s funny when you do the survey, I’m like I don’t think I did enough, so I’m like write my words it’s going to be worse this year, and I’m going to have to publish it because we said we were going to. It’s so scary, because I have no control over that.
RG: Right transparency is great, but it’s also very scary.
HC: It’s scary when you don’t know that. Like last year, it’s basically the same version of our report, it’s a little bit different I think, I took out some stuff that was internally irrelevant, and somebody externally it wouldn’t matter for, but I do have our report from last year, and I plan on putting this same report on our careers page, so knowing that that’s where, I don’t feel good about posting the fact that we basically have all white employees except for a few, that makes me feel like crap you know what I mean, like I’m part of the hiring process so. But I think it’s also just going beyond that and being like yep, I recognize the fact that I was sucking in that area, but now I’m going to do better and I’m committing to telling you that I’m going to do better, and like I said, putting it out there and making it public to other people puts a little more pressure on you to actually get things done.
RG: Yeah you said it earlier in the conversation we were having, it’s like yeah you respond, and you react what you measure, and so now that it’s being measured, you know we can do something, we can take action.
HC: Yeah, exactly. Because I feel like the other thing is too, like without the data, like that’s why again, like I say, just start by surveying people, get yourself some numbers or something to work with, because until you have that, it’s really hard to pinpoint what it is that you can do. And like I said, I’m still a total noob with this stuff, so I’m trying to figure out too there’s people that are experts at it. So again, there are resources out there, plenty of resources out there, for you to look at. There’s trainings you can do for free, or at a low cost, so for example our unconscious bias training is relatively inexpensive, and it’s good, I took it myself, and even though I read all this stuff all the time because it’s part of my job, there was good information I gained out of it too that I’m like, huh, I never thought about that. Just stuff around cultural sensitivity and things that you say often.
Like I had never thought about the fact that, have you ever thought about when, I know I’ve said this before, no can do? Okay so that’s like a phrase people say. Apparently the origination of that phrase is it’s supposed to be like, I don’t know, making fun of non-native english speakers.
RG: Oh interesting.
HC: I know yeah. I think about that, like that is something you hear all of the time, and it doesn’t mean that everybody is, it’s necessarily going to be bothersome to everybody, but it could be bothersome to somebody, and now you know why.
RG: Sure, right exactly.
HC: So it’s just like again, part of me is like, if nothing else comes out of this plan, at least I feel like our employees are more aware you know so, I realized that when we had our discussion last June, not everybody is at the same place in this journey of understand, and that’s just in part like based on your experiences and your identities and who you are, but I don’t think, it’s never a bad thing to inform, give people the information, you know what I mean? Whether or not you agree with it, or think that it’s stupid, which it’s not. But, whether or not you think it is, putting that information out there for somebody and having somebody read it, whether or not they agree with it is good for them. It’s good for everybody else too so.
RG: Totally. So I guess the big question is, when is the report going to be on, you said our careers page?
HC: Yeah. So, basically what I’ll do is I’ll circulate it too. So at this point, I’ve circulated it to our exec and leadership team, and then I’ll send it out the rest of our team at VNN, and then I would say probably a week after that I’ll publish it. I just want to give people I guess, and opportunity to be like, this doesn’t make sense, or ask me any questions that need clarification, because if there’s things that are not clear, I’d love to clarify that before we put it on our careers page. But yeah, I would say probably within a week of that happening.
RG: Perfect this is great.
Capacity Management 101: How to manage contact tracing, priority access, and set-up touchless ticketing for games and events
VNN’s Alex Kooi and Mike Perry from HomeTown Ticketing sit down to answer ADs frequently asked questions about capacity management, contact tracing, touch-free tickets, priority access and social distancing.
Katelyn Kasella: Hey everyone, thank you for joining us for today’s webinar on all things capacity management. With high school sports kicking off across the country, a lot of ADs are trying to figure out or simplify their capacity management. This includes things like touch free tickets, social distancing, and contact tracing. So today, Alex Kooi, our school account manager in Washington, is going to sit down with Mike Perry from HomeTown Ticketing to touch on some of these topics. They’ll answer some of the common questions ADs have and show you what HomeTown Ticketing looks like on your VNN site.
Now this is going to be a Q&A style webinar between Mike and Alex, so if you’re looking for more of a traditional full-length demo, we invite you to check out our YouTube channel where have a webinar called Digital Tickets: The new normal HomeTown Ticketing, and VNN as always. Please feel free to ask any questions that you have in the sidebar, and someone will follow up with an answer and a recording of this webinar will be available on our YouTube channel after we wrap up here today. Without further ado, I’m going to pass this off to Mike and Alex.
Alex Kooi: Hey Mike thanks so much for joining us today, as everyone has, we’ve been working with a lot of schools recently that are trying to figure out how to do sports during a pandemic, like there’s a lot of challenges specifically when it comes to game day, when it comes to state and federal COVID protocols, social distancing guidelines, contact tracing, all these different obstacles that are coming up now that haven’t existed before. So we’re getting a lot of these questions. What I’d love to sit down and do today is to kind of go over some of the most frequently asked questions that we’re getting in terms of how to do game day during a pandemic. So thanks so much again for hopping on with us today.
Mike Perry: Absolutely thanks for having us, really excited to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that we’re hearing, but also answer some of the questions you guys are hearing kind of on the back end and talk a little bit about how we can help schools and make their life a little bit easier in terms of event management.
AK: Sure yeah. And honestly one of the first questions that always comes up is like, well we’re now limited to 250 people in an event, or 25% capacity, or whatever that might be. So how is it that you can kind of manage capacity limits and amount of spectators you’re allowed to event, like how’s that done through digital ticketing?
MP: Yeah good question. What I’m going to do, I want to share my screen with the group here. I’m going to kind of give some examples here for everyone to see, I hope my screen is showing up. What I want to show you here is that what you see when you log into your Box Office and you click on an event that you’re managing, you’ve got a number of tools within this, and some of you may be seeing this for the first time, some of you may be very familiar with this, so there may be some new things that you’re seeing if you haven’t checked into your Box Office in a while in terms of managing the capacity at your events, which again is a very popular thing that all of us are hearing in terms of managing those events, is the capacity manager tool down here in your Box Office in the event itself.
Once you set this number for your capacity at this facility, whether it be your auditorium for things like graduation or performing arts, gymnasium, a football stadium, etc, you’ll set that number. Your ticket sales will never go over that number, so regardless of how many tickets you’re making available, you see here I have 300, it’ll never go over 250. So that’s a really great way it makes it easy for you to manage how many people are coming into your events from that standpoint so you don’t have to go ahead and count tickets, you don’t necessarily have a guest list or anything like that ahead of time. You can do all of that right here from your Box Office.
AK: Okay, and so for my school then oftentimes we just want to allow students and their parents to have first access on tickets, how could I do that to make sure that before we open up to the public, that it’s only students and parents getting first access to that limited availability?
MP: Yeah great question. Now in terms of customizing and controlling access to tickets and who’s coming to your events, there’s a couple ways you can do that. One of the more popular things that we’re seeing utilized is the use of codes. Now you’ll see right here we’ve got two tickets available, two ticket types available. Now there’s no limitation in terms of the tickets that you’re offering, whether it be, you know, your standard adult, student, GA, you know, staff tickets, alumni, etc. There’s a lot of options there in terms of that. Now within the codes, you’ll see you have the ability to customize a lot of different things here with your codes. You can do pre-sale codes, you’ll see when you click on this you have the ability to customize what the ticket type is that those codes apply to. So for instance, if you wanted to apply it to your student tickets or your adult tickets, vice versa, you have the ability to do that. Now there’s a couple tools that you have that make it really easy in terms of codes.
Now with your student athletes for instance, what we’re seeing a lot of schools do, is they’ll upload a list of codes here. You’ll upload that file here, and then that file can include things like student ID numbers which is probably the most popular, email address, first initial, last name, there’s a lot of ways to get creative with that. Typically, if you’re customizing access to a ticket, you want the code to be something unique to the individual who is redeeming the code for their ticket, so that’s why I say student ID, email address, are great ways to do that. Once you have those codes uploaded, you can customize when those codes are valid. For the start date, the end date, but also the quantity.
So for instance, how many times that code can be used, and then also for how many tickets that code is valid for. So that’s one way of doing it in terms of codes. We’ve got passcodes, which you have the ability to, in creating passcodes, you also have the ability to generate random codes, which is a great way to do this for your visiting team.
If you want to control and customize how many tickets your visiting student athletes get access to, just plug in here how many codes you need for how many student athletes that visiting school has, you can then control how many times that code is valid for, whether it’s one time redemption, two times, but then again, how many tickets that code is valid for. So if it’s two times, use code for two tickets, that code can be used two times for one ticket, or one time for two tickets. So again, there’s a lot of customization there in terms of how codes are used and how you’re customizing access to the event.
AK: Gotcha gotcha. So what you’re saying is, as long as I have a spreadsheet for the boys basketball team of all their student ID numbers, we could reserve two tickets for each, for both parents, each student?
MP: Yeah you can do that. You can customize it for your students, your parents, grandparents, whatever that custom group of people is that you’re allotting access to your events, you have the ability to customize that whether it be generic codes, can be a one-time use code for a large group of people, or individual custom codes for your student athletes or your parents. So there’s a lot of customization in terms of how you’re controlling access to the event.
AK: Okay gotcha. So our event is sett at 250, we can open up a group of parent tickets first, and if those are going we could also open up a group for just the away visitors to fill up that capacity that we’re saying.
MP: Absolutely. So for instance if you’re doing a pre-sale for your home fans, and it’s up to x amount of tickets, you don’t meet that threshold of your capacity, so you have some leftover that maybe you want to open up to say the visiting school or the general public, as long as you haven’t met that capacity, obviously you have the ability to control your capacity, whatever that number is, but as long as you haven’t met that number, you can always open up tickets down the road as you inch closer to the date of the actual game.
AK: Gotcha. So if we let the tickets just sell all week, and we still have availability on the day of, is there a way that we could open it up to the public at that point, if you’re not the parent or directly associated with a student, just allow people to fill in the remainder tickets that are available?
MP: Sure yeah. So for instance, if your capacity is set at, say, 250, and you’ve only sold 230 tickets, so you have 20 leftover, what you could do is if you really want to get creative with it, you can go in and create maybe a simple general public ticket, you can cap that, customize your price for the actual ticket, the quantity. So again, if you’re at 230 of the 250, you can cap it at 20 and then you can customize when those tickets go on sale, when they go off sale, but also the order minimum and the order maximum. So if you want to limit it to say, two per transaction, this would be a great way to do that. And then again, that ticket is open to the general public, so if you know somebody in you community, maybe an alumni, a board member, etc, wanted to get a ticket to an event that previously didn’t have access to, you just created that access, and it took under 30 seconds to do.
AK: Gotcha gotcha. So then I could have like a pre-sale period during the whole week to make sure that all the parents and away parents also get access to the game first, and then day of if there’s still tickets leftover, we could still sell the general public then.
MP: Yep, absolutely absolutely, 100%.
AK: Gotcha cool. Well then one of the things that is coming up a lot is a lot of districts require some form of contact tracing. SO that, you know, worst case scenario, a positive test comes back and I have to go through and contact everybody else at an event to make sure that we are doing our own due diligence. Is there a way that we can do some form of contact tracing through digital ticketing here?
MP: Yeah absolutely, and when your fans, your parents, your community, etc., when they’re purchasing tickets on your site, they’re going to plug in their information at checkout and typically that information is going to consist of name, email address, and phone number. Unless of course you’re adding some custom piece to that checkout process.
Now, it was designed to be a marketing tool for schools to promote their events to their attendees, however with the current climate, it’s been a great tool for schools to manage contact tracing, God forbid something happens at an event where you need to communicate with the attendees. You’re going to have that information, whether you need to do a phone blast, an email blast, etc., you can easily pull that information of the people who have attended your events, and again you’ll have easy access to it, and it’s stored securely within your Box Office, so.
AK: Sure sure. So then if we’re going to use digital ticketing for contact tracing, that means that we have to everybody to scan in. Whether you’re a fan, a referee, or an official, whatever it might be right. If you’re helping run it, run the event itself, so I don’t want to charge those people for getting a digital ticket, how then could I get a free digital ticket to everybody just to make sure that everybody’s scanning in, we have everybody’s contact info in the same list?
MP: Yeah absolutely, good question. With a free event, no fees, through HomeTown Ticketing, in terms of bar fees or payment processing, no fees would apply to a free event, so free or complimentary ticket is exactly what it is, there’s no cost to that, so fees would not apply to that.
So for instance, we’re working with a lot of schools right now in terms of planning things like graduation or prom, and a lot of times graduation, schools don’t charge for graduation, but they want a way to control how many tickets each of their students get, but also how many people are coming to the actual event, so in terms of a free ticket, there’s no cost associated with the free ticket or utilizing our services for a free event, so that makes it real easy for schools.
AK: Okay gotcha. And then for like my referees or people running the score table, is there some easy way that I can send them a digital ticket for free in my Box Office without having to make them go pay for a ticket like the general public is?
MP: Absolutely, so back here within your Box Office, on the screen here we have this create order tool, which is a great admin tool for things like you just described, if you need to send out tickets to maybe an official, a worker, a board member, a coach, etc., this is a great way to do that. And again, it takes just a couple seconds here. What you can do is go in here, you’ll select the payment method as a comp ticket, plug in that persons email address and phone number, you’re going to want to make sure that you have this box checked here so that it does email a ticket, you’ll then select the ticket that that person is getting, or tickets. Once you click create order, this will securely send the ticket to that person via email, and then they can bring that ticket with them right on their phone, or they can print that ticket at home. Any ticket you send through this is also going to go into your post game tracking and reporting, so that’s a great way to keep track of not only your paid tickets, but any complimentary tickets that you issue for the event. So this is a great admin tool in terms of handling things like that.
AK: Gotcha. So I can have all paid tickets, all free tickets, all on the same list when it comes to contact tracing that I can see everybody else at the event, make sure that you know, because everyone scanned in it stayed at 250 or below, right, with that same process?
MP: Absolutely. Yeah these will definitely count towards your capacity, so if you need to stay in your capacity but also you know, taking care of your student athletes, your parents, your visiting team, any staff or administration that is attending the event, this would be a great way to help manage that.
AK: Perfect perfect. That makes sense to me. Then so, I guess one of the things that a lot of schools are worried about is how do you make sure that spectators are maintaining a safe social distance between each other? Like we don’t want people crowding in the same section of the stands, we don’t want a big group of student fans or parents grouping together, how do we make sure that people are spacing apart at our events?
MP: Yeah, so we actually have the ability to create custom seat maps for our schools. This is an example of one that we’ve created, you can do this for your auditorium, for things like graduation, performing arts, we can do these for your football stadium your gymnasium, so there’s really very few limitations in terms of how and what facilities we do. But again, they’re going to have that custom look to it. We’ll incorporate those into your Box Office and then you can utilize for your events. As admin, you have the ability to block out seats to help enforce social distancing, you can do things like pod seating, so if you need to group people together, there’s a lot of customization to that now in terms of blocking out seats. It can be a tool for social distancing, but it can also be a tool for if you have like, obstructed view seats that you don’t typically sell. You can block those out.
That’s more of a popular thing with performing arts type of events, but again, all things that you would have access to as admin in your Box Office. And you can utilize these for any of your events once they’re in there.
AK: Gotcha gotcha. And then, so for my football field oftentimes, we haven’t, you know, marked off rows or seats on the bleachers themselves, how would I apply that seat map tool to something I haven’t marked off as rows or seat numbers itself?
MP: I think the best way to do that would be, you can do general admission sections, if you wanted to go that route. Some schools will label their sections by color, they’ll label them by a letter in the alphabet, however you want to do that. You can do general admission type, reserve sections, or you can do actual seats, it’s really up to how you want to do that. We do have a number of schools that do it by section, and then they limit the amount of seats per section, that’s a little bit easier way to do it. But we can also go the more custom route with actual specific seats like you’ll see here.
AK: Sure sure that makes sense. So those tools make sense in terms of capacity management, contact tracing, keeping people apart with social distance. How do my parents and fans find all this information? Like how do I get this out without constantly Tweeting out links to where to buy tickets, how do I make it easy for my community to find this stuff?
MP: Yeah. I think one of my favorite parts about our platform is it’s considered a white label solution. We provide schools with an embed that goes right onto your site, we also have the integration with you guys at VNN that allows the events they’re ticketing in the box office to show up directly on either their district site or their athletic site with you guys, so their fans are never going to be redirected to another site. They can go right onto their site, they’ve got the tickets link up top, a lot of schools with also add a tickets page under more, you can also buy tickets through the calendar, so there’s typically a lot of schools using up to three different ways on their website to promote ticket sales.
So again, click that tickets link right on your site, and then you have the events up. So like, for instance, right here at Jasper, they’ve got their student passes up, with Myrtle Beach they’ve got their tickets button here, and you can see they’ve got a number of different options available right now. There’s student passes, and if you click on the ticket, this would be a good example to show you kind of what it looks like in navigating through the tickets. Now for instance, they’re sold out here, so they have a capacity set and they’ve met that capacity.
You’ll see they require a passcode, so this will typically show up to an event where a school is customizing access to the event where the attendee will be prompted to initiate or enter their passcode upon purchasing tickets. So again, we put it all right on the website, there’s the integration, and we make it as easy as possible on your athletic community in terms of getting access to your events.
AK: Gotcha. That’s awesome. Well Mike, I’m not sure if there’s anything else that schools are typically asking you guys in terms of running game day for COVID protocols or anything like that that we missed.
MP: Yeah, I mean the only thing that I might add to the conversation is that you have the ability to manage your events safely and easily. I think that’s the key, we know that athletic directors have busy schedules, so our goal is to not add things to their plate but make their life easier in terms of event management. So that’s our goal there in terms of event management itself. At the event, you can easily scan tickets from a distance, that’s another big piece to it, you can limit the face-to-face interactions in terms of the validation of those tickets and people coming into your events, so you can scan from a distance of up to six feet away, your staff can also scan from behind the glass window if they’re in a ticket window, a booth, or behind a shield, etc. So we’ve got a lot of pieces in place that are again, designed to help not only your staff but your community in terms of gaining access to the events.
AK: Gotcha. Well Mike, thanks so much for all the help today, I really appreciate you sitting down with us, going through just different tools that you can use to help do sports during a pandemic. It’s kind of a crazy year, but now that kids are finally back on the field, it feels really good to be able to find solutions for these type of challenges. So thanks for your time today.
MP: Absolutely, thanks for having me. If anyone has any questions please let us know, we’re happy to help.
AK: Yeah for sure guys, for any questions that are still lingering, feel free to leave them in the comment section, we’ll definitely follow up with any specific questions about your own school account or getting set up on HomeTown Ticketing. We’ll call a wrap for today, thanks guys see you.
VNN top stories in high school sports 03/12/21
Each week, we scour our network to find the best stories in high school sports. Check out some of our favorites from the past week:
Vidalia High School (GA) alum gives back to VHS
Last week, EVANCE Technical Inc. presented Vidalia High School AD Tommy Dalley and Principal John Sharpe with a check for $10,000.
East Liverpool (OH) senior wins state championship
Congratulations to ELHS senior Cameron Beverly for winning the Division II-III high jump title at the OATCCC indoor state championship.
Jacy Holloway resigns as Buffs’ (KS) boys’ basketball coach
Coach Holloway, who served the second-longest tenure as head basketball coach at Garden City High School, announced his resignation last Friday.
Coldwater (OH) introduces four new head coaches for this upcoming fall
Rob Bruns will head Boys Golf, Jenny Alig will take over the Girls Cross Country program, Tim Brunet will head Girls Golf and Paul Dingledine take over Girls Soccer program.
Eastview High School (MN) names 2020-2021 Athena Award winner
Congratulations to senior Cassidy Carson for being named EHS’s recipient of the Athena Award. Cassidy has been very successful in both golf and basketball.
How to Build Your High School Athletics Program Through Social Media
VNN’s Alex Kooi gives a rundown of the social media basics for coaches and athletic directors. He also sits down with two ADs to learn how they’ve successfully used social media to grow their athletics programs.
Alex Kooi: Hey guys Alex Kooi here again. This week on today’s webinar we are going to talk about setting up social media accounts either for your athletic department or your team for the program. We’ll cover how to do a Facebook page, how to make a Twitter account, and how it integrates with all your favorite VNN products. So if any questions come up along the way, feel free to submit them in the sidebar here, we’ll try to address them as we go, and if not we’ll follow up with you guys afterwards with any direct questions you had. So let’s get started.
I’ll share my screen and you should see my main Facebook news feed on here. Now what you’ll notice is on the left hand side, there’s a pages option you can click on to create a new page for yourself. So on that left hand side here, I’m just goin to click on create new page. And for my page, I’ll call it Lyndon varsity soccer, and for my category on my sports team and for my description, I’m just going to put my school website down. So I’ll go with Lyndonathletics.com. Now once you click create page on Facebook here, it’s going to ask you for a little more information on the page itself. So once it loads, it’ll asking you to add a profile picture and a cover photo.
So for my profile picture, I’m just going to use my school’s logo. So once I click on this, I’ll find where I have my logo saved and uploaded there, and then finally for the cover photo, I was was going to submit a picture of my team, but for this I’m actually going to use the graphics software VNN has through BoxOut Sports to kind of pretty up my team page a little bit. So if I go into my BoxOut tab here, you’ll see that I’ve already gone and selected a couple different templates from the library. They’re specifically made for a social media banner, so if I just click on this Twitter banner team right here, all I have to do is go through the template on the left hand side here and fill out the colors and the text. So I’ll go green, yellow, I’ll use my team picture, let’s go with our game logo again and we’ll call it Lyndon soccer, then once I’m done with the template on the left hand side here, you’ll see the graphic it generates for your social media accounts. And then once you’re done, all you do is click share on the top right here.
I’m just going to download this graphic to upload to my Facebook page. Sweet, now going back to Facebook, I’m just going to click on this add cover photo option, I’ll go to my downloads, and upload my graphic here. Perfect, then you just click save on the bottom left, and your Facebook page will be good to go.
Now, before I connect this Facebook page to my VNN apps, I’m going to create a Twitter account next. So going to Twitter’s homepage here, I’m going to click on this sign up button here, and we’ll call it Lyndon soccer. Instead of a phone, I’ll just use my email, say I’m born January 1 of 1970. So Twitter will ask you a few questions on here to get you going, but once you click on sign up, it’ll then email you a verification code to activate your account. So give me one second here as I activate my account. And then you have to set a password next. Cool, now you can either choose to skip this for now, or you can use the logo right from your library. So if I just move this aside a little bit, I’m going to load my logo.
We’ll hit next for my bio for Twitter, I’m just going to put my website down again and I’m just going to skip the upload contacts part for now. Sweet. Now that my Twitter account’s created, I’m going to do the same process where I add a nice banner picture to this as well, so I’m just going to click edit profile here, and then we’ll drag and drop our banner into this field as well. I’m going to hit apply, perfect, and then once I click save I’m good to go.
Cool. So now I have my social media accounts created, I’m going to then connect them to my VNN apps. So for you ADs and admins out there that are creating this for your main athletic department, you’ll notice on your getvnn.com, you’re going to notice on your toolbar there’s a big manage social button right up top there. So once I click on manage social, I can then connect my Facebook account and Twitter. So I’ll click connect to Facebook first, continue as me, and then you should see your Facebook page show up right down here. So I’m just going to connect that page, and then the next, I’ll connect Twitter.
Twitter will be the same process where it’ll ask you to log in with your credentials, and then log you in right there. So the next part about this guys is once you connect those social media accounts, they will then sync right to your team page, so that way anytime Lyndon boys soccer is tagged in a score report, story, article, photo gallery, whatever it might be, it’ll actually automatically share it out to my social media accounts.
Now those who might not spend a ton of time on social media don’t want to increase the amount of time they’re spending on there. The nice part about your VNN page, is it does a lot of the content creation for you guys, and the reality is, this is where people find their information nowadays. They’re not visiting your website every week or even every month, but we are scrolling through our news feeds about every hour.
So you’ll notice on here, whenever you guys get tagged in a score report or any sort of story, people can then click on that from Twitter or Facebook, and it takes you right back to your team page so that people can view whatever story this was about.
Now lastly, I’m going to then connect my social media accounts to my BoxOut page here. So that way, I can start creating really cool graphics featuring my athletes and promoting my program. So I’m going to click on done sharing in the top right, and when it comes to connecting my account, you’ll want to do that on the settings portion on the left hand side of your BoxOut screen. So once I click on settings, I can do the same process where I authorize my Twitter account. And I’ll authorize my Facebook page next. Perfect. Now next time I go in to create like a score report or a game day graphic, I can actually share it directly to my social media accounts without having to download the graphic, rather than go to Facebook, or then go to Twitter, and tweet it out myself. So you notice on here if I just create a quick score report, we’ll say we’re playing against Sehome High School, so again I’m just going to fill out the template on the left hand side here, we’ll go with our Lyndon logo, and we’ll choose Sehome High school as our opponent, let’s say this is a final score of 4-3, sweet and I’ll say go lions, and once I’m done filling out that template on the left hand side, I’ll just click update preview, and you’ll see I have a graphic ready-made to share out to my accoounts.
So I’ll just click share up here and I can Tweet it out and share directly to my Facebook page. Guys that’s all for today, we’re next going to talk to a couple ADs that we consider experts in the social media space. They’re both using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and they’ve really built a following online. So we’re just going to pick their brains for a bit and ask them, you know, how social media has affected their communication and their athletic department as a whole.
All right for our second part of our webinar we are joined by Steen Danielson from Concordia High School, you can check out his website at goconcordiapanthers.com. We are also joined by Ryan Johnson from De Soto High School, you can check out his website at DHSwildcatnation.com.
Guys thanks so much for joining us today, could you guys just give us a quick intro in terms of how long you guys have been in your positions at the current school, and what social media accounts you’re currently using, and they’ll kind of dive in, pick your brains about the specifics on how you set up your athletic department and all those other things.
So Steen, you want to start for us?
Steen Danielson: Yeah, I’m the Concordia Junior/Senior High School assistant principal and athletic director. This will be my second year here, we’ve been a VNN school since probably October, maybe September last year. Currently for social media accounts, we’ve got a school Facebook page, we have my athletic and activities Twitter, and then the majority of our programs have their own Twitter accounts and separate Facebook pages that we have set up that are all linked with our VNN pages. So when they post stuff, they go to all the different outlets. So, it’s been a process to get everybody on board and synced, but I think now using VNN, we’re able to communicate across all platforms pretty effectively, and it’s really helped us communicate with our community.
AK: Cool, perfect. Ryan how about yourself?
Ryan Johnson: Yeah, I’m Ryan Johnson, associate principal, activities director. Most of what I do is athletic director though. I’ve been at De Soto High School here in Kansas for six years now. We have been a VNN school for six years now. We have one main Twitter account for our high school that showcases everything from academics to activities, to clubs to sports, everything. We also have a Facebook, we also have Instagram, and just like Steen, a lot of our programs have their own Twitter accounts, and so we’ve got all of those things synced up through VNN to go out to Twitter and to Facebook and everything like that. Trying to streamline across multiple platforms for sure.
AK: Steen, I’m curious, when you first started as an AD at Concordia, what was the social media presence like, and how has it changed over time?
SD: Since it started, so when I first got here, one of the things I wanted to do is put together a sheet of all of the different programs, social media accounts that we had and I learned that not a lot of people were on Twitter. A handful were on Facebook, and then there was the school’s Facebook page. So that led to some conversations about the importance of promoting kids and social media, and I bet you now we’re probably at 90% of our programs, have Twitter and Facebook, and the other 10 have one or the other. So people have really listened and gotten tuned in to get those accounts set up so they can communicate everything going on in their programs and advocate for kids and recognize kids for the good stuff they’re doing. So it’s been a big change in a year and a half, but everybody’s on board, and I think it’s really helped our social media presence, and help us communicate with our community as well.
AK: Gotcha. So all your own head coaches have like their own account then on Facebook or Twitter or both, or what’s the most popular one?
SD: Yeah probably when I got here it was Facebook, like everyone had their own Facebook page, but the problem that we had there was if you were a band parent following the band Facebook, you might never know what’s going on anywhere else, and so largely our community relies on Facebook as well. So it’s definitely important to have, but with communicating with schools and engaging with the other teams across Kansas and other ADs, Twitter’s the place to be, Instagram is as well. There’s a couple programs here that have Instagram, but everyone’s jumped on board to the Twitter train, and it really helps out because you can, what I’ve told coaches, don’t get overwhelmed by adding Twitter if it’s not your thing, because you can still just post through the website which is really similar to posting to Facebook, and then it goes to both, and so you don’t have to worry about anything, and that’s helpful.
AK: Sure. Ryan, I’m curious, how have you guys used social media right now, for just communication in general, how much of it is relied through social media versus other means like email, like word of mouth, phone, all that stuff.
RJ: Yeah, so our athletic department, we do it on when it’s busy season. When you’ve got six sports going and four different levels of each sport and everything like that, it becomes a daily communication tool. And so typically what we’ll do, especially during COVID times, is post information to VNN, which then gets shared out through Facebook, through Twitter and whatnot, and then we will hyperlink, find the hyperlink to that article, and then do a direct email through our student database system to both parents and students of that activity group, or if it’s a big enough event we’ll just email the masses, all parents and all students, so everyone receives the information. But it’s all linked by to the website, whether they click on Twitter or they click on Facebook or they click on the link in the email, it all goes back to one place, so it’s one consistent message across all of our stakeholders and community members, and so we really feel like that process, because we feel like we can reach a lot of different people, you’ve got a lot of different states of life. Like different social media accounts, what we’ve kind of seen is that our kids, high school kids are on Instagram primarily. And their parents like Twitter, and then the grandparents like Facebook, at least that’s kind of what we’ve seen in our community.
AK: Sure sure different audiences there. Steen, I’m curious in terms of if there’s any ADs out there who are just kind of apprehensive, or just haven’t gotten to social media yet, where you would suggest starting, in terms of just starting from square one.
SD: Oh man. Obviously you have a lot of power to set up your own, like Ryan and I both do for athletics and activities, or school-wide to promote programs, but what you quickly learn is that it’s really hard to stay up in communicating for everyone. And with me it’s 7, 12, all of the programs, so step one, you’ve got to be active as an AD, promoting and communicating, and where it helps out using the website is because it give everybody else a space and a voice to communicate as well. But I’m a big believer that you got to lead by example, so where I would start is getting on Twitter and starting to communicate what game day or what’s going on for the week, and then if you want to engage in building a website like this, you still can do the same thing. So it goes to Twitter, and Facebook, you have one medium that you can communicate across all of it. And then once that’s established, coaches will start to see the benefit, ability, to communicate with the community, and they’ll jump on, and then it just kind of spider webs, and just gets larger and larger, and your communication gets more and more effective.
What I found using the website, it initially started because we just didn’t have a place to communicate scores at all, so when I built the website with you guys, the expectation for coaches was just one thing, you needed to use Press Box by the morning after your contest to communicate your box score. I said you didn’t need summaries, you didn’t need anything else, I just need the box score the morning after your contest. And that was easy enough and now look where we’re at. And there was really no, hey I want you to do this or I want you to communicate this, sure here’s a tool, communicate your score, and it’s grown to, hey, I can communicate a lot more, and it makes my life easier. So, lead by example first, and then give people access and they’ll see how it makes their lives easier.
AK: Sure. Kind of that same vein Ryan, I’m curious, how have you organize your coaching staff around using social media to communicate with their parents, athletes, fans, all that sort of stuff.
RJ: Yeah so, obviously from our main accounts, the high school accounts, we’re promoting anything and everything we can. Positive news, students of the month, staff of the month, you name it. As far as coaches go, obviously the way ours are organized, it’s not Coach Johnson at DHS basketball accounts, it’s DHS Boys Basketball, it’s the school basketball account, so it’s not individualized down to one person, we kind of like the bigger picture idea, that way we can take that account and transfer it if we need to down the road. But they are promoting things. Sometimes, it could be anything and everything, so something that’s not globally communicated. It might be something that’s cool that happened at practice, it could be something, I mean you name it, pictures, info, anything like that from the actual team accounts.
AK: Yeah sure. Now you guys have both, both have a social media presence that has grow to well over the thousands following, I’m curious, when you started till now, what are some of those things you guys have done to try and create such a huge audience following your accounts? Are you involving students? What tools are you using, Ryan I know you’ve mentioned you’ve used HootSuite in the past, so what other ways have you done to really get this growth behind your social media accounts as well?
RJ: Yeah. So when we first started six years ago, we just had Twitter. We had the main Twitter account, and we were probably around 600 to 700 followers. We’ve grown to 3,000 plus and we post, we Tweet in game scores, we’ve got that Twitter account that is multiple users, so you could be at multiple sites posting different things. We’re posting game day graphics, we’re posting links to information, I mean it’s like social media is our one stop shop to get people to all sorts of different information.
AK: Gotcha make sense. And seeing, I’m kind of curious like, what kind of tools do you currently use in terms of just trying to engage with students, coaches, fans, all that stuff, so start off by on Twitter?
RJ: Something that I found really important, especially back when I did coaching was recognizing kids. So adding the students who are a part of the program and things they do, something I used to do was MVP of the game. So I’d add that kid, explain what they did to be impactful for that game, and really recognize them. And I’ve got coaches on staff who post in weight room records, speed, training stuff, and just involving those kids. Something I do as an AD from time to time, if there’s a really big play at the football game, and that kid’s got a Twitter, I’ll at them in my score update. Something else that I think is important, it’s not just about engaging with your community, but also other communities. So yesterday we lost in the sub-state finals against Clay Center, it was easy for me to at Clay Center and say, we followed to Clay Center, congrats on winning the championship, best of luck at state. And so you’re engaging with another school community and helping them communicate, and you’re building a relationship there. So the other thing we’ll do is use BoxOut for game day graphics and scores on game day when my yearbook, or when my yearbook sponsor is at the game, she’ll be taking sweet pictures. And she’s got a SD card that’ll send them to her phone, she’ll text me a picture, and then that’s what I do to make the BoxOut graphic for the score updates.
The second piece that the yearbook teacher will do is trying to find ways with my schedule, being also assistant principal, it was hard, 7/12, Tweeting a BoxOut graphic, because there’s something every, there are multiple things every single day. So I approached her and said hey, how could we do this, and she was all on board. So she’s got all her yearbook kids assigned to different sports. They’re making the game day graphics and scheduling them, so literally anytime you see a game day graphic, I had nothing to do with it, it’s a staff member in my building working with kids who are excited about promoting and advocating sports that they’re involved in. And it really gives us an official look on Twitter, and I think is another reason why people like engaging with our social media accounts.
AK: So you’re kind of at a place now where students are covering your own activities and other students at the school when it comes to these tools and on social media, and with all of your activities in sports then it sounds like. Sweet. Ryan, I’m kind of curious, in terms of tools like BoxOut, how does that help your coaches engage with students and trying to get, build their program out in terms of participation and covering for parents. Like how does that, how has that helped your coaches?
RJ: Yeah, I mean it just enhances everything we do. It makes your information look professional, like a college level feel about everything we do. Kids like seeing their pictures out there. On a normal school year, non-COVID, we will do a fall sports media day, or a winter sports media day, where we’ve got kids posing in front of a green screen and doing all kinds of fun stuff like that, and they just love it. And so anytime that we can promote the positive things they are doing with professional grade level content, it makes them look good and feel good. It makes our school look good, and it really just gives a really substantial look and feel on social media. And I mean you can tell the schools out there have it going. Like Steen and I, you can tell on social media the schools that are invested in and really have made a goal of promoting their school positively with awesome content.
AK: That’s cool. Well guys, I really appreciate your time today. We could probably pick your brains for another hour here, and in the future in fact we might even looking at hosting a Q&A session where ADs can come in and ask you guys how you’ve built certain aspects of social media, how your coaches use it, how to police it, all those sort of things. So I really appreciate your time today, if any of you guys have specific questions for Ryan or Steen, feel free to ask them in the chat here, we can always follow up directly with you guys too afterwards, but we’ll call it there for today. Again, feel free to reach out to connect at VNNsports.net with any specific questions for social media syncs, you can always email myself at alex@vnnsports.net, and we’ll call rap for today. Thanks guys.
VNN partners with HomeLight to support high school athletics and strengthen local communities across the country
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – MARCH 11, 2021 – VNN, America’s largest high school sports communication platform, announced today a nationwide partnership with HomeLight, the real estate technology platform powering homebuyers, sellers, and the top real estate agents in the United States.
The
partnership is the first collaboration of its kind between the sports
communication platform and real estate technology platform joining forces to
connect and strengthen nearly 500 high school athletic departments and local
communities nationwide. HomeLight, whose technology empowers people to make
smarter decisions during one of life’s most important moments of buying or
selling their home, and VNN, whose software makes promoting high school
athletic programs easy, will coordinate together on hyper-local digital
marketing campaigns in 500 local markets across 32 states.
“We
are always looking for partners that share our mission to connect communities,
whether that’s bringing people together for a Friday night football game or
creating a world where every real estate transaction is simple, certain, and
satisfying for all. As two technology platforms dedicated to serving local
communities across the country, we’re excited to partner with HomeLight to
continue sharing that mission,” said Romy Glazer, Chief Marketing Officer at
VNN.
Beyond the partnership, VNN and HomeLight have both created programs to celebrate and empower sports teams and communities locally. The VNN National Championship celebrates schools with the most passionate fan bases across the United States. HomeLight has partnered with U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the National Governing Body (NGB) of Olympic ski and snowboard sports in the USA, on the HomeLight Killington Cup — the only domestic stop on the World Cup tour for the women of the U.S. Ski Team.
“At
HomeLight, we work every day to be the best team we can — and everything we do
is focused on powering the best people and teams in real estate.” said John Van
Slyke III, Vice President of Marketing at HomeLight. “We believe it’s paramount
to deepen the sense of community for our agents, our clients, and their
families in the neighborhoods and towns they call home. We’re excited to
partner with VNN to support high school athletes and teams across the country
and strengthen teamwork and community in the cities and towns they call home.”
About VNN:
VNN is America’s largest and fastest growing high school sports communication platform. As the exclusive partner of over 15 percent of all US high school athletic communities, VNN connects the high school sports experience onto a single platform for 19 million passionate parents, athletes, fans, software providers, and athletic administrators.
About HomeLight:
HomeLight is a real estate technology platform powering the best real estate agents in the United States, building the future of how people buy and sell homes. HomeLight provides a variety of software and services to home buyers, sellers, and real estate agents at every step throughout the real estate journey, from finding a top real estate agent, to accessing a network of cash buyers through HomeLight Simple Sale™, and providing innovative financing solutions through HomeLight Trade-In™ and Cash Offer™. Each year, HomeLight facilitates billions of dollars of real estate on its platform. HomeLight is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Manhattan, Scottsdale, and Seattle. For additional information and images, visit www.homelight.com/press.
VNN top stories in high school sports 03/05/21
Each week, we scour our network to find the best stories in high school sports. Check out some of our favorites from the past week:
Silver Creek (IN) girls basketball team wins state title
The Dragons secured a 54-48 victory over South Bend Washington in the Class 3A State Championship game last Saturday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
Lumberton (NC) boys basketball receive send-off message from congressman
The Pirates received a special recorded message from former congressman and Pirate graduate Mike McIntrye before their Regional Final game.
Purple Knights (LA) are State Indoor 4×200 Relay Champs
The Purple Knights won the state title in the 4×200 meter relay division 1 posting a 1:29.9 time with Gabriel Byrd, Tyriq Wilson, Jardy Montgomery and Shan Brooks.
McCutcheon’s (IN) Thornton and Maggio earn All-State honors
Sectional and NCC championship guard duo Daylynn Thornton and Teresa Maggio recently earned All-State recognition from the ICGSA and IBCA.
Todd Denton hired as Concord (IN) girls tennis head coach
Denton was approved by the School Board for the position of Girls Tennis Head Coach, taking over for Jan Soward who retired after 13 seasons.
VNN x Rapid Replay Top Plays in High School Sports: March 5, 2021
VNN’s Romy Glazer counts down the top plays in high school sports from athletic departments across the country.
Watch as Romy Glazer from VNN reviews some of the highlights from VNN Network schools this week. Plays come from high schools such as Beech Grove (IN), Smiths Station (AL), Livingston Academy (TN), White House Heritage (TN), and Randolph (AL).
VNN x Rapid Replay Top Plays in High School Sports: February 26, 2021
VNN’s Romy Glazer counts down the top plays in high school sports from athletic departments across the country.
Watch as Romy Glazer from VNN reviews some of the highlights from VNN Network schools this week. Plays come from high schools such as Onalaska (WA), Garden City (KS), Baldwin (PA), Smiths Station (AL), Rainier (WA), and Randolph (AL).
VNN top stories in high school sports 02/26/21
Each week, we scour our network to find the best stories in high school sports. Check out some of our favorites from the past week:
Heathwood Hall (SC) welcomes new Director of Athletics Eva Greenberg
A native of Washington, DC, Eva Greenberg has worked in independent schools for 11 years, serving as Assistant Athletic Director at two schools.
Maple Grove’s (MN) Jordyn Lamker named 2021 Athena Award winner
The Athena Award is given to an outstanding female athlete from each Minnesota high school. The award is based on excellence in individual sports and accomplishments in team sports.
Hamilton’s (IN) Coach Hupp retires after 25 years in head coach positions
Hamilton Southeastern girls basketball coach Chris Huppenthal announced his retirement on Wednesday night at the end of the season banquet.
Patriots (CA) welcome new head coach for cheer program
Patriot Athletics is excited to welcome Selina Jimenez as the new head cheer coach. She has extensive experience both coaching and competing in cheer.
West Bloomfield (MI) announces Tyrice Grice as new head football coach
Coach Grice is excited to start his 26th year of coaching as the new head coach of the 2020 Michigan High School Division 1 state champion Lakers.
How to Advance Diversity and Inclusion in your High School Athletics Office
VNN’s Katelyn Kasella sits down with Tony Fisher, District Athletics Director, Minneapolis Public Schools and Co-founder of NOMAD, the National Organization of Minority Athletics Directors, and Emily Zimmerman, Athletic Director at Evergreen High.
Katelyn Kasella: Hey everyone thank you for joining us for today’s webinar on promoting diversity and inclusion in your athletic department. My name is Katelyn Kasella and I’m a brand content specialist here at VNN, and today I’ll be sitting down with two special guests. First we have Tony Fisher, he is the district director of athletics for the Minneapolis Public School District, and he also co-founded the National Organization of Minority Athletic Directors. After Tony, we’ll sit down with Emily Zimmerman. She is an athletic director at Evergreen High School in Washington. And Evergreen, along with six other schools, recently joined a new athletics conference, bringing a lot of new diversity and an attempt to let the kids build relationships and get ahead of their differences.
Emily, along with several other ADs, co-founded the KSALT, which is the Kingco Student Athletics Leadership Team. So very excited to chat with both Tony and Emily today.
Before we get started, just a few quick things. There’s a side panel, if you have any questions throughout the webinar, please ask, we will be in touch with an answer, and a recording of this webinar will be available after the fact on our YouTube channel, and we’ll make sure to email that link out to all of you here today. So without further ado, let’s kick things off with Tony.
Hey Tony thanks for joining us today, how are you doing?
Tony Fisher: I’m doing great, and yourself? Thank you for having me Kate.
KK: Yeah absolutely, I’m doing well as well. So I’m just going to kick it off right away. I know you wear a lot of hats, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
TF: Oh boy. Well first and foremost I’d just like to say thank you to VNN, I absolutely love the product. I’ve been using VNN for quite some time now and just never can get enough of it, so I certainly appreciate the work that you all put into creating a superior product for us athletic directors. But a little bit about myself. I’ve been an athletic administrator for 13 years, I actually have a pretty wide lens as it relates to making decisions that will impact all, or have the greatest impact on the most amount of students. And what I mean by that is, my first athletic directing job was a small urban christian school of about 330 kids. That was located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second school I served as athletic direct and basketball coach at was a small rural christian school of about 330 kids. The grades were K4 through 12th grade, so it was a combination high school. I moved on from that small urban christian rural school to a large urban public school in Orlando, Florida. And again, that school may have been close to 4,00 students. So going from 330 to 4,00 was quite the jump, but I was certainly prepared for it.
After that I took a job at, it was a large suburban public school of about 2,100 students, and I served as the director of athletics there for one year, and that’s when I moved on to have again, a greater impact on students or a large number of students, and now I currently serve as the district director of athletics for Minneapolis Public Schools. And our student population is roughly 37,000, so as you can tell there’s been a progression over those thirteen years, and that’s why I was able to admit at the beginning of this that my lens is pretty wide.
KK: Yeah, wow, that’s amazing. And along the way you co-founded the National Organization of Minority Athletic Directors (NOMAD). Can you tell me a little bit about where that came from?
TF: So NOMAD is an interesting concept. And for those that do not know what NOMAD stands for, it represents the National Organization of Minority Athletic Directors. And on the heels of the aftermath of the George Floyd murder here in Minneapolis, the first question that came to mind is, I know that I own a small piece in this world in terms of making this world a better place, but what can I do individually to improve our current climate. And one of the ways that I thought I could assist was through athletics. And so it all started with, I was asked to participate on a national AD HOC committee based around diversity for the national interscholastic athletic administrators association.
And so one one of the first questions that I asked when I was allowed to speak at that committee meeting was, number one, why is this and AD HOC committee. If it’s important to you all just as finance would be important or membership would be important, then why is diversity not important. Considering the fact that I had, I was able to read their strategic planning goals of this organization, and of the 40 strategic planning goals, 10 of them spoke to underrepresented athletic directors or diversity, and so in saying that, why is this an AD HOC committee, why is this not a full-fledged committee.
And then my second question was, is it possible to provide the numbers in terms of people of color serving on executive boards within their athletic administrator associations, because it would be interesting to tell the tale, you know, maybe numbers don’t lie, in my opinion. And it’s pretty eye-opening. And I’ll just give you an example here in Minnesota, which is that the acronym is the MNIAAA, so that’s the Minnesota Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. And that falls under the umbrella of the NIAA. In 51 years of existence, the MNIAAA had two women serve on the executive committee. They’ve had one person from Minneapolis and St. Paul, of which that athletic administrator was actually from St. Paul, and they’ve never had a person of color serve on their executive board. And so that was a part of what I wanted to uncover or unveil. What are the issues, the systemic issues, as to why people of color are not breaking through that particular ceiling.
And so during that diversity committee meeting, I met a gentleman by the name of Kevin Adams, who’s an athletic director out in Virginia. And I reach out to him, we had, you know,, just some conversations about again, what can we do to move the needle forward. He introduced me to a gentleman by the name of Anthony Thomas, who is out of San Diego, and another gentleman by the name of Carlos Reed, who is out of Oakland, California.
And the four of us met on June 5th, and we just started to brainstorm. And that’s essentially where NOMAD originated. And so we called ourselves the co-founders of NOMAD simply because of that meeting on June 5th, and at this moment we have a little more than 250 members. So there’s, that tells us that there’s a need for this type of work. And we’ve done some pretty special things, I think, in a very short amount of time.
KK: Can you touch on some of those things and talk a little more about the mission of NOMAD?
TF: So our mission is essentially to, basically you know, provide networking opportunities, resources, support, and pathways for underrepresented athletic directors, folks that look like me, talk like me, and come from the same background as me, and as I mentioned before with 250 members, there’s certainly a cry out for this type of work. And so some of the things that we provide, our membership, when I talk about resources, we, currently, on our website through VNN, have a job board. And that job board is set up where we’re able to input information of available jobs out there because, again, sometimes the narrative is we didn’t have a lot of qualified minority candidates that apply for this job, so NOMAD is looking to kind of be that liaison in assisting organizations with providing quality minority candidates for athletic directing jobs.
When I talked about pathways also, we’re looking into assisting, whether it’s collegiate students or high school students, with the profession of being an athletic director, so, you know, just providing resources, providing information, whatever is necessary. And I’ll give you one example, there was an athletic director, I believe she was an assistant athletic director out of Atlanta, she reached out to NOOMAD, became a member, and we all kind of pitched in to help her secure employment. And right now I believe she’s a finalist for a job down in Atlanta, and you know a part of that was having some of those one-on-one conversations with athletic directors all over the country, or in particular our NOMAD board.
We’ve done webinar series, and so there’s been five webinars, and those, excuse me six webinars, and those webinars have been what I would describe as very powerful. I actually just got off of a webinar to be very honest with you, it was our fifth webinar, and the title was “Athletes and Activism” part one. It’s a family affair, and that webinar featured Earl Edwards, who is the director of athletics at the University of California, San Diego, and his son Earl Edwards Jr, who is a DC United soccer player, and on the executive board of Black Players for Change. And so those conversations today were very powerful, just in a sense that, you know, what can we continue to do to support our athletes if and when they decide to engage in activism efforts.
We did a webinar, webinar four was on the life of duality women in color in athletic administration, our stories and our truths, that feature Dana O’Hara, she’s the head of athletic and physical education director at Covenant Steward Hall, which is located in San Francisco, California. Candace Story Lee, who is the vice chancellor for athletics and university affairs, and the athletic director at Vanderbilt University, Angel Mason, director of athletics at Barry College, located in Rome, Georgia. Jackie McWilliams who is the commissioner of the central intercollegiate athletic association, I’m trying not to forget anyone, Dr. Sylvia Salinas who is the executive director of athletics at, within the Dallas Independent School District, and Alexis Williams, who is the senior associate athletic director and the director of diversity and inclusion at the University of Colorado. So again, when we talk about underrepresented, our women are definitely underrepresented in this particular profession. And so we wanted to be able to speak to that topic.
Webinar three was a two-parter, but it spoke to, the title was “Let’s talk about race: the collective responsibility of discussing race with your student athletes and coaches”. And for basically implementing different strategies and so forth. Star-studded panel there of Dr. Scott Brooks, who is, he’s the associate director of the global sports institute at Arizona State University, Dr. Renee Miles Payne, who is the senior associate athletic director and chief diversity officer at the University of Miami, Matrice Meriwether, who is the chief talent officer at the National Federation State High Schools, so the NFHS basically, and Dr. Keith Brooks, the director of equity and inclusion here in Minnesota, at one of our large public school districts. Now part one, we were able to secure Dr. Richard Lapchick, and I’m not sure if your familiar with Dr. Richard Lapchick, but Dr. Richard Lapchick serves as the executive director of an organization called TIDES. TIDE stands for the Institute for Diversity and Equity in Sports. Dr. Richard Lapchick is, huge, in the sense that he’s walked arm-in-arm in protests, marching protests, with Nelson Mandelo. The man actually took a punch for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when they were kids at basketball camp in New York, and other kids were basically razzing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for being the only person of color at this camp. Richard Lapchick stepped up, and the kids swung at him and took a punch to him. So just those types of resources I think are huge in facilitating these different conversations as it relates to race.
And then the last think that I’ll speak to in terms of some of the resources. We have book studies, and so we’re in our second book study currently, but our first book study we engaged in conversation around race talk, and the Conspiracy of Silence by Dr. Daryl Wing Sue, and that book is really about understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. And currently we are engaged in what’s called Urban Trauma, by Mesa Akbar, and that basically speaks to a legacy of racism and just, how we got here, and you know, different things to pay attention to when we’re, you know, dealing with our student athletes and the different traumas that they go through on a daily basis that a lot of the majority are unaware of, which ultimately impacts their behavior throughout the day.
So those are some of the resources that we provide in NOMAD, and I think that, again, it’s definitely necessary considering the fact that our membership continues to grow on a daily basis. So on top of the webinars, book studies, all these great resources for athletic directors, consuming all this information, how does the trickle effect work, how does it positively impact the students that they’re dealing with on a daily basis?
I would answer that by basically saying, you know, when you look at DEI work, diversifying, providing equity, and being inclusive, I would say that the impact on students from a diversity standpoint is that it exposes your student athletes to all types of backgrounds, and so when you talk about positively impacting, it’s educating our membership on why it’s important to understand diversity, and implement diversity within your athletic programming. The equity piece, I think is critical in the sense that, you know, we want to be able to provide resources, or similar resources, or close gaps that may exist in athletic programs, and coming up with solutions on how to address those equity gaps. NOMAD speaks to those types of, you know, those types of issues that exist in programs as well.
And then the last piece is the inclusion piece, which, all of these should be core values, but creating environments where athletes get to know one another, and then they can build solid relationships that will ultimately improve teams. So someone once explained, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion to me, or defined it in a way that really stuck with me. Diversity, would be considered being invited to the party right, inclusion would simply mean being asked to dance when you get to that party, and then the equity piece would be centered around the music that’s played, that everyone tends to enjoy, not so much just being one-sided, and only a certain group can enjoy it.
So when you look at defining it that way, I think that can also drill down to student athletes, and really have a positive impact. Because at that point, they will also be conscious to invite folks to ask them, once they’re invited to engage, and then be mindful or intentional about their likes and their dislikes.
KK: Tony, how can athletic directors and coaches who aren’t underrepresented by allies for organizations like NOMAD?
TF: I think it’s simple, but these two solutions are pretty loaded. Number one, educate themselves. So when I talked about the resources before in terms of the book studies that we’re engaged in in NOMAD, this is an opportunity to engage and educate, and I think the second part of that which I believe is simple but it can be difficult, is just willing to have those tough conversations surrounding race. I mean, if I think, if you start to understand the person that you’re having the conversation with, staring across the zoom meeting, or you know, sitting across the table from you, if I can slowly but surely understand who you are as a person, that’s going to give me more, what’s the word I’m looking for, more of a willingness to not be so defensive, or not be so protective. When, and if, you were to say something that may not sit well with me, so you and I having this conversation right now, is essentially breaking barriers. Because of the fact that you’re understanding me as a person, and then ultimately that will open the floodgates for you to then share with me your story.
And now we can kind of empathize, when and if there’s a situation that, you know, I can’t really relate to, or you can’t relate to. So educating themselves and being willing to have the tough conversations, I think is how athletic directors and coaches who are not underrepresented can serve as allies.
KK: Okay thank you. How can a coach or an athletic director who is interested in this organization become involved today?
TF: So I think that’s pretty simple as well. Visit our VNN, I always want to throw that feeler out there, or that marketing tool there, but use our VNN website and we have a membership form from there, and it’s very simple. You certainly just fill out the information that pertinent to you, or that’s detailed for your particular situation. Like for instance, I think that form asked for first name, last name, city, and state schools that you serve at, and then it asks for any topics that you would like to address, and I would be remiss to not mention this, this is a free membership. So again, it’s just one of those situations where it seems to be needed based off of what I mentioned before, how our membership continues to grow.
And we’re not saying that we have all the answers, but what we’re willing to do is educate ourselves with one another, and we’re willing to have those tough conversations.
KK: Alright thank you Tony. I’m going to move into just a few general questions now. And they’re very broad, so I mean as deep as you want to get or as surface level as you want to get is completely fine, What are some of the biggest challenges that you have seen diverse students facing in all of your years of experience in athletics?
TF: I think the first one that I would throw out there is white privilege. I think that student of color in particular, and I’m just speaking from my lands, I never understood white privilege and once I got to the point of educating myself, now I understand it. But it’s one of those things where, you know, how do you help other people understand it. In being a person of color at a young age, you know not really having a concept of the color of your skin providing you with more opportunities. You know I never really understood that, and so I think one of the biggest challenges now is with our diverse student athletes, helping educate them on that particular topic.
And I think the education happens on both ends. I think our students of color have to understand what that is and what that means, and then I think that, you know, our counterparts if you will, need to understand that it exists even though they may not think that it exists, you know. I think some other challenges would be, I spoke to education, so I would say lack of education of the non-diverse population. You know, the more they know I think the better you can understand where diverse groups are coming from.
I think, being I spoke to this earlier, but being willing to have the conversation, just simply having an openness and, you know, part of the conversation is listening, right? So if I see that you’re engaged, like you’re nodding your head when I’m saying some of these things, that tells me that you’re open to hear more, and then at that point I continue to give more, and so just being willing to have the conversation, I think that’s a big challenge, because a lot of people, non-diverse folks I should say, are unwilling to have the conversation. And I think if we can get to the, and diverse folks as well, don’t think it’s, you know, that it’s a single-sided story. I think both ends of the story, or both ends of that spectrum are not willing to come to the table and have those conversations, and so I think if we can get to the point of wanting to have the conversation, I think that’s big hurdle that we would be able to overcome.
And then I think the last piece that, just some examples of institutional racism, so you know, so I spoke to the organization, only having two women, one from the two major cities in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and no person of color serving on their executive leadership team, being able to put those kinds of examples on the table. And you know, sharing why that’s not okay. So I would say those four things are probably the challenges, the white privilege, the lack of education, being willing to have the conversation, and just the one example that I spoke of institutional racism, but there’s tons of examples out there.
KK: And I know you’ve spoken a lot about taking the first steps of seeking education, and so is there anything else that coaches and ADs can do to begin to address these challenges?
TF: Yeah it’s interesting you say that today during our fifth webinar with Dr. Earl Edwards and his son Dr Edwards of the University of San Diego California there. He came up with an acronym called PAL. And PAL spoke to, and again he would do a much better job at explaining this, but I thought that, you know this fits this particular question, he talked about the P representing personal attacks, so eliminating personal attacks, this is how we can address these challenges right. He talking about the A representing assuming good intention, so when we’re having this conversation, assume that I’m coming from a place of wanting to fix the problem, and you are coming to the table as well with that same intent. And then the last letter there is the listening portion, and just being focused on the works, not so much the individual.
So once you hear what I’m saying, you then begin to eliminate what I look like or where I come from, then you’re more so focused on what it is that I’m saying, and that tells you the true story of who I am. So I thought that that acronym by Dr. Earl Edwards was spot on in terms of PAL. No personal attacks, assuming good intention, and then listening by focusing on the worlds and not so much the individual.
KK: Yeah definitely. That’s great. All right well that’s all that I have for you today, I did want to give you a minute here if you have anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up.
TF: Yeah, you know I think the last thing that I would add is just, you know, again, fresh off of the webinar there, Dr. Earl Edwards spoke about our sphere of influence, we all have a sphere of influence in a sense that you may influence just your family, or you as an athletic director may influence an entire athletic community, or you as a senator may have some influence on, you know, a state. Whatever the case may be, we all have this amount of influence that we have, and essentially if we just all make it a point to do our individual part, ultimately we can solve this issue. But it really boils down to taking care of home, taking care of what you can take care of. I can’t solve what took place between, you know, a police department, and you know, a particular individual. I can’t solve that problem because that’s outside of my lane so to speak. But what I can solve is creating solutions for athletes when it comes to supporting their activism efforts within the Minneapolis public school district, and then serving as an example for other school districts on how to approach those types of situations.
I can influence being a part of organizations like NOMAD and, speaking at different speaking engagements like this and sharing the story just keeping it to myself, I think a part of that influence is if you’re not willing to speak up, then it’s very difficult for people to change, because they don’t, they don’t understand, you know, your story. So that influence, we have a responsibility to serve that influence and a part of serving that influence is being willing to just do your individual part. I think if we all have that mind frame, we may not get there tomorrow, but we could certainly get there.
KK: Okay thank you so much Tony, appreciate you hopping on today and chatting with us.
TF: Absolutely, thank you for having me I certainly appreciate it.
KK: All right once again, that was Tony Fisher with NOMAD, and if you’re interested in learning more about this organization or signing up, visit them online at thenomadassociation.org. Next up we have Emily Zimmerman, so let’s get her on. Hi Emily, thank you again for joining us today, how are you?
Emily Zimmerman: I’m well how are you?
KK: I’m doing well. We’re super excited to hear a little bit more about you and KSALT. So just to kick things off, can you kind of introduce yourself and KSALT?
EZ: Yeah! My name’s Emily Zimmerman, I’m the athletic director at Evergreen High School, which is in Seattle Washington, and we are a member of a Elite 24 of 24 School League, the Kingco league. We are one of seven schools who newly joined the league this year during the pandemic. so in joining a new league and bringing in new students with some diversity that wasn’t previously there, we made a student group call KSALT, the Kingco Student Athlete Leadership Team, to inform decisions of the ADs, to elevate the leadership within our student group, and most importantly we didn’t do anything in the fall in terms of sports, so to provide some opportunity and connection points for our students even though it was virtual.
KK: And can you talk a little bit about the mission and goals of this organization?
EZ: Yeah. So in establishing this, our goals is really to create a platform where students could bring up, address, talk, about current issues that are happening within our league. Obviously we’re not playing sports, there’s not a lot going on. so we’ve used it as an avenue to do some professional development for our students and do a lot of leadership work. That was the top thing they talked about wanting to do. And so we’ve used that to really really elevate their leadership potential, and to provide voices. So when we’re making decisions as athletic directors, the hope is that we’re making them on behalf of our schools. But student voice in those decision makings is so important, so it’s an advisory group right. It’s something that we can bring decisions to them, and say are we on track here? Is this the right, are we on the right path or not? And it’s a really just, vital group of kids to be able to do that.
KK: And there’s kids from each school, correct?
EZ: Yeah, two students from each school, a male sport and a female sport is how we kind of identify that.
KK: That’s awesome. And how often have the kids been able to meet this far? You launched in October right?
EZ: We launched in October, so we met every month, we meet monthly yeah. We met, I mean, maybe a couple more times in the fall. We really wanted it to be something that was happening and current, so we meet month, and recently we added students to our planning committee. So now, our decisions are informed decisions on how we plan the meetings are informed by our students as well, so we’re slowly working to hand over the group to students so that it’s much more student-led. So we have a meeting this afternoon and our students are leading half of that meeting.
KK: That’s awesome. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things the kids talk about during these meetings, or weigh in on when it comes to conference decisions?
EZ: Yeah. So you know one of the things that’s been really great about it is, as, in our state we’ve been very conservative about restarting sports, and there’s been just decisions happen from the top, and I think for students and for us, that’s confusing and frustrating. So one of the best things I think we’ve had is just a space for kids to be able to say how they feel. So one of our meetings was timed right after kind of a big decision was made by our state about sports, and we spent half the meeting just leading them through kind of processing and providing feedback so that we really knew what was important to them.
And what came out of that was so much confidence for us as athletic directors to know that the kids are going to follow rules, they’re going to do what they can to play, because that’s important to them. So I think that’s one of the great things, and then I think just again, when we did a lot of surveying at the beginning to be sure that we were hitting on things that kids were interested in, and we talked about the survey items for leadership and sportsmanship, race and equality, and things like that. And the top thing that the kids really wanted to talk about was leadership, and I think when we talking about it, it encompasses all those things, right.
Leadership is sportsmanship, leadership is having an equality lens, and so it’s been fun. We brought in a speaker last meeting and that speaker was, is, an alumni of one of the schools in our league who’s gone on the play professionally, and then also has a professional career, and spoke about his leadership potential and development in the league, and as a high school athlete, and how it’s impacted him. And so now we’re doing this week’s meeting is really action oriented, we’re going into our first season, so we’re working on getting these athletes to look at the five-week season and really figure out what are they going to do, right. We’ve had all this work, now what are we going to do as a league. How are we making our mark.
KK: And as we move forward, and COVID hopefully comes to an end, what do you see the future goals of this organization being?
EZ: I think moving forward, our goal is that this continues to be an advice group for the athletic directors and that when we’re making decisions that impact kids, which we normally are, we’re involving them in the decision making. And then secondly it continues to be a place of growth for kids. So a place where they can create community between schools, where we can address issues if they occur in a really honest way, and that we can bolster who these athletes are and provide them with a little bit more, you know, learning and experience that they can then take back to their teams.
KK: Thank you for providing a little bit of context and background of KSALT. I’m going to move into some more general questions, so I know when you and I have spoken in the past, you talked about this platform for the students to talk about these big topics like diversity and mental health and COVID, and what have been some of the benefits you’ve seen from giving students a platform to speak about this?
EZ: I think that one of the things as adults that we do is we sort of feel like we know what they’re thinking, right. We, especially those of us who are really, I mean athletic directors are super in touch with their community, and around a ton and in the building a bunch and around kids a lot, and so I always fool myself into thinking that I’ve got a really good handle on what kids are feeling, thinking, doing, and I’m always humbled when I actually hear what they say. And we actually provide a platform, because sometimes I’m, yeah I’m maybe in the same world, but where I’m able to really see and have that as evidence to then pivot and figure out what my work is doing to truly support what they’re saying and doing. So I think having a platform where you actually ask kids and make kids feel like their opinion is important is huge.
KK: Yeah definitely. What has been some of the biggest challenges for KSALT, and how have you overcome it?
EZ: Well we’re currently experiencing our biggest challenge, so as I have said a couple times, up until now we haven’t been in season at all, we didn’t do a fall season. And so it was really easy to find time in the day to do this, because our athletes weren’t doing what they normally do. We know that our athletes are the busiest kids on campus, right. Oftentimes they’re involved in athletics and clubs and other activities or jobs or home things, so we’ve had the gift of time up until now. And we’re looking at doing three seasons in four and a half months, and obviously we want to put the emphasis on that, but we also don’t want lose KSALT. So I think finding time is slowly becoming the hardest thing. We’ve shifted to going in the mornings and kind of, we centered on kind of lunch time for a lot of our students. Again, we’re across many different school districts, so we’re just sort of doing our best and then we’re going to see what next year would look like. But I think just thinking about the longevity of this program, as always when you’re creating something new it’s hard. And continuing for me to center it when I’m also thinking about running games and doing things that I haven’t had to do in a really like time.
KK: And how have you navigated connecting virtually?
EZ: You know I think again, something that we as adults feel is very foreign, kids are much more comfortable with it. It’s been interesting as we talk to our leaders who are now on our planning team, about how much more comfortable they are leading things when it’s virtual, versus maybe less comfortable if they were in person right. And so I think for kids it’s very approachable, because they can come home, or I mean they’ve been online right, all day, so they just kind of hop on another meeting, and it’s approachable. So I think, you know, we do everything through zoom which is really easy. And you know the link gets sent out, and kids know how to operate that. So that has actually gone smoother than I would have thought it was.
KK: That’s awesome, what’s one of the coolest things that you’ve seen come out of this initiative?
EZ: The coolest thing is, last meeting we had a guest speaker, and it was also after we had made an announcement about sports, so we were announcing that the seasons were going to happen, and so we really wanted to make sure that we were honoring the guest speaker’s time, so we kind of told the kids, hey stay after if you have questions, like we know that we just announced a big thing but we really wanted to honor what we had planned. And a student stayed after and a couple other students asked sports questions, and this student said, “Oh I don’t really have a sports question, but I’m just wondering, next year, are we going to be the same people on KSALT or are we going to have new members, because I have a younger brother and I’d really like for him to be a part of this”. And it was sort of one of those moments where you’re like, this is being talked about at their dinner table, right. This is being talked about outside of this meeting. And I think as an educator, that’s always your goal, that you’re not just doing something to do it, but that kids are walking away with something to hold on to, even if it’s small. Even if it’s five minutes the meeting made sense to them, you want to walk away, take away, and you want them to have someone else experience it.
And I think that has been, that was I think for a lot of us, just kind of like, wow, great, we’re on the right track here.
KK: Yeah definitely. And kind of in that same realm, has there been anything that the student athletes have done or said that surprised you?
EZ: I think their resilience and maturity in a pandemic is, shouldn’t be surprising, but is a great reminder that they are far more resilient and mature than we give them credit for, than most of us are. They roll with the punches, and their ability to adapt and to think critically is just really impressive, and I’ve really enjoyed that when we did some processing through, some of the COVID decisions, we had seniors who were maybe looking at not playing their senior year, and they were so just resilient in those things that they were talking about and in their leadership. They’re all about the relationship building of sports, it’s so interesting when you get kids in a room that they just talk about the relationship piece of sports. They’re not talking about the state titles, they’re not talking about the wins and the losses right, it’s all about team and what do they miss about their team and what do they miss about their coach and their teammates. And a lot of them are wondering about their legacy, and how are they leaving a legacy, and it’s all of those bigger things about sports that consistently come out and are really exciting to see.
KK: That’s awesome. And is there anything that you as a league or just personally have been able to change or implement after hearing from the athlete’s perspectives?
EZ: I think just continuing to elevate the student voice is probably our biggest takeaway for this year. And my hope is that we continue to use this as a vessel for decision making as a league, I think just that was some new learning for some of the athletic directors in the league of just how passionately their students felt about all parts of the decision-making process. And so I think that’s probably our biggest takeaway.
KK: Awesome. Is there anything else you want to add Emily?
EZ: I think just elevating student voice is really the best thing we can do in a world where we have so many different things going on, and you know we all have a lot to learn in race and diversity and things like that, when you have a space for kids to interact with one another and interact with you and provide some sort of that feedback, that’s really when the work starts to occur, and I think we’ve been really lucky to be able to see that happen. So I would just encourage anyone thinking about it to take the leap and go for it. Kids don’t expect perfection, they just want a space.
KK: Awesome great! Well thank you so much, I appreciate you joining us and weighing in today.
EZ: Yeah absolutely thank you so much.
KK: All right thanks again to Emily and Tony for joining us today, thanks to every one of you for attending. I hope you learned something new. Again, this recording will be available on our YouTube Channel, and we’ll get that link out to everybody, so look for that email to come. Have a great rest of your Friday everyone and a fabulous weekend.
Counting down the best sports graphics across the VNN network
In today’s digital world, a stunning image can make or break an online story. Articles and social media posts that include graphics historically perform better – especially in the world of high school sports.
Over 500 schools across the VNN network use Box Out Sports to create professional-looking graphics for their websites and social media accounts. With Box Out’s ready-made templates and designs, athletic directors can promote their athletes, share information with their communities and enhance their online engagement with ease.
Our schools create thousands of impressive graphics each month, ranging from player spotlights to COVID-19 updates. We’ve even seen Signing Day videos featuring these images. Today, we’re counting down the top five schools in our network that created the most graphics this month – and highlighting a few of their best designs.
5. Mt. Vernon High School – Fortville (IN) – 115 graphics
4. Belton Honea Path High School (SC) – 118 graphics
3. Scottsburg High School (IN) – 131 graphics
2. Roger Bacon High School (OH) – 133 graphics
1. Woodridge High School (OH) – 136 graphics
