Fall Sports may be changing in front of our eyes, but however it comes back, athletes still need to sign-up to play. So how do you, as an athletic administrator, do that in a world of social distancing?
Romy Glazer: Hey everyone it’s Romy from VNN, and right now it’s a few minutes after 10:30 here central time. So we’re going to get started. First off I wanted to say thanks to everyone here for spending, you know, a half hour of your morning here with us. This is one of the series we here at VNN do where we try and create some low pressure, just visibility, into some of the partners that we work with, get you guys a demo, get you familiar with technology while we’re at home.
And today’s topic is more or less one of the building blocks with everything that you use, so we’re really excited about it. And it’s all around registration, and so today I have with me Rick Ehrman, CEO VNN who’s going to speak a little bit at the beginning, but we’re going to get into the meet pretty soon, and that’s we have Clair Anderson and McKay from Register My Athlete. We’re going to walk through a little bit of their software, see what it does, and give you guys a good point of view as to how you can utilize digital registration. A little bit on the high level of what to expect, so we have this scheduled for 30 minutes, and on occasion, you know, we usually hit that, sometimes we go over a little with Q&A, but we have everyone in listen-only mode, primarily because there’s a lot of people, but at the end of the session we will do Q&A, I act as a moderator, so if you’re logged in you should see a control panel. You can ask questions on the side there, I’ll be watching them, answering what I can, and saving a bunch of the good ones to pick up at the end. It’s also going to be recorded, so we’re going to be posting this on YouTube, so you’ll be able to check it out later.
You know, if you have anybody else in your department or your conference or your association you think should see it, feel free to send it. You know, we are happy when that happens. So with that, I am going to hand over to Rick Ehrman to get it started for me.
Rick Ehrman: Thanks Romy. As some of you know we’ve been having these on a weekly basis, introducing partners and technology and acquisitions, They’re usually most productive the quicker we get the Q&A, but I also want to encourage you to submit comments or suggestions, we have been trying to do a better job of listening to our customers, so we feel like we’ve become a credible voice in the industry by listening to our 3,000 plus high school customers, and we’ve been doing a lot of work to kind of analyze partnerships and technologies we think can serve you better.
I’m excited to introduce Clair Anderson in a few minutes, and Register My Athlete, because they’ve been one of our closest partners and we believe solve one of the biggest problems that athletic directors and coaches deal with.
So just a little bit about the VNN mission statement, I won’t spend too much on this, although I do take mission statements very seriously, we spend a lot of time thinking about the stakeholders that VNN serves. From ADs to coaches to parents, down to athletes. And what’s really exciting and fun about being in this industry, is we’re all kind of trying to solve the same problems, which is making your jobs easier, making athletics more affordable, more accessible, safer. And I was on a webinar last week with a consortium of technology providers, some of them on this next slide that really are kind of point solutions for each one of the problems or challenges you have to deal with in your day to day job. So, as you can see, we like to think of ourselves as the connective tissue. We’ve had great growth in the last 90 days, I don’t want to skip over kind of, the, you know, the challenges that we’ve all had associated with the chaos and disruption of our COVID-19 communication platform we feel is thus used and most effective during times of crisis and chaos, when you’re required to communicate in masses more frequently and more consistently.
So we were, we fell, blessed to be partnered with these companies and digital ticketing and the video space. I was actually on the phone yesterday with the leadership team of Hudl, who we have a lot of respect for. They’re very solution oriented and have great market share in the high school space, and I don’t think this is officially their mission statement, but they were talking about keeping athletic directors married. So I didn’t want to be too tongue-in-cheek, but we’re trying to make sure you all stay married, and don’t get divorced by getting home earlier in the evening. But without further adue, you know, I want to talk a little bit about registration, and, you know, why we chose Register My Athlete. And then I’ll hand it over to Clair and his team to give you a demo, which I’ll use to be most important.
But the data that we’re able to aggregate and analyze as a result of our partnership with Register My Athlete really helps us serve our stakeholders better across the board. I come from the youth sport space, I used to work at sports engine, where, registration is everything. And it’s the biggest problem, the biggest challenge, the tip of the spear, but as we think about the user experience and ease of use, and technology and reporting and compliance, we feel like we did a great job of analyzing the market to see what the best solution was for you. And we’re fully integrated with Register My Athlete, which should I think, feel like we’ve eliminated anything to do with touching paper or checks, or shuffling, and just kind of digitizing that entire process.
So I’ll hand it over to McKay, who could talk a little bit about the value proposition, or maybe Clair will speak of that first, before we get into the demo. But excited to take your questions later in the call.
Clair Anderson: Thanks Rick, this is Clair. I just want to introduce a little bit about what Register My Athlete is about, then I’ll turn it over to McKay to do a demo for you.
But a little background in terms of Register My Athlete’s story, I’m one of the founder of Register My Athlete, it’s a paper free solution, you know, and it was designed, the concept for RMA started in 2007 when I was an athletic director. So I’m an old educator, 18 years. I’m a coach, athletic director, and teacher. And 12 of those was an athletic director, and so our product was built from an athletic director’s perspective, and what, basically what we’ve done is we’ve focused on just the clearance process paperwork, all the things that when an athletic director goes to work in the day and their desk is just full of stuff, and you’re trying to get as many things off the plate as you can, that’s what we focus on from an athlete and coach perspective. So we do coach management as well, we try to stay in our space and what you want to be the best in the registration space that we can, you know, in all thing associated with that.
Whether it’s do the paperwork, collect the fees, help manage some communication. And through partnerships with VNN, in that communication regard, you know, passing rosters and that kind of stuff, but our goal and the value in our partnership with VNN is, let us stay in the registration space, take as many things off an athletic director’s plate, and then partner with the VNN ends of the world so that they can help manage the rest of your day to day. And so we currently service over 4,000 schools, a lot of those in coach management registrations, but and then a number of them in athlete registrations. We manage state eligibility transfer processes, that type of thing, and we do that for three state association in Utah, Nevada, and Texas, and working on a few others.
But with that, I turn it over to McKay to kind of give you a clearer picture of how the process works and go from there.
McKay: All right everyone. This is McKay, thanks for being here. Clair discussed a little bit about what we’re here to do, and I’m going to talk more about how exactly we do it. So let me get my screen set up. Awesome.
So at Register My Athlete as, Clair.said, we primarily do three things. Athletic registration, coach registration, and then the third thing is a platform for athletic trainers to manage injury cases for the athletes that they’re seeing about injuries. So I’m going to go sort of in that order, I’m going to cover account creation, and then I’m going to go in as a parent and show the parent side of things, and then I’m going to go in as a coach and show some of the tools that coaches have in order to manage those incoming registrations that the parents are doing. And then I’ll get into the admin point of view, we’ll cover athletic training and then coach management toward the end.
So I’m going to go ahead and get started. You see I’ve got a login page pulled up, I’m not going to really get into account creation much other than to say that every user has to create an account, and then within that account they will be doing everything that they need. So it’s basically sort of a one-stop shop. And you’ll see what I mean here when I log in. So I’m going to long into our test account, and you’ll see I’ve got four portals here in he middle. So these are the portals that I have because I have multiple roles. So I have a parent portal, coach and admin portals, and then a coach registration form. So all of it’s done under the same account, so that’s all I’ll say there.
Now I’m going to go into our parent portal, spend a couple minutes in here showing you a little bit about the process. So the first thing I’d like to point out is that, when a parent registers their athlete out of school, that school can now send e-mail announcements to the parent, and also put them on the front page of their account. The second thing I’d like to point out is that this list of athletes right here shows that a parent can create and register multiple athletes under the same account. So they can get it all done in one place. Now, I’m going to click starter, complete registrations, and I’m going to go into an existing registration down here on this list. If I needed to start a new one, I’d do that right there, but I’m just going to go into this existing one that I’ve got right here. And I’m going to go into the registration checklist.
Now, I’ll preface this with, there are a few other pre-registration things that usually need to be done. For example, collecting guardian info, collecting insurance info, there’s a health questionnaire that you can set up. So there’s a few pre-registration things, but this is the meat and potatoes of the process.
So the first requirement section is going to be the electronic documents, document questions, and then the legally binding e-signatures for the guardian and student. Now, it’s a pretty straightforward process. We would set up the school’s documents here, the parent and the athlete are going to read all of them, they’ll need to agree to the document. Once it’s been read once, they’ve done that, they’ll answer all the document questions. And once they’ve completed all of these requirements, they’ll come down and the the guardian and student e-signatures. Now these are legally binding, and they bind everything in these sections here. So that’s all I mentioned there.
The next thing I’ll mention is going to be the additional requirements / physicals, and this is primarily used for physical forms. It’s a section for anything that needs to be submitted to the school rather than just read, or rather than just answer, it needs to be submitted to the school rather than just read, or rather than just answer, it needs to be submitted. So the most common example is a physical form. We provide a resource document here, so the parent can click here and download the physical form now, you can take it to the doctor, get that filled out, and then they can come back into the system and uploaded for approval.
That’s all I’ll mention there, it’s a pretty good process, works very well to get those things that actually need to be completed. The last couple things I’ll mention here on the parent point of view are going to be the fees and in the store. So the fee section is for mandatory athletic participation fees. So right now, in order to participate, I have to add the speed of my cart, and pay for it. The next thing is going to be the store items here. And these are for, not necessarily participation fees, but they’re for items that need, they can be purchased.
So an example is baseball pants that we have here. And that’s all I’ll mention there. The next thing I’m going to do is go to our admin portal. And we’ll cover, or sorry our coach portal, and we’ll cover a few of the tools that coaches have and admins have to manage those incoming registrations that the parents are completing. So I’m going to click in my head coach portal. Again, we have an announcements page, but the one that I’m going to go to and focus on, is going to be the sports page.
Right here, now I can view the sports that I’m assigned over if I click into one, I have some tools. Now coaches and ADs don’t necessarily have a lot of time, so the primary things that they need to make sure that they’re aware of are who’s going to be, who’s registering and are they complete or not. So to view that, you can just click on this list here, and it’s going to show you who’s registered, their completion status, anything they’re missing, and then if they have a red bar are their row, that means that they have been marked ineligible. And that’s generally used for academic eligibility so that coaches and admins know who’s eligible, who’s not, so that’s what this page is.
The second thing thing we’ll show you is going to be rosters. Now I’m going to go into the varsity roster. Again, as athletes register and they complete their registrations, you can create rosters, get the jersey number, some status’ here. This one ties into athletic training, we’ll cover that in a few minutes, put in their height, and a couple positions. And then again, the ones with red bars are the ones marked ineligible, so everyone knows it’s pretty obvious.
A couple other things. You can always come in, you can always print a roster right here, and you can always send a custom email or a custom text to the athletes on the roster. The last thing I’m going to mention in sport management here is going to be this page. And this ties into the pre-registration thing that I was talking about, where we collect, you know, guardian, insurance, emergency contact, stuff like that. And that’s going to be right here. That’s where we store it for easy access by coaches, so you have the athlete’s name, contact info, you have the guardian’s name and contact info, again you have their home address, their emergency name, the emergency contacts name and info, and then you’ve got their medical info.
This last column is a list of pre-existing medical conditions I mentioned earlier. You can set it up so that the responses to those medical conditions will show in the fifth column there. So those are some of the tools that admins and coaches have. Now I’m going to go into our administrator portal now. And talk a little bit about the athletic training program and what exactly that is and what it does. Navigation athletic training, the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s embedded into the navigation menu. And the reason for that is because we sell, it has an add-on to regular athletic registration to create and manage these injury cases. So I’m jut going to show a pre-existing injury case. Look into this one right here and we’ll see exactly what it is. So here’s an overview page with some recent activity, history of that.
We have another overview page with some dates and things like that, just some pre-case information. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. We have our injuries page. You can add an injury, keep track of those. The next thing is going to be the evaluations. So, for example, the tests and everything with the negative and positive results. Now, I’d like to point out this is all industry standard. We’ve worked with medical and healthcare professionals to design this. The next thing we’ll say is going to be we’ve got a page for soap notes, we, and we have a page to keep track of all the treatments that you the trainer have been doing with the athlete.
There’s also a section for documents, and then some note sections over here toward the right-hand side. So the athletic training program is designed, like I said, a platform for athletic trainers to create and manage injury cases for the athletes who are injured. There are a few reports as well, so you can see who we’ve treated that week. You can see the new injuries that have been added to cases that week, and things like that with evaluations and with treatments, and so on and so forth. That’s what I’ll mention there.
The next thing I’m going into is going to be the coach registration. So let me log out of here and go back into my coach portal down at the bottom. There we go, okay. That’s fine. The coach registration portal is very similar to the parent registration portal except it’s geared more towards coaches who need to complete their requirements, and then toward the admins who need to be able to stay on top of things and make sure that the coaches are actually completing their requirements. So I’m just going to get in here and show you a test registration for a coach that I’ve already started. And you’ll notice, oh it looks very similar, we have our electronic documents here, we have our e-signature right here in the middle, and then down here is going to be the requirements section for things that actually need to be completed. Generally, you know, a training certificate, background check, a fingerprint card, things like that. The coaches and admins can upload them for approval, you know put an issue in an expiration day and things like that to keep track of those. You can also embed some links here for them to have resources to actually get these requirements completed. So that’s nice as well, it tells them where to click and it takes them to the site where they can complete that. The next thing I’ll go over here is going to be the “View current registrations” page, which is going to be a report of all of the registrations that coaches are completing. So, again, an admin might not have much time, they may need to know very quickly who has registered, who has completed their registrations, and who still has stuff to do. So that’s what this page is for.
I can see who’s registered, what their sport and role is, and then I can see what their status is as well. Most of them are in progress or incomplete, and then I can see a list of everything that they need to complete if they still have things left. Additionally, if there are requirements that need to be verified and approved, that’s going to show here as well. So that’s the gist of the coach management piece. It’s a very good tool for the admins to keep track of their coach’s requirements to ensure compliance with the state and the district rules and everything like that.
The last thing I’m going to mention is that we do offer VNN integration. So, as Rick said earlier and Clair said, we’re fully integrated with VNN, which basically ends up providing a sort of, you know, one stop shop for parents to visit your school’s athletic website and then to access our website at the same time. So with that, I’m going to turn the time back over to Romy.
RG: Perfect. Thanks guys. And I got a comment that the screen is kind of small so I apologize for that. I’m going to go full screen on this. So for the integration, this is what it looks like right now when you work with RMA and you work with VNN, we have a link that shows up in the top part, the top right hand side of your website. So it makes it really easy for parents to find it, register for sports, and go right to Register My Athlete from your VNN site. You know, on deck, we have a few other really interesting things too, you know. We also have roster pages that are set up, so our team has been working on taking some that, that information like weight and height and, you know, number and sport, and being able to pull some of that in, so you don’t actually have to create rosters on your VNN site as well. But, in short term, the link is where we are now, and as those releases come out, we’ll be sure to give you a heads up as they release. I know it’s really requested a lot from people in the market, so really excited about that.
When it comes to pricing, there’s a few different levels. Primarily because we know that some schools are bigger than others, and so different budgets and all that. So there are really sort of three pricing levels. And as McKay was saying, there’s a few products. So it can get complicated pretty fast, so you know, as always, if you’re interested in doing something like this, we recommend you get in touch with your local VNN sales rep, or you can also just email Alex@VNNsports.net and he’ll get you to the right person. His email is Alex@VNNsports.net. And then, you know, we also have a landing page set up. VNNSports.net/registrattion, and the form there. So that comes to m, if you guys have any questions. Pretty easy, but you know, the three levels.
There’s one that goes from 0 to 999 students, there’s one that goes from thousand-plus, and then, you know, we have an annual package price and a one-time setup fee, which kind of goes towards the time that our support team takes to help set you up in the RMA team. And then the annual package price from there, and then also you know, if you are in charge of a district or you’re in charge of an association, or you have a handful of schools, you’re all kind of working together, you know, to figure out what the new normal is going to be, we do have discounts for multi school conferences and associations, so feel free, you know, let us know and we can cook all that up. You know we’d love to work with you so that’s some of the pricing. But I know we want to pop into the Q&A so we’ll do that right now.
I’m going to leave the pricing slide up so that you guys can see it and you can see we have the email, but we’ll get started on the Q&A. So Clair, first one coming for you from the field. Your website, we saw it on McKay’s desktop, is it mobile responsive or mobile friendly?
CA: Great question. One of the most frequently asked questions we get is do you guys have an app. As, you know, from an athletic directors perspective, is that could mean a lot of things. So the answer, are we mobile-friendly, we are mobile-friendly. We do not have a, so you can complete all of these tasks on the phone, on an iPad and so forth. We do not have an app dedicated to just being an app, we’re in the process of building that right now as we reach out to stakeholders. So if it’s an admin when you get on, and you, if you have an admin app as an admin, what are the four basic features you want on there. If you’re a parent, what are the four basic features you want on there. So we’re in the R&D process of building that so that it’s the most effective tool. So if an athletic trainer pulls it up, okay they’re going to need to be able to process emergency contact info, do treatment, that type of stuff. So in the short term we’ve optimized our site so that when you get on that, almost every page is mobile friendly. So it’s very simple to upload forms on a phone, on an iPad, to complete that process.
RE: Hey Clair just to add one thing, we’ve done a lot of work around that – like what kind of functionality requires apps versus not, and, you know, in most cases when it comes to content consumption, you know, apps make sense. In other cases, where you’re actually entering data, you know, we found that 90 to 90-plus percent of people prefer to go to a desktop to do that, so it’s good to have as an ancillary solution, but we’re seeing the same thing with other partners, where it could have been secondary for content input.
CA: Yeah, yea, I agree. So, if we get to that point, then, you know, pull up an app, and you, if you’re the coach, here’s the three things you want and you just click on that button. It’s done, but it will not be input right necessarily. But so great.
RG: Okay another one coming in, so you’ve got a handful of different packages Clair, you got athlete, you got coaches, you’ve got RMA+ coach for an injury trainer, you know, how do you like, what would you suggest people start with. You know is this something you see a lot of people usually kind of going for all at once, do you see them usually starting with athlete and adding on, would love for you to talk maybe a little bit about that.
CA: Sure. So what we’re starting to see is people are going for all at once because of registrations, not necessarily new to the space, but if it is new to the space, I mean in the space, he’d never heard of it. Here’s a couple things to keep in mind. I mean, when I was the AD quite frankly that, the registration portion, for me wasn’t necessarily my biggest problem, I mean it was because it was so much stuff, but the managing the coaches and knowing who your assistant coaches and volunteer coaches and all that, was a challenge. And so if you’re going to manage athletes and coaches, i would say at the minimum I would do RMA, the registration and coach management, to solve a lot of your, you know, take a lot off your plate.
The injury piece is really an addition to the Register My Athlete piece because the injury upgrade is really only useful if you have the data in the system, so as far a injury, the injury piece. you know it competes with sportswear, which is a lot of athletic trainers. Most of you on this call probably don’t deal with the injuries then, you allow the trainer to manage that, and physicals and so forth, so there’s a lot of pieces there. But if you know what you want, I would put them all on. If you’re brand new to the system, I would probably just start with the athlete registration.
And a couple things I want to point out, you know you’re sitting on webinars and stuff like this, and you know you might even go, “Man this would be nice, if we had all this stuff, and man if we get that off our plate”, then you get off this call and all of a sudden you feel overwhelmed again, there’s no secret sauce to moving, it’s going to be a challenge if you decide, if you’re doing total paperwork right now and you want to move to Athlete Registration, you need to commit to it. And it’s going to be a challenge. And that first year conversion, getting everybody on to electronic, it’s going to be some work. All of us have been through the coaching world, and we ask kids to work hard all the time, but after the first year it becomes very easy, and when you’re in your third year, it’s easy easy.
You don’t, pretty quick you don’t have to tell them how to do it, but that was a long answer to tell you if I was just going to start, I would start with the RMA. And we’re here to hold your hand through the whole thing, we have a good support team to kind of walk you through the process, but it is, it’s a pretty big process. But you’ll be glad you did it. Right now is the perfect time to do it because you know with this COVID, a lot of the focus has been what are we doing technologically to help students in the classroom, and so electronics are becoming more and more widely accepted, that they can jump on and help manage some of that stuff way easier now, because you know that schools are providing technology to make sure they can complete this stuff online.
RG: Clair that was a perfect lead-in for the next question that I had, for either you or McKay, it had to do with multiple registrations. So you know you have parents who maybe are registering an athlete for multiple sports, or you have them registering for multiple years, like, can you go into a little detail on that feature?
McKay: Yes, good question. So the site absolutely does allow for parents to start multiple sport registrations for a single athlete at a time. So, and I didn’t show it because it’s too much of a process, but basically when you originally start the registration, you select a couple of things. The first thing you do is select the school. Then you create the athlete profile, or select the existing athlete profile, and then the third thing you do is select the academic year you’re registering for. And the sport, with the sports registration page, there is an option that the admin can set up to allow parents to choose multiple sports. And it basically just turns into a checklist. So the parent can go down the line, check everything they want to, register for that athlete, and they can finish that registration. And it basically will multiply into a complete registration for all of those sports that they selected. So yes, there absolutely is an option for that. And it works pretty well.
RG: Great, great thanks McKay. So let’s see, you’ve got approximately two more it looks like in here. One had to do with messaging, and so Clair I was hoping to, you know, see if you had a point of view for RMA and messaging,
CA: Yeah, so as far as messaging goes in our system again, our messaging was built from the athletic director’s perspective, you know, and we managed messaging when a parent signs up, creates their account. They can say, does a parent want to receive messaging, the same text that a student’s going to receive. Everything is built around protecting the kids, and so as far as when we want to send messages once, they’re put on a team that a coach can say, okay, send this message out with attachments, that type of thing. Do you want to send it as an announcement, as an email, as a text, or both, and so you can manage messaging of multiple ways.
But the thing we really like about it is, once you’ve got your audience and the parents have signed up with their kids, then you don’t have to worry about, all right, our parents. Do parents have access, because every parent when they get in has access, and so now you have a real platform to make sure they get communication. Whether it’s email or text, and when, and I’m a coach in fact, I still coached this last year, I usually just send both text and email to make sure they get the information.
RE: I was just going to add to that. When I think about the unique proposition that we bring, as you know, collectively bring as VNN and RMA together, it is all around communication and messaging. So when we think about the data that’s aggregated and accumulated from a registration process, we think about that as we think about anonymously evaluating it. And, you know communicating through our Team App, communicating for fundraising, putting recruiting strategies together, running background screens on coaches and volunteers, so the messaging and communication part is super important. And one of the main differentiators I think that we bring in this partnership to the market.
CA: Can I add to that too Rick? And, this is critical, and this is why we love having VNN as a partner for us, is because, you know, like I said, we’re focused on what comes off of my desk as an athletic director, and we want to be the best in our space there, and we know that from a consumer’s perspective, they need all of these things that Rick just talked about. And so our goal as a partnership is to make sure that we can create that scenario for you, so you don’t have to worry about all those things in multiple multiple places.
RG: Perfect. I love it. You guys actually kind of covered the other questions that we had, so that’s great. One clarification, I know it’s 11:03, so we said we’re going to be about a half our, so we’re just right at about time, so one clarification that I wanted to make here on the pricing slide. That total package on the far hand, right-hand side of the screen, also includes uniforms, which is forms that can live on your site and is good for summer camps or booster club fees, and so it doesn’t include, or is helpful along with registration for athletes and coaches, but does something a little different. So I wanted to make sure to clarify that to everyone who’s on the call. Yeah, I suggest if you’re interested, get in touch with your local VNN sales rep who can walk you through. I know McKay and Clair are around to give demos if necessary.
I want to say thank you so much to everyone for being here and spending a little time with us. We’re around if you want to email us, let us know and we’ll keep doing these. As Rick said earlier, to send us your suggestions or what kind of content or webinars you want to see over the summer, you know, we want to hear what you want to do. We want to make sure we’re providing a lot of value to you guys, so you know we’re open to any kind of feedback you have, and let us know so we can keep being engaging and keep helping all of us together, the great technology that’s going on, and I know your job’s better. So thanks again, and I hope everyone has a great Wednesday. Talk to you soon.