Top 3 Time Intensive Mistakes AD's Make

As Athletic Director, nothing hurts more than wasting time on pointless tasks.  Make sure you’re not making one of the most common time-wasting mistakes listed below. Are you committing one of the Top 3 Time Intensive Mistakes that Athletic Directors make?

Every AD knows what it’s like to be asked the same question 17 times a day.  Where can I find the physical form?  Where is tonight’s game?  On average, athletic departments spend more than an hour per day answering these repetitive questions, again and again and again.

But here’s the good news: A comprehensive website can get you off this hamster wheel.  Just post all your forms, answers to frequently asked questions, or updates your students or community may need on your athletic site.  Then, when the phone rings, simply refer the caller to your website to find the information, and the next time they need an answer they’ll check the website first.

Voila!  You’ll find yourself answering a lot less repetitive questions, and your community will love the easy access to all the information they need.

Changes or cancellations to events are inevitable.  But the old fashioned (yet still popular) process of calling a list of people one after the other takes more time than it needs to.

There are multiple ways to streamline this process.  First, to ensure all your internal people get the message, creating an email list for each sport (including coaches, volunteers, game & facility managers) enables you to get a message out to everyone with the click of a button.  If you’d prefer text messages to emails, send text alerts with online tools like GroupMe and more.  Some website companies (like Varsity News Network) even allow you to send text alerts directly from your website.

But even after you’ve streamlined your communication to your staff, you still have to answer all the inbound calls from parents wondering about the status of the game.  This part is even easier.

Simply establish a policy that the first place you update when a game has been cancelled/postponed/etc is your website.  And let all the parents know that if they want the latest information about cancellations, that’s the place to look.  Allowing your parents to find information they want on your website ensures that you don’t waste time answering the same questions again and again over the phone (sound familiar?  see #1)

Finally, arguably the biggest time waster for athletic departments is answering individual questions about scheduling.  Practices, games and events, scheduling questions come in all the time, and answering each one individually can suck up big chunks of your day.

Here’s how you fix it in 2 quick steps:

Step 1: Have your coaches use Google Calendar to schedule their teams right from their phone.

Step 2: Have your coaches post their google calendars directly to your website.

The minute your coach makes a change to their schedule on their phone, it automatically updates your website with the latest information.  Not only that, athletes and parents can subscribe to the coach’s calendar so all updates are automatically sent directly to their phone.

Just like that, you’re all but out of the schedule question answering business.

These are all things you can set up yourself.  But, if you’d like to get a solution custom built for your school, contact VNN to get started.