Teamworks is playing a major role in college basketball this season. The communications streamlining software company is helping the NCAA run successful men’s basketball tournaments and had also signed a new partnership with the ACC to streamline its men’s basketball tournament operations.
The NCAA and Teamworks engaged in talks in 2015 before the association used the app for its men’s basketball tournament in 2016. As a result of last year’s success, the NCAA has expanded its use of the platform for championships for women’s basketball, men’s soccer and men’s and women’s outdoor track and field. The NCAA’s use of Teamworks was one of the factors that piqued the interest of the ACC, according to Paul Brazeau, Senior Associate Commissioner of Men’s Basketball Operations.
“I know some friends from some other conferences that are using it, and many in our membership have told me about it and expressed to me their likes,” Brazeau said. “That caused us, in essence, to begin to explore for ourselves the many uses it might have to streamline and make more efficient our processes.”
Concerning tournament-style play, co-founder and CEO Zach Maurides explained that each participating team registered for the tournament through Teamworks, filling out necessary paperwork on the app. Teams advancing through rounds received information about upcoming games and media interviews, allowing the teams to block out practice times. Teams that were eliminated received travel information.
“The conference is using this system as a way to communicate not only with their staff, but also the representatives — all the teams and their staff that are going to be participating in the tournament, as well as vendors and host staff, that are helping to operate the tournament,” Brazeau said.
“It’s designed that — we communicate with all the schools, so all the schools are part of it as the end user to communicate back with the conference office. They can’t necessarily…communicate with each other, but they can communicate back and forth with the conference office with tournament information.”
Brazeau stressed the ease of use and the efficiency Teamworks provide to the ACC, especially concerning forms that teams, staff members, and other workers must fill out.
“We end up collecting a lot of forms moving into the tournament — things that need to be submitted to us. Sometimes, it’s just a single change or two in each person’s form that can be done readily, speedily, electronically, and with ease of communication as a sort of back-and-forth where we are then not collecting paper and waiting on an email, fax, or whatever it might be.”
The conference plans to use Teamworks for upcoming championships, including baseball.
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FEATURES
The mobile app has a number of features with a detail that only those with experience in college athletics can provide. Teamworks also has a web app in case a user has access to a computer. Maurides walked through some of Teamworks’ core features.
In terms of communication, one can send messages to a particular person, groups based on team position, and a player’s contacts in case of emergency. The feature is customizable depending on the client. Messages can be sent via email or text message, or even as a voice message. Messages can even be scheduled in advance for situations like wake-up calls. Teamworks will show who listened to the voice message in full, and who opened and read the email or text. “You could have a group of 500, 1000, 2000 people that you interact with, and you can quickly slice-and-dice who you want to communicate with,” Maurides said.
Tournament scheduling involves not only the team schedule, but also the media schedule and a complete schedule for all the games in the tournament, among others. “Everyone that is participating in these tournaments is going to have individual calendars,” Maurides said. “They’ll also have the ability to access other calendars.”
Teamworks users have access to particular files and forms needed to operate smoothly. With forms, users can fill out anything from credential paperwork to, if working the event, an I-9 form, on the app. One can use a finger to fill out checkboxes and written responses, and even write a signature. Teamworks pulls the data for spreadsheets, and can save the documents as PDFs.
A new feature is used for emergencies, such as natural disasters or active shooters within the area. For a team, a coach can request a check-in for all athletes and staff. Checking in sends a GPS location back to the coach; the location can be sent to emergency crews in the event a person needs rescuing.
HISTORY
Teamworks is the brainchild of Maurides, a former offensive lineman at Duke who was tired of running stairs for missing team meetings. He experienced and learned how impossible it was for a group of people, from student-athletes and coaches to nutritionists, to spend time scheduling, and that the flow of information from a sports program to the athletic department was terrible.
“There were…at the time already, software systems that were built to address it,” Maurides said.
He mentioned that Duke had even invested in software to help organize its athletic department back then, but the software failed to serve its needs. “The reason was that (the software systems) are designed for a sedentary, professional workforce. It’s for people that are sitting at their desks in front of a computer terminal all day long. In the world of athletics, that couldn’t be further from reality.”
Through a computer science class project that tasked him to create a Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, Maurides set out to create a collaboration platform for a workforce that was constantly moving and changing. Though the company was created before smartphones like the iPhone was introduced, it has expanded from a web application with an SMS component to being used on mobile devices.
“Eighty-plus percent of our application today is the utilization of–it takes place on the mobile app, but there are still certain things – for example, planning team travel – that sitting down at a computer with a large form-factor is actually easier to do,” Maurides said.
Currently, the company serves over 1,000 clients, including more than 770 NCAA Division I teams, athletic departments and athletic conferences. The company also services professional teams in the NFL and MLB, the NFLPA and the Illinois school bus system.
“No matter if you are a coach, an administrator, somebody that is working in championships at the NCAA, a host site staff, a committee member, all those many different people have one central location that tells them what’s happening next, where they need to be,” Maurides said. “If you need to fill out a piece of paperwork, it’s on Teamworks. If you need a document, it’s on Teamworks. Everything that you need is right there.”