Situation Critical: Student-Athlete Information Management
Up until recently, many athletics administrators and coaches viewed technology as a means to get a leg up on the recruiting front or improve the monitoring of recruiting information such as telephone calls and text messages. Certainly, technology has helped a great deal in managing those areas of risk, but what about the nuts and bolts of your program – managing student-athlete information?
Most departments are critically deficient in maintaining, storing, transferring, entering, analyzing and sharing data in an efficient manner. Usually, one or two staffers are responsible for obtaining important student-athlete information from one system and then entering it into one or more other systems. Or worse, information is obtained from hard-copy forms and hand-entered into the necessary system. Sound familiar? This creates a large margin of error and increases an institution’s risk in areas such as admissions, eligibility certification, financial aid tracking, student-athlete complimentary admissions and even communicating quickly and effectively with student-athletes and parents.
ACS Athletics clients have improved staff performance in a number of areas through integration, monitoring, communication and mobilization. These solutions are offered at a fraction of the cost of adding just one entry-level staff member, yet benefit dozens of coaches and administrators across the department. Included below are some recent examples involving ACS clients and the ACS Team Manager solution:
Brown University
Partnered with ACS: 2010
Challenge Addressed: Centralizing Student-Athlete Information through Campus Integration
“At Brown, we have over 900 student-athletes, so keeping up with all of that information can be a huge challenge. ACS’s ability to integrate with our Banner system has made this task much more manageable due to the seamless transfer of student-athlete information from Banner into our ACS system. This has eliminated the burden and risk of manually entering student-athlete information into multiple systems. With ACS, I have a central location for all student-athlete information.” Sarah Fraser, Assistant Athletics Director
Texas Christian University
Partnered with ACS: 2006
Challenge Addressed: Student-Athlete Forms
“We now have the ability to identify and analyze information almost immediately, which previously took tons of time and energy. It has made the difference between simply collecting and storing information, and the ability to analyze and monitor student-athlete responses via the ACS Athletics reporting features.” -Andrea Nordmann, Associate Athletics Director
University of Louisiana
Partnered with ACS: 2009
Challenge Addressed: Student-Athlete Complimentary Admissions
“Monitoring (student-athlete) complimentary admissions lists has always been a challenge, simply as a result of the nature of the process. We now have a streamlined, online system, capable of being accessed 24 hours/day. The compliance office staff can spend more time monitoring the relationship of student-athletes to their guests and be more proactive in preventing potential violations after reviewing student-athletes’ answers to questions asked by (the) ACS (system) when requesting complimentary admissions. Reports can be generated in a matter of seconds indicating our monitoring efforts.” –Jessica Clarke, Associate Athletics Director
University of Houston
Partnered with ACS: 2006
Challenge Addressed: Roster Management
“The roster management tools ACS provides have been big help to our department. With ACS, everyone has the same roster and this sharing of information keeps everyone on the same page. With the roster auto-notification, everyone knows when a student-athlete’s status has changed in real-time, reducing the likelihood that a student-athlete will practice or compete while ineligible.” -Kevin Klotz, Assistant Athletic Director
ACS Athletics is now offering its proven, battle-tested Team Manager solution separate from the full InControl suite. If you would like to learn more about how this affordable solution might benefit your program, please contact us at sales@acsathletics.com.
Tags: ACS Athletics, Information Management, student-athlete