University of Akron Holistically Solves Athletics Department Process Challenges
With today’s college athletics departments having so many moving parts, administrators are continually challenged to manage basic processes and communications with coaches, student-athletes and other stakeholders. In the good ol’ days, the entire athletics department staff was usually housed in one facility and was composed of a few dozen employees. When issues arose, you walked down the hall and chatted over a cup of coffee. Each administrator wore several different “hats” and work life was much simpler.
Today, athletics departments are much larger, staff may be scattered in several facilities and the day-to-day processes are much more complex. The stakes are much higher, as well. Information must be immediately accessible so that good decisions can be made quickly. Coaches need marketing and branding assistance and predominately depend on email campaigns to keep up with literally thousands of prospective student-athletes. The expectation to monitor recruiting and student-athlete activities continues to grow stride-for-stride with the size of the NCAA rule book. The consequences of not meeting such expectations can cost institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars and damage reputations.
In response to these challenges, the University of Akron is taking a holistic approach to improving the day-to-day operations of the athletics department. This past summer, Akron partnered with ACS Athletics and implemented a department-wide technology solution to improve efficiency and communication in the areas of recruiting, compliance monitoring and student-athlete information management. Kevin Klotz, Akron’s Assistant Athletics Director for Compliance, indicated that during the last five years, facility expansion created physical barriers to performing at an optimal level. “We knew we needed a solution that would allow us to seamlessly move information from one office to another in a timely fashion. We believe we have found such a solution with ACS Athletics,” Klotz said.
In addition, Klotz indicated that his coaches were searching for a, “better way of doing things,” as it relates to completing required paperwork. “They (coaches) were spending too much time completing forms, which they knew needed to be done, but (the process) ended up being repetitive because they were transcribing (recruiting information) from their own files to our forms,” Klotz said. From a coach perspective, Klotz indicated that some of the key features of the ACS InControl system include the ability to have the entire recruiting database at their fingertips, the automatic logging of phone calls, not having to sit down at the end of each month and fill out extra forms and the proactive notification of a potential violation when making recruiting telephone calls.
One of the first ways in which Akron realized the benefits of ACS InControl was to use the system to administer student-athlete participation forms. The compliance office sent email notifications to current student-athletes and incoming freshmen with instructions to log into a secure ACS Athletics student-athlete Web portal and complete the required forms. Over 6400 forms were submitted online, which saved the athletics department significant time and the cost of using paper. Further, in the event issues are identified via the information submitted on any of the forms, the appropriate institutional administrators can begin to resolve such issues prior to the student-athlete arriving on campus for the beginning of the term. Faster completion of these forms allows beginning-of-the-year student-athlete meetings to be more educationally focused and interactive.
The InControl system has also greatly improved compliance functions. Klotz noted that benefits were realized almost immediately. “We’re already spending much less time having to review every phone call, contact and evaluation,” Klotz said. “We also have the ability to mark the prospect’s signing date within ACS, which automatically adjusts the recruiting rules to the prospect’s new status as a signee. When a coach calls a prospect after they have already signed, my office doesn’t have to go back anymore and try to remember whether or not it is permissible to call this prospect more than once a week. You have no idea how much time we have already saved, which allows us to spend that time doing other things which will benefit our coaches.” Klotz also noted the benefits of using the recruiting rules engine to evaluate 100% of all Bylaw 13 recruiting activities, as opposed to only spot-checking. “We spend less time monitoring those activities because the system automatically approves activities that clearly fall within the rules. When we have to follow-up on an issue, it’s a focused follow-up.”
In addition to improving the recruiting and compliance processes, Akron has also improved efficiencies in student-athlete roster and records management by providing coaches and other stakeholders online access to critical roster information. “ACS allows us to produce an easy to read active roster in a matter of minutes which has greatly increased our ability to keep people informed of who is and is not on our teams – particularly at the beginning of the semesters when a lot of students are being added and deleted from the rosters,” Klotz said. Klotz also praised the system’s ability to track student-athlete complimentary admissions and cross-check student-athlete countable athletically-related activity logs. ACS InControl allows coaches to input student-athlete hourly participation logs for online submission to the compliance office staff, which then requests verification directly from student-athletes using the secure online portal. This eliminates the need for coaches to track down student-athletes to obtain verification signatures and allows student-athletes to submit confidential comments to the compliance office.
To further expand their holistic approach to software automation, The University of Akron is in the process of adding the ACS Athletics equipment inventory tracking software module. This integrated component will connect equipment operations with the official rosters while giving them the tools to track all issued, on-hand, and ordered inventory down to the penny.
When asked whether there were any challenges associated with convincing the athletics department staff to adopt a holistic, technological approach, Klotz indicated that once the administration had the opportunity to see the value in implementing the ACS InControl system, it paved the way to earn support from decision-makers outside of the athletics department, specifically, Information Technology. “We arranged for the Vice-President for Information Technology and his staff to observe a webinar with ACS Athletics. They came away very impressed with ACS Athletics and further pledged their support of the system and implementation.”