Where to point the finger for performance on or off the field

June 8th, 2010

Blame just feels right in so many cases. The big question is does it get us anywhere in reality? I suggest it doesn’t usually move anyone towards the things they want on or off the field in sports.

Let’s take little league from the perspective of the coach for example. If the team loses more often than the coach thinks they should given what he or she knows of the teams average skill level who or what is to blame? Blame the kids for (fill in the blank) until the cows come home and what will really change; nothing in my experience. By contrast if the coach looks in the mirror and realizes that the practice sessions have not done enough to condition the kids and balls keep getting dropped then conditioning and drills may be in order.

So you say Duh… everyone knows that in little league sports! So if thats true… why so much noisy complaint and yelling at the kids?

The experts out there tell us that we complain anytime there is a gap between what we want and what we are getting. More specifically when we complain we usually do so in one or more of the following three ways:

  1. Complaints for recreation – it’s a social lubricant and a way of aligning on values
  2. Expressive complaints – we just have to get it off our chest but don’t want or expect that anything will be done about it
  3. Complaints for action – we want and expect that something will happen and happen soon

Discerning which complaint you are making is tough and figuring out what other people are doing seems almost impossible much of the time.

In my experience the key is to simply ask; what are the possibilities that you think we should consider looking at to address this concern? That statement usually pulls out which of the three types of complaints are occurring and what you might need to do about it. I go so far as to ask myself the question so I can get clarity… if I really think these kids can do better in their little league baseball game then what action(s) would most likely yield the needed results in the relevant time-frame?

Once I know that then I know it is up to me to take the action or shut up and put up…unless I am just complaining for recreation or to blow off steam… and even then I need to make sure that my complaining isn’t doing harm to those around me who can’t figure out what my intent is with all my noise.

Does this line up with your experience?

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What people want from their sports software providers

June 7th, 2010

Knowing or discovering what your market wants and then providing it is an obvious key to business and life success. But, like so many things in life, it’s far easier said than done. At Bonzi we know you want the following basics from a sports software provider because our clients tell us or otherwise confirm these things every hour of every day:

  • Friendly, unlimited, free support… even one-on-one training from people you know, like and trust to have your best interests at heart.
  • Lowest overall cost
  • Easy to use but with all the features and functions you need to do it your way
  • Your money in your bank account within 24 hours of a transaction
  • No surprises, no hidden costs and no contracts
  • The best registration, website, scheduling and email communications software available that will run with almost any browser
  • Speed; all of the above needs to happen fast no mater how many other people might be online

While those are all great things we’ve also realized that there are a few other elements that are also critical but at times hard to pin down:

  1. Reliable; we do what we say we will do when we say we’ll do it
  2. Good relationships; you treat me like a person, are appropriately warm and friendly and are willing to speak frankly when things need to be addressed
  3. Well run business; Bonzi sports software runs a tight ship business wise so that you can count on us being both efficient and around for the long haul
  4. Fit; you understand and give me what I need and beyond to run my club, league or organization
  5. Listen; we ask questions and don’t assume – we get to know you and your situation by asking good questions and listening well to the answer
  6. Research and innovation; you know best practices in sports software and are constantly working to keep the gap narrow
  7. Caution; we’ve done our homework so that our suggestions and direction are valid and reliable
  8. Available; you can reach us when you need us and we’ll respond
  9. Education; you’ll help us understand how things work and give us the tips that come from over a decade of working with organizations and the sports software that supports them
  10. Alignment; we have the features and functions you need to do your business – if we don’t have what you need we won’t hesitate to tell you so you can find a better alternative – we won’t waste your time if we aren’t aligned
  11. Deadline oriented; let’s face it, play starts on a certain date, standings must be posted by a certain date and your email has to get delivered so your plans stay on track – at Bonzi sports software your deadlines are our deadlines

All these may seem like subtle distinctions in a sports software provider… but they are distinctions that our customers tell us make all the difference in the world to their lives using sports software.

What do you think?  Did we miss anything?

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Costs, How to Choose, Parents Win, Volunteers, Wins for Parents | No Comments »

Sports team software tools is key to coaching success

May 25th, 2010

Coaches and volunteer and obviously critical to your programs success; that’s why it is so frustrating when it’s hard to get them to raise their hands and volunteer. Who can blame them for hesitating given how much work is really involved.

With the right sports team software you can make their job easier.  Coaches and volunteers need to communicate with their team, print off medical release forms, setup a team web site, send group emails and more without being a software guru or web wizard. Above all they need a sports team software that can be learned quickly so that they can be effective from day one.

TRUE STORY

Rich sets up up Bonzi’s sports software’s Coach Tools for every coach in her club with a single click of the mouse.   Once set-up, coaches are automatically emailed a thank you letter thanking them for volunteering along with instructions for Coach Tools.  When a coach logs onto their software, they have the ability to setup a team web site, post stories, announcements and pictures with simplicity and ease.  Coaches can enter in their practice schedule, snack schedule and game schedule which all appear on the team calendar.  Group email to the entire team is included and well as text messaging, a hot new feature in 2009.  Her coaches, players, and parents have a place to go to find out the latest information about their team.  An added bonus – Darlene can publish her own announcements or calendar events from the club on any of her team’s web sites.  Communication is easy and everyone’s happy.

Currently there are no other sports team software providers that include these types of features with their software.  Sometimes you can purchase it separately, but it’s not “linked” to the club or league’s “system” making for disjointed sports team software..

Bonzi is the only provider to include the Coach Tools feature in its sports team software at no extra charge.  If offering software for your coaches and teams is important to you, make sure to call us for more information today! With the right sports team software you won’t have nearly as much difficulty getting coaches and volunteers to raise those hands with a smile on their faces.

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Posted in Coaching, How to Choose, Parents Win, Volunteers | No Comments »

Background check issue with free league software

May 20th, 2010

One task that’s always annoying but usually not covered with free league software is risk management or background checks.  Usually there’s a many applications and little time.  You probably worry that if they’re not quickly, you might miss a problem coach. It’s a difficult process to manage and track and just takes up more volunteer time. Despite all that, we all know it must be done and done right. What to do?

Most sports leagues, clubs or organizations want a software product that can support tracking of background checks or maybe even automate submission of a background check applications for an affordable fee. Free league software doesn’t do that as far as we can see.

TRUE STORY

Kay manually processed all of her background check applications for her organization on paper sending them a few at a time to her background check company for clearance.  She didn’t have a way to communicate or record who was “cleared” and who was “not cleared”, so no one really knew what the status was of the background check.  Bonzi helped Kay to setup a simple but effective background check management system so she could track the new applications that were submitted online, mark the volunteers cleared when their background checks were completed, and track expiration dates of those that needed a new background check application.  Bonzi is now working with Kay to setup her up with automatic background check processing significantly reducing her work load while keeping her system up-to-date with the latest clearances.  Everyone’s happy because the background checks are done fast and board members feel confident potential problems will be caught quickly.

Make sure to ask any provider how they handle background check tracking and if they support online background check applications.  Bonzi can do this; can your free league software or other alternatives?

If you’re having trouble managing background checks and want to solve that problem for your organization, give Bonzi a call.  We can help.

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Posted in Coaching, Cost of Free, How to Choose, Parents Win, Uncategorized | No Comments »

A Key Question in Coaching

May 12th, 2010

I have a dear friend who hit the workplace lottery big and got to retire early; lucky guy (actually he had great ideas, worked very hard at something he loved and had a bit of luck too).

He took the passion that made him a successful business person to being a volunteer coach. By all accounts he was overall a very good coach with one exception; he yelled to the point of almost berating the kids. While that level of passion might have been OK in the corporate world (even there I have my doubts) it seemed to me to really take the shine off of his otherwise superb coaching contribution.

In sports and in life I’ve discovered powerful question that I usually reserve for my own behavior but occasionally have the guts to trot out when I hear a coach going beyond the pale with kids… or even other adults. That question is “What were you trying to accomplish with what you said” followed by “If it was to motivate and inspire you might want to consider taking another tact”.

Soccer, baseball, football, lacrosse, swimming and any other sport you can name seems to get there share of parents and coaches that somehow think that yelling derogatory and at times obscene things at kids has a prayer of accomplishing some positive result. Yes, you might get a change in behavior but often at huge cost… a cost that to me if rarely worth it.

Being passionate and giving instruction is yelled is not what I’m talking about. Done right that often does inspire a kid and helps them be there best. The positive expectation that is shown with that kind of behavior has been shown to create an emotional safety zone for kids AND pushes them to more fully realize there potential.

At Bonzi sports software we have an amazing customer support staff and we are deeply grateful for it. They treat each person who calls with respect, grace and infinite patience. There folks have to simultaneously seem as though they have nothing else in the world to do other than help a volunteer who has never used anything more complicated than a typewriter 40 years ago in college get a sports registration system and a team website up and running to the satisfaction of some fairly sophisticated kids, parents and fellow volunteers… while getting the support delivered quickly enough to serve numerous clients each day.

These people on the Bonzi sports software staff are dedicated and show each day, I’m convinced, to do there level best. By the same token, I believe, that kids show up on the field each day to do there level best… given there overall circumstances. I cannot imagine anyone in there right mind yelling derogatory comments at the Bonzi sports software staff and expecting that it would improve their performance any more than I can imagine yelling at another person, adult or kid, in a derogatory fashion and expecting a positive result.

The key is to know that, from my perspective, everybody gets out of bed in the morning with serious intent to do their best given their circumstances. Those circumstances can be lots of negative self-talk about their ability to perform, a hurting knee, having had a big fight with a parent, or any other of ten million possible things that could take a person off track from delivering their best performance.

I’ll always be grateful to those coaches who had ultra high positive expectations for me when I played sports and would never accept my excuses for doing anything but my best. The fact that it was delivered in a positive almost demanding fashion did not demean me but rather showed me that they could see what I could become and had faith that together we could get there.

If you find your passion taking you to the dark side a bit for whatever reason consider giving that passion a twist towards positive expectation instead. After all, if you yelled at your co-workers I doubt that you would expect there performance to increase would you? The key question for me is “What was I trying to accomplish with what I said” . If what is said in any way belittles a person you might want to consider a different tact.

What has your experience been getting kids or adults to go beyond what they thought possible on the field?

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Committed to outcomes – Amazing Video

May 10th, 2010

Outcomes vs. activities; where the rubber meets the road.

Somewhere along the road of life it dawns on most of us that we have a choice; be committed to the activity or to the outcome.  I believe that most of us are actually very committed to outcomes vs. mindless activity. I suspect the trouble comes when, assuming we are both committed to the same outcome,  my version of how best to get to an outcome differs substantially from your version. It’s often at that point that otherwise nice and well meaning folks suggest that the other person is just “checking the box” aka doing the activity and not committed to achieving the result.

Trouble can also show up when we are committed to different results than those around us but assumed that we all had the same goal in mind i.e. the first grade soccer dad who wants to win vs. the dad who just wants his child to have fun. Both are perfectly fine outcomes but yet very different.

The trouble comes when we assume we know what outcomes those around us are committed to. Often, in my experience, I’ve found that when I asked “how would you describe a perfect season”, that I suddenly get my first real glimpse of what the other person wanted. Sometimes what I find is that the other person only has a vague notion of what they think a great season would look like. I’ts pretty hard to get aligned with vague goals, values and wins.

Just imagine a team with kids and parent who have a wide variety of ideas of what a “great season” looks like; seems to me that it could be a recipe for conflict that didn’t have to take place.

At Bonzi sports software (www.bonzicentral.com) we work everyday to be as fully aligned as possible with our customers idea of “great sports software” looks like. While our foundation brand promise is:

Bonzi sports software hasn’t lost a customer in over ten years because of…

  1. Friendly, free and unlimited support, even one-on-one training
  2. Lowest overall cost but with the most features
  3. Easiest to use but still the most powerful (according to our customers) sports software on the market
  4. No hidden costs and no surprises
  5. Your money put into your bank account every day.

While this is a good starting point and we are fairly certain it is aligned with the values of our customers and target market… it isn’t nearly enough. We really have to be lined up with what our customers want in great detail today and listening so we know what they’ll want and need in the future. Our customers will only stay our customers if we deliver the outcomes that they have come to count on us for.

Once on the field the desired outcome is of course to score or to help our team mates score. Again, we are often better off if everyone is clear on what each person involved is seeking in terms of outcomes i.e. my 11 year old son is mostly interested in skill improvement while his best friend on the team could care less about skill and just want to score. Even this little mis-alignment produces the occasional hard feelings.

So the lesson is simple; get clear on what everybody wants and see if you can put together a plan for everyone to get what they want. Without this everyone is liable to assume and when the inevitable disappointment arrives hard feelings can’t be too far behind.

Who can drive this outcome alignment effort? While a coach is perfectly positioned almost anyone can step up to the job just by asking the question: “What does a successful season look like to each of you”?

Some outcomes, let’s face it, are just a bit more spectacular than others. In the following link you’ll see a college lacrosse player who is an advocate of Bonzi sports software named Conner Martin make a goal with just 2 seconds left in a situation that seems hopeless. Hopeless, evidently, to everyone but Conner and his team at Chapman University. Conner makes that goal and does it so fast that if you are at all like me you’ll have to rewind just to see it happen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o9jxyoqbvQ

Sadly Chapman lost in overtime but there is no doubt that Chapman and Conner came to play that day.

I’d love to hear your observations on clarity and alignment on outcomes in youth or adult sports.

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Decisions; getting clear or taking a stand…

May 4th, 2010

Running a sports team, league or club… be it youth, adult or both requires making many decisions and then living with the consequences. You will never be right 100% of the time and when you are perceived to be “wrong” you will usually hear about it. Never mind that you are often either a volunteer or if paid getting the equivalent of minimum wage in 1962 if you count all the hours you really work.

We do it for the kids or the folks who used to be kids and that joy usually makes it all worthwhile.

Still, like the old skit on I Love Lucy where Lucy is at the chocolate factory (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wp3m1vg06Q) and the chocolates come faster than she can wrap them… the decisions required to run or lead a sports team, league or club often seem to come faster than we feel we can decide with confidence.

What we’ve found is something remarkably simple. And after a bit of homework it appears that the “experts” more or less seem to agree that many and maybe most decision making strategies get down to a choice between two approaches for deciding: we either get more information and then make a decision or we decide that we have all we need (or are likely to get reasonably) and we just take the plunge and make the decision knowing that we’ll never know enough but decide we must.

At Bonzi we “enjoy” a special challenge in that we are growing at a rapid rate and simultaneously are deeply committed to maintaining and even improving our customer satisfaction. So far, according to our customers, we are making the right choices to both maintain our reputation for the best customer service and easiest to use software in the industry (we haven’t lost a customer since we opened our doors over ten years ago) and being able to grow. To do this involves making the decision, seemingly every hour of the day, to either get more information or just decide and let the chips fall where they may. Like Lucy, at times, it feels like not only is there no end to the decisions but that the volume speeds up.

All that brings up the challenge of passing on the authority to others to make decisions in our place; after all, if you can’t do that you almost certainly can’t grow. Naturally you must hire or attract the best folks available. But once you’ve done that consider passing on the thought about wisely choosing between when it makes the most sense to get more information or just take a deep breath and choose.

In the end it seems to be the pattern that counts; you are never going to go long without a mistake. If you are using your head and doing the best homework you can when time allows we all hope that our decisions will be reasonable more often than not. If we largely are making good decisions we all hope that we’ll be forgiven for our mistakes whether we got all the information we needed or just took that deep breath and make a choice.

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Practice, practice, practice…

April 28th, 2010

You know the old joke… “how do you get to Carnegie Hall”?  with the punch line being… “Practice, practice, practice”.

Much of the performance literature that I have read over the last few years has said that its actually specific practice and not just practice, practice, practice. Alternatively, as the old Dale Carnegie saying goes, practice doesn’t make perfect but rather perfect practice makes perfect.

Kids who do what is now called “deliberate practice” of a specific skill over and over again until and beyond such time as their brains are hard wired and their muscles have permanent muscle memory; these are the kids who are often seen as overnight successes.

My 11 year old refuses to practice basketball. The neighbor kid never seems to not be in front of his house shooting shots. At the start of this year both kids were about the same in all regards on the court. No surprise, by the end of the year the neighbor kid was really having great results and my son was just a bit better than when he started.

We see practice show up in a funny way in sports software believe it or not. Here is the deal; with enough practice almost anybody can get good enough to tolerate almost anything. In fact they can get so good and so tolerant that they are just used to using lousy software. Practice, practice, practice.

The trouble comes in when that administrator or volunteer moves on and a new person without the dogged dedication has to learn to use the system fast. This is one of the events that has people calling Bonzi. The funny thing is that while everything benefits from lots of practice you don’t need much practice nor skill to look like a pro on Bonzi almost from the start.

So is all that just marketing hype? One little fact tells the story; Bonzi is the only major sports software provider that doesn’t require a contract. We’re confident that you’ll be happy with Bonzi month one and beyond without having to invest practice, practice, practice. This is so true that none of our customers have left Bonzi since we opened our doors over 10 years ago.

Our suggestion is that you consider leaving the practice, practice, practice to the kids and give Bonzi a try so you can get the job done and get on with watching those wonderful kids practice.

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Posted in Coaching, Motivation | 1 Comment »

Coach; Do You Know How The Kids See You?

April 26th, 2010

Most of us are fairly blind to how others see us. I’ve always thought that, to a degree, that was a good thing. I’d probably go crazy if I really knew at all times how others saw me and felt about me.

There is some value, in my experience, to seeing how I appear or am regarded by others; it helps me to have a choice about how I behave.

I have never met a coach or a player… or anyone else for that matter who got out of bed in the morning and said anything but “I’m going to do the best I can given everything that is happening for me today”. My take is that the vast majority of the world really has good intent and in particular the saints we call coaches in youth sports or even adult sports.

Here is the rub; from my observation, like it or not, most people get their ideas about us not so much based upon their direct personal experience with us but by what others say about us. Almost seems unfair. But how could it be otherwise? We count on reports from others to know as much as possible in advance about those we encounter in life.

The implication then is that first it might be helpful to know how we are seen and second to see how we might choose to change our actions and behavior if we don’t like how others see us.

Our ability to coach and the success of that coaching often pivots to a significant degree on how our players and their parents regard us. Maybe the most important conversation that impacts the performance of our players and the team is a conversation that we’ll never get to hear. I say that because, in my experience, that conversation occurs far away from the field of play at home when the kids and parents talk about the game or the training.

The keys then to improvement are to find a way to understand more clearly how you are regarded and if you don’t like what you discover try changing behavior or actions including how you say things until how you see yourself and how others see you get a bit more aligned. My take is that when that happens you team will move closer to performing up to their potential.

Love to know your thoughts on this and if you see this play out in your world.

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A Key To Easy Coach Communication

April 22nd, 2010
Most coaches have absolutely the best intent when it comes to team communication.

The challenge is even the best intent means little if time is short and the proper tools aren’t available to quickly get all the necessary communications out.

Here is how you might describe the perfect scenario:

After teams are rostered (players and coaches are assigned to the team), the team is activated on the web site.  Instantly Emails are automatically generated to the parents telling them their team roster has been finalized, coaches have been assigned, and they can log onto the member account and view the team web site.  The coach has already posted all of the necessary information on the site. Parents, kids and coach now all have one place to get all the necessary information 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

All of the above only occurs in one sports software package on the market today as a part of the standard software.
Sometimes you can purchase it separately, but it’s  not “linked” to the club or league’s “system” making for a disjointed and cumbersome system – not what you want if easy and effective communications are your goal.

Bonzi sports software is the only provider that offers the team web sites function included with its sports management software.

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