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 »

League Software

May 17th, 2010

League software;  just exactly does that mean?

If you are a bowling league, baseball league, softball league, basketball league etc. does that mean it’s for you?

According to www.dictionary.com a league is…

league

1 [leeg]  Show IPA noun, verb,leagued,lea·guing.

–noun

1.

a covenant or compact made between persons, parties, states, etc., for the promotion or maintenance of common interests or for mutual assistance or service.
2.

the aggregation of persons, parties, states, etc., associated in such a covenant or compact; confederacy.
3.

an association of individuals having a common goal.
4.

a group of athletic teams organized to promote mutual interests and to compete chiefly among themselves: a bowling league.
5.

6.

group; class; category: As a pianist he just simply isn’t in your league.
–verb (used with object), verb (used without object)

7.

to unite in a league; combine.

—Idiom

8.

in league, working together, often secretly or for a harmful purpose; united.

So, of course,  league software must be designed to support a league.

Depending on how they define it there are probably at least 40 different companies that suggest that they provide “league software”. All have nice web sites and some have enticing offers with a few even suggesting that their software is FREE.

If your time has come and its either time for you to move from manual management of your league to online league software or you are already on a league software and you need to move to another to meet the needs of your league then you know that you have a huge job ahead of you. That is unless you get a little help.

Bonzi has something called the Bonzi Challenge. This is a challenge that says that Bonzi is so confident in what we offer that if you can find a better supported league software package, a lower cost league software package, easier to use and more powerful league software, a league software that requires no contracts, and a league software that puts your money in your bank account every time you receive a registration then Bonzi will give you use of their league software FREE, no strings attached, for one full year. You can check out the Bonzi Challenge HERE: http://www.bonzicentral.com/bonzichallenge

The Bonzi Challenge helps you sort out the market for league software by showing you most of the players in the market and it gives you all the questions our customers have told us are the most important to ask when making that all important league software choice. There is even a calculator to help you figure out what the real and total cost of one league software option vs. another might be.

We believe that after you take the Bonzi Challenge that you will know two things for sure; 1) what league software should be and 2) what questions to ask to make the best choice for you and your league.

If you’ve used the Bonzi Challenge tools, what did you think?

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Posted in Cost of Free, Costs, How to Choose, Parents Win, Scheduling | 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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Posted in Acknowlegement, Coaching, Communication, Developing Kids, Motivation, Parents Win | No Comments »

Three types of complaints; recognize them to stay sane

May 4th, 2010

If you are a leader of any kind in sport clubs, leagues, or teams you likely run into complaints aplenty.

That these complaints happen at all is enough to put you on the “Tums of the month club” auto shipping programs. Wouldn’t it help if you had a way to quickly discern which complaints you needed to pay attention to and which you didn’t?

Our observation is that all complaints fall into one of three categories:

  1. Recreational complaints – some people grew up in a world that used complaining as a means of bonding with others or just having fun – these usually don’t mean a thing and require no action.
  2. Expressive complaints – read that “letting off steam”. There is a variance between the person’s values and what is happening but not so much that they are willing to take any action. While these don’t require action they are a source of insight into what those in your organization value and where you might want to consider making changes or improving your communication.
  3. Complaints for action – here there is enough variance between the person’s values and what is happening that they are likely to either leave the group or press you, in time, sufficient to drive change.

In our experience most complaints fall into category #1 and #2 and are just part of the unique culture of your group or organization. The magic is noticing #3 before it is too late. This is harder than it looks in our experience. One way to test is to simply ask:

  • What action do they want to have happen
  • What action are they willing to take

If they can’t be specific about what they want to have happen or they are not willing to take any action (sometimes requiring your help) then it may not be a category #3 complaint and just being heard is enough to put the issue to bed.

Discerning between these categories is critical to a company like Bonzi sports software where the core of our brand promise to our customers and prospects is customer service aka resolution of complaints, concerns and issues as well as helping our customers have an easy and smooth experience setting up and using sports software.

Often one of our deeply experienced customer support people will have to sort through several issues in one call and at least one or more issues will fall into each of the three categories above. Our experience is that many of our competitors actually want to invalidate their customers concerns or otherwise tell them that they are wrong or don’t know what they’re talking about. At Bonzi sports software our customer support people are tasked with just one primary rule of the road; help our customers and prospects be successful and make it a friendly, happy, smooth experience where the customer doesn’t have to wait to get what they want.

What have your experiences been with complaints of parents, kids, or other leaders; do these three categories line up with what you’ve observed or have you noticed other variation we might have missed?

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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 »

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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Are you Using Single Sport Software?

April 15th, 2010

What’s the difference between using a sports software dedicated to a single sport vs. a sports software that can be used for any sport?

Years ago I read a story in one of the big car magazine’s that had a headline that went along the lines of “Toyota vs. Ferrari; Toyota Wins”. The article essentially said, as I recall, that Toyota had a sports car out that would deliver 90% of the performance of the Ferrari in some fashion at about 10% of the price of the Ferrari. Once you threw in the out-of-sight cost of maintenance the imbalance was even worse.

The crux of the matter was that Toyota would manufacture in one year more cars that Ferrari would manufacture in their entire history. The implication was that the Toyota engineering would be put to far more stringent tests of BOTH performance and reliability because of this planned volume. As I recall the author of the story suggested that most drivers would enjoy either car’s performance about the same; you just wouldn’t have the bill and you wouldn’t have the prestige depending on your choice.

I would suggest that single sport software would be like the Ferrari and multi-sport software like the Toyota but that wouldn’t be fair in this case. In my view Single sport software really carries the prestige of a Yugo as well as the performance of a fairly average car. You see, multi-sport software is held to  far higher standard because of the very high number of users and the rigorous design cycles. What this means to a user is that they are likely to encounter far easier to use software and far better support from a multi-sport software than a single sport software.

Another aspect is that each sport has something to add and unique rigors. This blend drives innovation and innovation gives you better, easier to use, and better performing software.

The best part is, when that multi-sport software is Bonzi, you do even better because Bonzi is the ONLY provider to offer:

1.         Friendly, free and unlimited support – even one-on-one training

2.         Lowest overall cost and the most features

3.         Easiest to use and most powerful software available

4.         No contracts required and no hidden costs or surprises

5.         Your money goes directly into your bank account everyday

Maybe all of the above is why Bonzi has not lost a sports software client since they opened their doors over 10 years ago.

What are your thoughts on the merits of single vs. multi-sport software?

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