ATHLETE DEVELOPMENT TRACKING SYSTEM (ADTS) FRAMEWORK

It's been possible to capture athlete evaluation data electronically since the  1980’s. But because it was expensive, the most common medium for capturing data was paper.  

If data wasn't captured on a computer, the entry process, extraction of that data and most importantly, the limited capacity and high costs of data storage made it infeasible.  Fast forward to today, and each one of those limitations has been alleviated or eliminated altogether.  

Today, entry and extraction of data can be automated through software and storage capacity is almost limitless.  Consider the diagram below to get a perspective on the evolution of digital storage costs over the years.

Because digital data storage costs were exorbitant, it made sense to capture athlete evaluation data on paper.  In the world of sports, this meant tracking athlete progress and participant on a piece of paper and storing those results tucked away in a filing cabinet.  We can consider this process an early iteration of an Athlete Developing Tracking System (ADTS).

There are a few obstacles to entering and collecting athlete evaluation data.  If you grew up in an era where paper has been replaced by online tools, the idea of using paper may seem outdated but it did serve a purpose at a time where it might have been the most feasible option.  However, today there are very few reasons to use paper as your source of data collection versus an online system.  

Here a just a few reasons:

• Paper gets lost and therefore, an athlete's progress is lost
• Accessing files in a filing cabinet is not an efficient way to recall information
• It takes a lot of resources to gather any meaningful data especially the greater the number of athletes or participants that are being tracked
• In order to gather meaningful insights, you have to sort through records and parse the data.  An example of this is would be sorting through paper records to extract how many swimmers are able to effectively execute the breaststroke

Looking at the graph in the introductory paragraph of this page, we can see that the cost per gigabyte of storage in a span of 20 years has decreased 19,000 times.  It’s a staggering evolution.  Because storage of data now is cheap and almost limitless, there is a very good argument to be made for taking all athlete development tracking online.  This is where the benefits of an online Athlete Development Tracking System (ADTS) are most prominent.

"An Athlete Development Tracking System (ADTS) is an online system which allows you to measure the effectiveness of your athlete development programs by managing the process of creating, deploying, measuring and adjusting your programs for long term success."

The system can be described with the following diagram;

Create

This is the building block of an ADTS.  How you format your athlete development programs is very important because it will determine the metrics that you’ll be able to pull in the Measure component of the ADTS.  

Deploy

This component requires taking the programs that you’ve designed in the Create stage and putting them in the hands of your training facilities and their coaches/instructors.  

Creating an athlete development programs is no small feat.  It requires resources in the form of expertise in your sport and these resources can range from experts to volunteers who have knowledge in your discipline.  Canada is a leader in the Long Term Athlete Development methodology and is proof that developing the right program takes years of work, resources and fine tuning.

Different approaches need to be taken depending on the level of athletes that your programs are targeting.  For example, recreational athlete development programs should be approached with participation as the main objective.  High performance programs may require a more quantitative measure of skill development and factor in the quality of a skill with a quantifiable 1-10 scale versus a “tried it” or “did it” approach.

Although it is a big undertaking, it also shouldn’t be over analyzed.  The lean methodology in the tech industry teaches us that we tend to over analyze how we should design our products and and we overlook the importance of putting it in the hands of the users.  It’s more effective to give your users an early pilot version of your product and allow your users to dictate what parts of the product are working and which aren’t.  You want to spend just enough of your resources to have a working model but don’t overdo it because you may end up making more changes than you anticipated.  Stay lean!  This process in the tech industry is referred to as a Minimal Viable Product.  The same methodology can be applied to an athlete development program.  We call this a Minimal Viable Athlete Development Program (MVADP).

The Create component of the system is also the component where you need to determine the objectives of your programs and key performance indicators.  Your objectives should be focused and limited to no more than three.  Ideally, just one.  

Once you have your Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), you’ll be able to determine which skills need to be tracked and how those skills will be measured on a skills checklist.  As an example, will they be quantified in a 1-10 scale or a simple “completed”.  

Measure

You’ll want to distribute the skills checklists that you’ve created to your training centers or directly to your coaches.  A spreadsheet such as the ones that you can download in the paragraph above are satisfactory however, the distribution is most effective with an online system designed for this purpose. 

An online system can be especially effective if you’re deploying your programs to multiple training centers.  

Keep in mind that your aim is to get your programs in the hands of the people who will be using them.  Feedback from the training centers', coaches and the athletes is important in how your will adjust your programs to constantly improve them.

The measure component will look at the objectives you established and look for validation as to whether your programs are meeting your objectives.  You’ll validate this by looking at your key performance indicators.  This is where the effectiveness of the skills checklist you created in the Create stage will become evident.

In this stage, you’ll need to ask questions such as:

• Are program objectives being met?
• Are KPI’s providing the right insights to meet objectives?
• Have the objectives changed?

Adjust

Based on the answers to your questions in the Measure component, in the Adjust stage you’ll determine whether adjustments need to be made and to what degree.

When you extract the data which could be from something as simple as a spreadsheet, if your results are missing the depth of data that you were expecting, this may be the time to revisit your objectives and KPI’s.  An effective ADTS, should allow you to do this with ease via export or infographic form.

As a large sport organization, the task of managing this entire process can be fairly extensive.  Let’s look at diagram of what the Deploy stage looks like.  You can see that depending on the number of training centers, coaches per training center and athletes per coach, the chain can be quite large with a lot of data being fed throughout.

The deploy stage of the ADTS is where the both your Organization and your training centers bear responsibilities.

The responsibilities can be described in the diagram below;

In the Deploy stage of the ADTS, the flow of information is outgoing in that the information is made available from your organization to the training center, from the training centers to the coaches, and from the coaches to your athletes or program participants.  

In the Measure stage of the ADTS, information is incoming from your program participants, to coaches, to the training center and ultimately, to your organization.

The loop is described in the diagram below;

If we look at distributing your programs in the Deploy stage, in its simplest form it can be accomplished with paper skill checklists but we’ll go a step further and look at an example using spreadsheets.   Using spreadsheet skill checklists, you will first:

1. Build a program skill checklist using a spreadsheet
2. Have your training center’s license your programs under program terms which you've defined
3. Ask your training centers to provide their coaches with the spreadsheets they’ve licensed

In the Measure stage, the Training Center and their coaches will be responsible for:

1. Entering the participants evaluation on the spreadsheets
   
2. Store the evaluation spreadsheet and provide it to the Training Center administrator
   
3. Training centers then submit each one of the spreadsheet checklists to your Organization.  
   

As an organization licensing out your programs to your training centers, you will have to collect the spreadsheets submitted by your training centers.

To effectively measure the success of your programs, a representative of your organization will have to sort through the worksheets and tabulate the results in order to have any meaningful insight on the effectiveness of your programs.

As an example, if you have 20 training centers, 10 coaches per training center and 10 participants per coach, that yields 2000 paper checklists to sort through.

An efficient ADTS, should narrow the efforts in the Deploy and Measure Feedback Loop.  In the Deploy stage, majority of your Organization’s efforts should be in creating your programs.  Once your programs are created, the process which follows should ideally be automated.  Creating your programs is required and the effort in doing so is unavoidable.  There is however an efficient way to deploy your programs through a centralized system designed to manage the process versus a manual process of distributing paper or spreadsheets.

In the Measure stage, an effective ADTS should provide instantaneous feedback to your Organization.  Once an evaluation is entered by the coach, that information should immediately be made available to your organization.

Let’s take a look at a diagram showing an inefficient deploy and measure feedback loop.

Here is a diagram showing an efficient deploy and measure feedback loop.

This may seem like a small difference but the latency in receiving feedback from the participant to the program licensing organization can be significant especially as the partipation numbers increase.

In an inefficient measure and feedback loop, lag time in receiving information at the top of the chain and the risk in losing information as it makes its way up increases.

Looking at the diagrams above, you can see that an inefficient deploy and measure feedback loop has greater potential for loss of evaluation data and lag in how quickly that data is received. 

If this entire process is replaced with a system where once a skill is evaluated by a coach, it instantaneously makes it’s way up the chain, efficiency is significantly improved because there is no lag in the information travelling up the chain.

From the time that the coach evaluates a participant to the time that the coach enters the evaluation online, that individual skill evaluation travels up the chain without lag.

An organization running programs internally with 1 or just a hand full of coaches can benefit from an ADTS.  The size of the organization doesn’t determine the effectiveness of the ADTS.  If the organization is committed to improving programs for their athletes and participants, an ADTS aids in attaining that goal.

An ADTS has an increased benefits to larger organizations because it allows you to manage and centralize all the stages of the ADTS.  It also provides a larger sample size so you can get a more accurate depiction of how effective your programs are.  

If you are deploying programs to multiple training centers, a sufficient ADTS interface allows you to perform multiple functions with a single action.  You should be able to consolidate functionality such as licensing out your programs, managing those licenses and most importantly, instantaneously accessing data and statistics on your participants.

• You don’t have an athlete development program but would like to develop one
• You’re required to report statistics on your program participants (Age distribution, gender, levels achieved etc)
• You rely on funding which is determined by having accurate statistics on your programs
• You’re looking for new ways to generate revenues
• You’d like to find a way to connect with your training centers
• You’d like to provide value to your training centers
  

• Training Centers protray a professional image to their customers by having an organized and standardized way to deliver athlete development programs
  
• Saves time by centralizing all evaluation data for athletes so that evaluation data can be accessed from year to year
  
• Training Center gets to contribute your program ecosystem and ultimately, improve the quality of the programs you offer and improve the quality of the discipline that they are coaching
  
• Allows parents, athletes and participants to track their kids progress from a young age
  
• Allows the training center to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of their programs
  

One of the biggest benefits of an ADTS is that you can create a consistent revenue stream.  In order for you to create a revenue stream, the product you create has to present value.

Before we get into the business model, it’s important to note that a business model is difficult to create if training centers don't see value in the programs that you offer.

How do you create value in your program offerings? 

1. Leverage your expertise to establish credibility - When creating Athlete Development Programs, utilize your in house expertise on the programs your creating
2. Provide resources - After your programs are created, provide help resources for your users.  Those resources should be extended to your entire ecosystem including, training center administrators, coaches and program participants
3. Keep your programs up to date by using the ADTS framework - Utilize the ADTS Framework to ensure you get the right feedback to constantly improve your program and stay relevant
   

There are different ways in which you can structure the business model. We recommend choosing the most viable business model for your athlete development programs, and there are a number of factors. The three types of models we recommend are:

• Per Participant Fee
• Per Training Center Fee
• Per Coach/Instructor Fee

In each case, we recommend that you charge upfront.  Since you are providing resources and support from the time a user starts using your programs , you’ll want to collect your fee upfront to be able to support your programs and ensure healthy cashflow.  

Be mindful that a per participant model is most difficult to manage and the per Training Center model is easiest.

If it does and you'd like to learn more, fill out the form on your right to request a 15 minute consultation to see if an ADTS online system is the right fit for you.