When I first started out with DRIVN, it was mainly just a communication and calendar tool for us. As the head football coach at Greenwich High School, I had six coaches attached to my Facebook account just to contact kids. I was using Hudl to get a hold of kids. I was emailing, texting, calling, you name it. I was all over the place trying to keep track of which kids used email, which kids texted, which kids used Facebook. Contacting our athletes was a very chaotic process.
Every kid nowadays has a smart phone, and they might read emails but they don’t want to read emails from their teachers. They don’t want to hear anything from their teachers.
DRIVN has worked out tremendously. I know they all have it, and I know they all have the calendar on DRIVN. I send them a motivational quote of the day every morning. I ask for simple yes-no answers to see who is going to be at the morning lift so I know how many coaches I need to get there. DRIVN makes it so much easier. We have stopped emailing kids. We just email parents now.
That’s how we started out. Next, we created group chats.
My quarterbacks and offensive linemen are in a group on DRIVN so if I want them doing something together, I can just contact them separately. If I want to get in touch with them, I can just send a quick note to them. And those guys have their own group chats.
Now take that and multiply it by four different levels. I have position groups for the freshman team, sophomore team, junior varsity team and varsity team. I have four different levels of staff as well. I can communicate directly with the freshman staff or the junior varsity staff, for example, or all of them together.
I was in the finance world before I got into coaching. In the finance world a phone call to a client goes a really long way. It’s really no different coaching a kid. A quick message to a kid – ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ – goes a really long way. I have been able to stay in touch with kids a lot more now because of DRIVN. When I reach out though DRIVN, I know they get it. An email might get lost.
When the players need to get in touch with me or another coach, it’s a lot easier for them. If the parents need to get in touch with the coaches, they do it through DRIVN. It’s a lot easier to manage and maintain communication in what can be a chaotic environment.
We have had record numbers in the weight room this year and I think that’s because of the organization that DRIVN allows us to have. Not only because of the kids know, but because the parents know as well. The parents have it on their calendar and if there is a schedule change, they get a notification right away.
We have morning lifting on Friday for in-season athletes. It’s a chance for kids who are in-season with a sport to have a lighter lift. They have to respond and let me know if they are coming. I can look and see we have 12 kids coming so I need two coaches to be there.
I can contact the coaches through DRIVN, and we take attendance in the weight room on DRIVN, and now our workouts are on DRIVN. I can see who did the lift and see the time it took for them to get the lift in so they can’t cheat it. It automatically populates the weight they are supposed to do based on their max charts. We have a max calculator.
I can get a full look at what Johnny was doing in the weight room today. Any coach can see a summary of what each kid did. That’s been huge because we are on top of every kid. I know everyone’s report card. Why shouldn’t I know what everyone is doing in the weight room?
When a new player walks through the door and says he is thinking about playing football, the first thing I do get him on DRIVN so he can be caught up on everything we are doing.
I am in a very different community than most of the country. We are a suburb of New York City and we have a lot of parents who commute to the City. We also have a lot of multi-sport athletes. Those calendars can become pretty overwhelming to parents when combined with their own personal calendars.
Our parents don’t have to merge all their calendars into one master calendar. They can have it separate and know that it is their son’s football calendar. And it integrates with Google, so if the parents don’t want it on their smartphones, they can have it on the computer. I do everything through Google so when I update a calendar, I only have to make one change.
DRIVN has completely changed the way we coach. We are now more organized, have a much easier time communicating with our athletes and are able to spend more time working on getting better on the field than working on administrative overhead. See for yourself, schedule a demo today.