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Ricky Fried, Georgetown Women's Lacrosse Coach
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Sponsored Post: Georgetown coaches leading technology revolution

SportsBoard - This article is brought to you by SportsBoard
This article is brought to you by SportsBoard

Please welcome Dave McKibben to LAS. Dave is a technology expert at SportsBoard, an LAS sponsor that has created an iPad app that revolutionizes how lacrosse coaches scout opponents and individual athletes. Today, Dave shares the story of the women’s lacrosse coaches at Georgetown University.

 

 

Having adopted SportsBoard’s revolutionary iPad app since last fall for recruiting, the eighth-ranked Georgetown women’s lacrosse team was already well past many of its competitors on the technology front. However, last month, the Hoyas leaped even further ahead of most by replacing Front Rush with SportsBoard’s contact manager functionality.

“We weren’t necessarily in the market for a new recruiting database,” said Lauren Morton, Georgetown’s assistant women’s lacrosse coach. “But SportsBoard showed us there’s a way to have a recruit’s assessment data right next to all their academic and contact information. The ease of having it all in one place while we’re at tournaments has made our lives way easier.”

Morton and Georgetown head coach Ricky Fried have had a lot to do with SportsBoard’s latest groundbreaking creation — they have provided SportsBoard with lots of granular feedback to make it even better than it was.

“It’s been exciting for us just to be a part of this,” Morton said. “SportsBoard welcomes feedback from all of its customers, which is why its product has grown so much since it initially came out in March 2012. SportsBoard practices what they preach, providing incredible customer service in terms of response time and new features.”

Lauren Morton, Georgetown Asst Coach
Lauren Morton, Georgetown Asst Coach

Since switching over from Front Rush to SportsBoard’s Lacrosse Scout for contact management, Morton said the Hoyas’ odds of overlooking a late-bloomer have decreased significantly.

“When a kid develops later in the recruiting process or if they contact you later, you can easily find them now,” she said. “Before we switched everything over to iPads and SportsBoard, you had to go through the tournament notebooks to see if they were there, and whom they were playing with. It was not a very efficient process.”

Within the past few weeks, Georgetown has begun implementing yet another SportsBoard feature that is changing the game for coaches—Player Efficiency Ratings (PER) reports. The Hoyas’ coaching staff has been using injured players to tally stats during practices. Minutes after practice ends, coaches are able to view relevant performance data about each player.

SportsBoard created the live-stats Player Efficiency concept for Duke’s renowned men’s basketball team, but Georgetown is more than pleased Jacobs integrated the Player Efficiency capability into Lacrosse Scout.

“We’ve used a plus, minus system like hockey to rate player performance, but nothing to the degree and depth we’re using it now,” said Fried. “Again, there’s a lot of detail here for our coaches without spending a ton more time putting it together.”

Ricky Fried, Georgetown Head Coach
Ricky Fried, Georgetown Head Coach

The Hoyas haven’t begun syncing their stats to video through SportsBoard’s interface to SportsTec’s Sportscode and Gamebreaker video analysis software, but Morton said the staff is “excited” about the prospect of saving hours they would normally spend manually tagging film.

Georgetown is one of some 60 college lacrosse programs now using SportsBoard’s Lacrosse Scout.

“We haven’t started using SportsBoard for video evaluation with voiced-over critiques at our camps yet,” Morton said. “But that’s another area where this app can make us more efficient and add value to our program. For now, just being able to use the same system for recruiting, evaluating our own team during the season and managing contact information is more than enough.”