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Life After Sports: Networking for Athletes
81 Plays1 year ago
The world of sports creates a familial bond that connects people far beyond the thrill of the game, but what happens after an athlete retires from their sports career? Dive into the challenges and solutions presented by Chris Smith, CEO, and founder of Athlete Network, as he shares his journey and insights. Inspired by the experiences of his own sports community, Chris was determined to create the power behind the promise "Once Family, Always Family" so often delivered at the end of a season. In this episode, discover the potential impact on facility managers looking to hire athletes and how Athlete Network's technology is reshaping the landscape. Join us as we unravel the key themes and valuable takeaways that bridge the gap between athletes, facilities, and the ever-evolving realm of technology.
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Learn more about Athlete Network:
https://www.athletenetwork.com/
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Transcript
Connecting Athletes Post-College
00:00:00
Speaker
On this episode of The Facility Playbook, I got to sit down with Chris Smith, CEO and founder of Athlete Network. What I enjoyed about our conversation is how Chris has similarly done what we're doing in the facility space. He's taken tons of software that's being used by colleges out there and put it all into one place so that athletes can stay connected as a part of their amazing network after they graduate and while they graduate from their university.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:21
Speaker
If you're a facility manager and owner and you're looking to hire highly motivated athletes right out of college, check out Athlete Network. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Facility Playbook.
00:00:34
Speaker
Do you own or manage a facility? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Facility Playbook. I'm Luke Wade,
Software Solutions for Sports Facilities
00:00:40
Speaker
founder and CEO of Facility Ally, and this podcast is about helping managers and owners learn from pioneers and veterans in the industry who have built and managed sports facilities, entertainment venues, and clubs.
Revolutionizing Facility Management
00:00:52
Speaker
Did you know that most of those facilities use between four and eight different softwares to manage their reservations, memberships, lessons, camps, clinics, and more? Revolutionize your facility with Facility Ally's all-in-one system. Learn more at facilityally.com.
Athlete Transition and Network Inception
00:01:03
Speaker
Today we're here to learn about building a network with Chris Smith, CEO and founder of Athlete Network. Thanks for having us in today, Chris. Thanks for having me on, Luke. I appreciate it. Let's hear a little about your background and what led you to create Athlete Network. Yeah, so originally born and raised in Hawaii, was an athlete my whole life. I did everything from race and sailboats, wrestling, football. And about the time I was a freshman, I had the dream to be a college athlete and went to go play at the University of Hawaii.
00:01:29
Speaker
Like everyone, I thought I was gonna be a pro athlete. I thought I was gonna beat the 3% statistic that went on, but I didn't. Became a pro in business, right? I went to get a job. And I was fortunate to have a support structure that helped me realize I'm not just an athlete. But what happened was when I went to go to work, a lot of my teammates really started struggling, man. They didn't know anything different than being an athlete. And unfortunately, I've lost five teammates because of that struggle, not knowing how to transition.
Evolving from Career Network to Comprehensive Platform
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, fast forward to my job. I was in sales and I was killing it. And my bosses kept saying, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm coachable and like to work.
00:02:07
Speaker
And then the entrepreneurial bug triggered, like what if we helped athletes understand that about themselves? What if we helped them understand that the pain and ass coaches they've dealt with, the teammates, all of that is an experience that if they learn how to cross pollinate it, we'll set them up for life. And I wanted to solve that problem because at the end of the day, our motto is we want to help keep athletes competing. One of the best ways is to help them find that next adventure, right? That next sport, which can be business.
00:02:35
Speaker
That's awesome. So what is Athlete Network or what was it when you first started and what is it today and how have you accomplished that? Yeah, great question. Originally, it was a career network. We wanted to take seniors and recent grads, teach them how to interview. You did have accountability with your metrics in sports. You did have a difficult boss and a coach. You did have to learn how to work with a very diverse group of people.
00:02:59
Speaker
And we ended up working with over 500 athletic departments. Over a million student athletes went through our career education program and training. As we were on that journey, though, we started to realize, similar to what you're doing at your company, athletic departments were using all these different softwares to try to help their current and former athletes, some of them up to 30 different softwares.
00:03:21
Speaker
And the adoption was low because no one really knew where to access anything.
Improving Administrative Processes and Opportunities
00:03:25
Speaker
So we thought, what if we could create a software, an athlete network, that networks the athletes to all the resources, people, careers, and programs they need? Would that solve this whole platform fatigue issue? And that's why we jumped full steam in back in 2019 with Athlete Network. We basically white label it per school. It's their own software. And it's being used all across the country at all levels.
00:03:50
Speaker
So what are some of the top users of the software? You know, we're really fortunate. A lot of your Big Ten schools like Michigan, Penn State, Washington, Purdue, Indiana, Florida State has one of the biggest networks out of the ACC.
00:04:05
Speaker
So we're really happy about that, but there's 1,100 schools. We don't want just the big dogs to use it, right? We want to be able to scale it down for all athletes. So what's some of the success stories or case studies you've seen come out of these schools? Yeah, so when we think about our network, there's basically two clients, right? You got the athletes, and then you got the athletic department administrators. On the administration side, case studies are reducing the time it takes for them to accomplish something. So something that sounds very simple, University of Washington.
00:04:35
Speaker
Unbelievable football here, right? They're third in the country right now. So many of their former players would request tickets, but they would go to eight different people on campus to request these tickets. It would have to get funneled down, ticket requests were coming in from email, text messages, and it was so unorganized, it was taking a staff member three days just to process this.
00:04:54
Speaker
In our system, those athletes can request those tickets, and what took three days takes three minutes now. So if you talk about value, right? If you can save someone days, you're producing ROI. On the athlete side, the case studies are not only helping them get jobs, but just being a part of a community.
Unique Athlete-Specific Network
00:05:10
Speaker
I mean, you know this as an athlete and a vet. It's your life. And then when the jersey comes off or the uniform, it's over.
00:05:17
Speaker
When they go on the network, they can network with each other, they have access to mental health resources, they have access to careers, videos from their coaches that the coaches don't want, Facebook or Twitter. Speaking of not as a fan, but as someone who wore the jersey. That's amazing. So I think you've kind of covered this a little bit, but for maybe diving a little bit deeper, like how is this specifically different than a LinkedIn? Yeah, that's a great question. First and foremost, LinkedIn's engagement is to make LinkedIn money.
00:05:41
Speaker
That's what LinkedIn is for. It's a great service, but it's also open. Our networks are locked down. They're membership-based, and everything was built for the athletes, so the fields and their profiles.
00:05:55
Speaker
what position where you're at, you know that she played football. There's a lot of different positions in football. On LinkedIn, they don't know I was a center. The school can't easily communicate with the 1999 championship team at the University of Hawaii by where they live on LinkedIn. We take the data and we segment it for our audience to deliver it very quickly to who they need to with our communication tools.
Mental Health Support and Features
00:06:18
Speaker
So obviously starting in 2019, a lot of things have changed since then. What are some of the cool things that, you know, I know you highlight a lot of top levels. Maybe let's talk about a feature or something that you think is like really cool that's provided like athletes, kind of what you're talking about, that network or that connection that they've been looking for.
00:06:37
Speaker
One feature that's super simple is every athletic department has their traditional website where they post content. But we found is athletes aren't living on Twitter. They're not going to these sites to read it. And the big dog in the industry is called sidearm sports. They power all those websites. But we integrated with them. So every night, our two systems talk.
00:06:57
Speaker
and it takes by sport all the content, it breaks it down and then delivers it to me. So I don't have to look for it anymore. So I get very up to date and in the know on my sport without looking for it. And that's increased engagement with the exact same content from 4% to about 50%. That's awesome. Which is awesome, right? Tech software should increase engagement, reduce staff time. The other aspect is mental health, man. It's a passion of mine. I've seen too many people struggle.
00:07:24
Speaker
We have a ton of mental health resources available 24-7. On campus, they do a great job with mental health professionals, but they're there from eight to five. You know this, some of the dark hours are at 2 a.m.
00:07:36
Speaker
We want to make sure that these former and current athletes have a place to access the content and curriculum and people they need when they need it. That's amazing. I love the curation of the content because I get the daily email in the morning that breaks things down of what happened yesterday or what's coming up. And so to have it more specific around the sport is really, really cool. On the mental health side of things, to your point of schools and everybody has different programs, how have you navigated what you guys are able to offer
00:08:04
Speaker
in tandem with what the school's offering around that? Well, great question. It's twofold. One, we don't want to alienate what the schools are offering, but we want to make it accessible and used. That's a big problem. People think people have platform fatigue. They have communication fatigue. They don't even know where things are because they get so much nonsense sent to them, they become numb to it. So the first thing we do is we go, if the school is big enough and has their own sports psychologists or mental health, we'll partner with them and say,
00:08:31
Speaker
don't do anything different. Just actually get your curriculum used because your athletes can find it. The schools have a lot of great resources, but they're not being leveraged because it's too hard to access them. With our system, football, they can send out the mental health specific. For football, they can see who has used it, who hasn't.
Hiring and Thriving Athletes
00:08:51
Speaker
So once we get all their current information, and then we've partnered with other companies, we've created our own mental health aspects, and that combination provides a lot of resources.
00:09:01
Speaker
It's funny in athletics, I think you relate to this. We have workout rooms, right? We have weight rooms. And we don't start working out when the season starts. We start the year before. What if we viewed mental health like a weight room? What if we had people actually working out on their mental health before they needed it? That's what I'm trying to solve here is I hate to admit it, but it's frequent. You're going to read about a student athlete that unfortunately has moved on, right?
00:09:26
Speaker
And then they want to talk about mental health. Let's start talking about it ahead of time. You and our old school football players, when we played, you didn't bring up mental health. Your, your ass would have been on the bench. So that is one good thing is it's not taboo anymore to talk about it, but let's not give them the resources when it's too late.
00:09:43
Speaker
Right. Yeah. No, it makes total sense. Yeah. And football and wrestling, every sport I've ever played, you know, when we grew up, like you said, getting yelled at, screamed at physically, you know, like all those things happening. And then the military, you know, when you had a tough day, you would say you were sick or hurt, you know, so you could go to sick call. You couldn't say you were having mental health problems.
00:10:00
Speaker
It's definitely changed and obviously for the weather, but we have a lot, a lot longer to go. I love the focus around athletes. Similar around veterans is we've had goals. We've been through these hard times, these challenges around sports. As a facility manager and owner out there, I'm looking to hire an athlete. It sounds like you have a lot of experience around that. What should I be doing and thinking about if I want to attract these amazing athletes that are getting out of school to come and work for me?
Lifelong Athlete Community
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question.
00:10:27
Speaker
So obviously, we don't expect anyone to hire an athlete because they run fast or jump hard. It's those non-cognitive skills, coachability, grit, tenacity. You know how to respond to adversity. So the first thing is understanding why you want an athlete to come work for your company. It's also a very diverse community, which is awesome. In athletics, you know how to work with people who are not like yourself, from social economic backgrounds to ethnicity and so on. So it's not just hiring an athlete because they're an athlete. It's all of that.
00:10:57
Speaker
You've got to market to them in a way that they understand and it relates to them. You can't just be like, hey, I want to hire an athlete. You've got to show success of other athletes. You got to show them how all those traits that you want, the competitiveness,
00:11:12
Speaker
It's going to be fostered and embraced because a lot of athletes go into companies and rub people wrong because they're hyper competitive. They're go, go, go. And if the infrastructure is not set up, people are like, what is this guy, this woman doing? Like, relax. You've got to create a system where they can thrive. And if you do.
00:11:31
Speaker
you're going to see skyrocketed results. And we're blessed to work with a lot of the biggest companies in the country who have realized that. That's awesome. Yeah, I always have said this before on the podcast is like the facility has to set their goals first. And if their goals aren't, you know, like we're going to high achieving, we have all these huge things we need to do, then maybe hiring a high achieving athlete is not the right thing. It's not your process got to be there. But if you're trying to grow and expand and be hungry and work really hard, then athletes are definitely somebody you're wanting to look at. So your motto is once an athlete, always an athlete. What does that mean to you?
00:12:01
Speaker
So when you're an athlete, whether it's high school, college, or pro, you're always told you're a part of a family. And we're trying to help those athletic organizations back the always part. Because unfortunately, once the jersey comes off, the always doesn't exist. And a lot of times it's not at the institution or athletic organizations fault is they lose touch with the former athlete. But you can't sit here while they're playing and say, Luke, you're a family brother. You're once a blank, always a blank.
00:12:30
Speaker
What our tech does is it helps fulfill that promise of the always. It helps stay connected. If you're family, you should always have an open door back. That's what it means is once I played at the University of Hawaii, once a warrior, always a warrior is I always have a spot.
Data-Driven Decision Making
00:12:46
Speaker
I always have the ability to come back. I'm in the know. I'm not treated like a fan.
00:12:50
Speaker
And that does a lot for your mental health because a lot of our challenges is when we're part of a community and then we're not. You don't know where you belong anymore. So even just the video from the coach, an honest video talking about the program, or if I'm going to my alma mater and I can get access to tickets, even if I have to pay, just access. That's what the always part is about.
00:13:13
Speaker
And it sounds like that's exactly what you've integrated into Athlete Network. So even once you graduated, once you've moved on, you can always get into Athlete Network and still connect with the past, future, other athletes. That's awesome. What kind of data tracking and management does Athlete Network do? Yeah, that's the biggest opportunity. I mean, I'm sure a lot of your clients value the data as well. In 2023, data should be making decisions, not emotions.
00:13:38
Speaker
And the problem within athletics is they never had a clear and concise way for their current former athletes to see the outcomes of the programs and services they're providing. So within our system, everything can be tied to the profile. You can track, like for a current athlete, you can track what career events they went to, what resume workshops, what mental health workshops.
00:14:01
Speaker
And then you can stay with that individual for years and see the outcome. Oh, they got a good job. They're doing well in life. And you can start funding those programs and services more because you have the data to show the outcome. All the intentions have always been there, but no one until recently used data to drive decisions and results. So everything is data tracked. Everything is digestible to help make future decisions.
00:14:29
Speaker
It sounds a little ironic, but one of my greatest calls is when a partner of ours would be like, we realize we can get rid of these three apps. Because the data shows no one wants them. Get rid of them. Don't keep pushing things on people. It's not a lack of resources. It's too many resources. Let data narrow down what actually matters to your
Expanding to Youth Sports and Development
00:14:51
Speaker
membership. Same thing with all your partners. Sure.
00:14:53
Speaker
I'm going to throw a curve ball at you. I know that obviously you focus on colleges, tons and tons of athletes there and they move on, they come back. But would something like this work for like a youth sports program, right? So like even starting in their teens or even high school, you know, if you're trying to connect these athletes early on and they're able to stay connected to these other athletes, even as they go off, is that something you've thought about? Yeah, we have thought about it. Like any business, we're not trying to
00:15:18
Speaker
oversaturate ourselves, the youth market does pose different challenges tech-wise than a collegiate, especially if the youth aren't there instead of their parents. But at the end of the day, Luke, I think that athletics starting in youth is the greatest human development machine our society has. I just do. It's my opinion.
00:15:37
Speaker
You get these kids who are accountable. They got to go to practice. They got to learn how to work with each other. Then they go, even if they don't go beyond youth or high school, it's still teaching them how to be with a team. So the more we can make resources accessible, whether it's youth, college, or pro.
00:15:53
Speaker
There is a need for it. It is on our roadmap eventually. We just haven't got there yet. Sure. No, it makes sense. Definitely don't want to do too many things at once. That's how you get spread too thin. If I'm a facility manager and I'm looking to hire these rockstar athletes, is there an opportunity to work with Athlete Network to do that?
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah, so our value to the facility manager would be, think of us as the middleman. We work with athletic departments all across the country from internships to recent grads to alumni. Instead of you having to go and make a relationship with that athletic department, you just come to us and we'll plug your opportunities into these networks. Because it aligns with our mission, right? To keep athletes competing. We want to make them have access to great jobs. Athletes love anything that has to do with sports, right?
00:16:38
Speaker
And the other day I was playing pickleball at Chicken and Pickle. I was playing with four other college athletes. Met the two guys next to us. They were former athletes. Once an athlete, always an athlete also means you're always going to want to find something to compete in, right? So if you're looking to hire that caliber, it's a double win for you.
00:16:56
Speaker
Cause not only can you expose the opportunity at your facility that the athlete might become a client at, you can also find them to be great employees.
Centralizing Resources and Efficiency
00:17:05
Speaker
They're going to show up on time. They're going to be results driven and oriented. What are the benefits? What are the benefits to a facility or an athletic organization looking to add your product? So if I'm thinking about like a Hy-Vee arena, you know, that side of things would most likely be the hiring side of things, correct? Correct. And unless there was a membership component where you wanted to provide continuous communication and
00:17:26
Speaker
education to. Our value to our partners is we centralize your membership, your stakeholders into one network, and then our technology makes it very easy to segment that membership and communicate whatever you want, whether it's videos, whether it's discounts, programs, mental health resources, it doesn't matter. What we're solving is the centralization for our partners of all their stakeholders.
00:17:53
Speaker
It's too decentralized, it's too siloed, and that's where lost opportunity
Attracting and Retaining Athletes
00:17:59
Speaker
comes. That's where you have duplicative tech because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Put everyone in one network, one database, get everyone on the same page, and then let them
00:18:09
Speaker
have the ability to talk to who they want to quickly and effectively, but it's from one thing, not 50 Excel spreadsheets. Some of our partners, literally, we've gotten rid of 50 Excel spreadsheets. They have 25 different sports. The coaches are keeping track of all this on Excel in 2023.
00:18:26
Speaker
Now it all comes into one system. You can get rid of the Excel spreadsheet. And when that coach leaves that Excel spreadsheet is not leaving with the coach. It's staying intact in their network. Sure. So outside of the tech side of things for a facility that maybe doesn't can't directly use athlete network software solution outside of hiring. What have you seen is the best way to build a network for athletes like
00:18:46
Speaker
to create a connection, whether, hey, I'm looking to get a group of guys. I want to get athletes in here playing sports or whatever it is that I'm offering. What's the best way I can attract them to come and be a part of our community and then keep that networking. Power of three, man. I've just learned that you've got to have three value propositions that you don't have to educate them on.
00:19:05
Speaker
If you're trying to educate them, it's gonna be very costly. You gotta find three main things that your facility, your network can provide them that others can't. And it's gotta be obvious to them. So for us, one of the most obvious things, if you want former tickets, you can't get former tickets unless you are in these networks, right? If you want to have a facility tour, right? That's a big missed opportunity a lot of our schools have. They all have alumni, they don't even know they're there.
00:19:32
Speaker
You can register, but you can't do that on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. You only can do it there.
Entrepreneurial Insights and Core Strengths
00:19:37
Speaker
So you got to find what are those things that your community wants that they can't get in other places. Once you identify those, I'm a big proponent of the curve of adoption. Don't try to do it to everyone at first, right? That's not how humans work. We work with our early adopters and our innovators. Get them to love what you're doing.
00:19:57
Speaker
Get them to have such a great experience. And that's only about 15% of the population of any group. But in the beginning, focus on them. Focus on them with those three great services. Then get them to go be your evangelists or your advocates to the rest of that population. So if you're trying to attract more former athletes to come play pickleball at your facility,
00:20:19
Speaker
Don't try to get them all at once. Just get those early adopters, show them a great time, and then do what we're doing. Get them on camera saying, here's why I come here. That's going to grow your community faster than anything else you can do. Yep. I love that. Power three. And it's also less confusing, right? When you confuse people, they just don't buy or they don't sign up. So that if you can silo it down to pain points and then also keep it really clear, then it makes it easier for them. That's awesome. So if you started all over today, what would you do differently? I don't think we have enough time for this in this podcast, man.
00:20:49
Speaker
You and our fellow entrepreneurs, we're just talking about this. It's a grind. And especially in software, it's unique because there is no blueprint. If you're building an MVP of something that did not exist, it's not like we're a franchise where we can look at what someone in California did. So if you're making me give you a couple examples, I'm really good at business development and sales. If I could start this all over again, I would have found a tech co-founder.
00:21:15
Speaker
You know, I meet a lot, now that I'm in tech and I've been for a while, I meet a lot of great tech guys and they'll ask me and I'll say, you gotta find a sales guy. And they're like, ah, if our product's good enough, nope. Just like I can be the greatest sales guy in the world, but if my product doesn't work.
00:21:30
Speaker
So you've got to know your strength and you can't do it all. And then find brilliant dudes or people that can fulfill what you're not good at. In the beginning, don't wait. I waited too long. I thought I couldn't afford people. I thought I had to raise all this money to go get them. So I would have tried to find that right off the bat. The second thing I would have done with our beta, I built it too much on what I wanted in the very beginning. Because I am the audience we're going after.
00:21:59
Speaker
but not everyone is like me. And a lot of the feature sets right off the bat were feature sets that Chris Smith wanted. I would have talked more at our beta schools about like, what are the real pain points beyond the obvious ones we're trying to solve? And then I would have tried to get a little bit more of a...
00:22:17
Speaker
consensus on those products and then not done anything else but those. I think we try to do too many things in the beginning. That's probably why I told you about the power of three. Like I'm old school man, Jack Welsh, if you can't be the best one or two at it, don't do it. We probably in the beginning try to be too good at too many things.
Future Expansion Plans
00:22:35
Speaker
Makes a ton of sense. So what do the next three years look like for Athlete Network? College athletics is in an interesting spot right now. With NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment. I was at a convention the other week and Aidy said we're on a ship without a rudder right now.
00:22:51
Speaker
But there's always going to be athletes. There's always going to be communication problems. So we really want our top three feature sets. We really want to be the best that exists in software for those within the college athletics, which is the communication tool. It's the resource tool and the data set, right? Cleaning the data, providing data.
00:23:11
Speaker
And then we'd like to get into the professional competitive club like NGB, like the USA triathlon aspect. If we can penetrate that well, we would like to get into youth at some point. And I know it's way outside of our wheelhouse. I've had a lot of people in the military approaching me about this with the same kind of community access to resources. So start exploring cross pollinating the software into other verticals that have similar pain points.
Conclusion and Contact Encouragement
00:23:39
Speaker
I love it. Well, if once you get to the military, let's talk for sure, because I could definitely help out with that. I'm a part of a lot of different communities there. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. If you're out there and you're looking if you're a facility manager and owner and you're looking to hire amazing athletes, make sure you reach out to Chris at Athlete Network. If you're looking to essentially automate your facility with management of memberships, reservations, leagues, camps and clinics and more, check out facilityally.com and we'll see you next time on the Facility Playbook.