Collectively the Front Rush team is bunch of former college athletes, college coaches, administrators and entrepreneurs. Mike talks about his experience working with elite coaches for more than 20 years, and what he’s learned about their needs when it comes to athletics management software.
How are coaches overlooked in recruiting software?
“When you look at the business models of all the past companies that’ve been in the space, the first call they make is to the athletic director and compliance director. The whole business model is made around a whole different user group than the coach. We have a lot of history with coaches on the Front Rush side and the ACS side.
What I like about our structure is that we’re simultaneously pursuing two user groups; coach and compliance. We’re gonna innovate for coaches separately than we do for compliance.
We are dedicating ourselves to pure feature-driven development for coaches.”
What have you learned from working with coaches?
“One thing I’ve learned by talking to coaches is that they don’t all do it the same way. There is a lot of diversity in how coaches recruit. How they score players, how their recruiting boards look, who goes to meet high school coaches, who meets with parents — all are different school to school.
I’ve realized we can’t build a one-size-fits-all system. We want to bend to what each staff wants to do with their recruiting.
Elite staffs around country are all very accustomed what they know, what they need and what they need now. We’re looking for every opportunity to let users customize almost every piece of the software.
Coaches bring a unique style and model to their programs. We want to encourage that uniqueness and diverse way of running things by not pigeonholing them into one way software works.”
How are you going to keep building elite products for coaches?
“Because of the success that both ACS and Front Rush have had historically, when they joined forces under Reigning Champs there is a solidity to this organization. Front Rush is committed to putting the best coach tools out there. I like to build. It’s what I do, it’s in my blood. I’m excited to have resources from Front Rush, build, make it happen and put it in coaches’ hands.”
