Organization Overview
Team Elevate is a Long Island-based girls lacrosse program with a goal of empowering their student-athletes through proper coaching and encouragement.
To do this, Elevate provides its families with expertise from coaches with extensive playing and coaching backgrounds. They are determined to provide a complete experience, with academics, family and school equally prioritized.
The motto of Team Elevate is “elevate your mind, elevate your body, elevate your game, elevate your life,” and the program is determined to provide a well-rounded experience for its student-athletes.
This paper will look into how Team Elevate uses the SportsRecruits platform to provide real, tangible value to their student-athletes and families.
Looking for Technology to Manage Recruiting
The motto of Team Elevate is “elevate your mind, elevate your body, elevate your game, elevate your life,” and the program is determined to provide a well-rounded experience for its student-athletes.
With the importance of recruiting to the club experience, they were eager to elevate the way they assisted their players in finding the right collegiate fit by putting the right systems in place.
“SportsRecruits is extremely helpful, no doubt about it,” said Kotowski. “It’s a key part of everything we do.”
-Dave Kotowski, Team Elevate
Elevate was spending a lot of time on administrative tasks and redundant work, which took away from time spent assisting their student-athletes. Coaches and club staff were devoting hours a day copying/pasting emails and manually trying to keep tabs on the recruiting efforts of their families.
“We truly have integrated LR into our recruiting system,” said Team Elevate Director Dave Kotowski. That is one of the things we do so well now: We have a system. We also do large group recruiting meetings, and we do several of them a year to keep people in tune. We show them how we do things, and how we use SportsRecruits. That is what it is all about.”
Like many club sports organizations, Elevate had almost no data about how their student-athletes were performing in the recruiting process. They were reliant only on individual meetings where accountability on the player’s side was limited, while transparency on the organization’s side was almost non-existent.
“We were doing all of the emails and everything internally,” said Kotowski. It was a lot to track and a lot to follow.
Enter the SportsRecruits platform.
SportsRecruits Integrated Solution
Team Elevate started with SportsRecruits when the leaders realized a technology platform would be essential for providing the best, most consistent experience possible for its players and families.
“When we were first contacted, I told them I wasn’t interested whatsoever because we were doing it ourselves. I had tried other programs and felt that none of them had added value,” said Kotowski. “But once they showed SportsRecruits to us, I said, ‘this is great.’”
Team Elevate has systems in place for everything they do, from personalized player evaluations to providing a college bus tour to take its student-athletes to a variety of schools, allowing them to get a feeling for the campus.
The organization has systems in place for everything they do, from personalized player evaluations to providing a college bus tour to take its student-athletes to a variety of schools, allowing them to get a feeling for the campus.
As such, they were drawn to how SportsRecruits integrates seamlessly within their existing infrastructure, making the transition almost seamless to using the platform’s tools.
Customizing the Tools for Success
As the director of Team Elevate, Kotowski enjoys using the suite of tools on the LactosseRecruits platform to begin the recruiting conversations for his families. One such tool is the ability to see which college coaches are viewing a player’s profile and video.
Once a player has set up their profile and uploaded their video, Kotowski is able to easily see which college coaches are looking at which student athletes. This begins the process for Team Elevate.
“It’s fantastic. I can’t say enough about it. SportsRecruits is our program, and that is what we will use.”
Dave Kotowski, Team Elevate
With the process in motion, Kotowski is able to let his families and student-athletes know a coach has looked at their information, and can tag a school for a player if they already had not done so. This alerts the family that it is time to contact the college coach while simultaneously allowing him to reach out to the coach on behalf of the player. All of this is done in a few clicks right from the platform.
“We have made it into our program,” said Kotowski. “I am sending an email out to a girl right now, making sure that she is contacting a coach. A coach contacted me yesterday about four of our girls, and I told the coach I was going to email her back through the LR platform and I’ll attach the profiles so she’ll have all of their information. This is how we do it.”
The ability to have the entire club’s activity in one place and to track and utilize data to assist families are two of the biggest reasons Elevate enjoys using the SportsRecruits platform. In this way, Team Elevate has a system in place to provide a consistent experience to members interested in playing at the next level.
SportsRecruits provides a way for Team Elevate to provide tangible recruiting assistance to its families while at the same time being able to hold player’s accountable for their own progress.
“SportsRecruits is extremely helpful, no doubt about it,” said Kotowski. “It’s a key part of everything we do.”
At a Glance
What they needed
A club-wide system to provide consistency.
Streamline the recruiting assistance provided by the club.
Data and analytics to point players in the right direction as they attack the recruiting process.
What they did
Implemented the SportsRecruits platform into their club in 2014.
Entrenched a consistent club-wide system to handle the recruiting process.
What they are saying
“It’s fantastic. I can’t say enough about it. SportsRecruits is our program, and that is what we will use.”
-Dave Kotowski
Director, Team Elevate
