As a new company, ARI Recruiting is growing at a rapid pace and we must come up with features that are both innovative and appealing to our market.

Throughout our growth over the years, two of the most important questions we’ve asked ourselves were, “What does every coach struggle with the most?” and “Why do they struggle with it?”

The answer is something I, and so many others, struggle with every day: ORGANIZATION and TIME!

With our original organizing features, the coach was not only limited by the technology, but also by having to manually organize their athletes for the best usage of our platform. Organizing is supposed to make processes simpler, not more of a hassle. We recognized the need for easier ORGANIZATION, which provides coaches more TIME.

As a solution, we have creatively launched an updated version of our original features, giving coaches the option to automate their organizational process — much like the ease of a self-driving car! Imagine yourself in the driver’s seat of your self-driving car (Okay… you just won the lottery). You plug in a destination, hit “go”, and sit back to read the paper and enjoy a steaming hot cup of coffee. The same concept can be used to explain our new solutions.

Read on, and I’ll show you how you can plug in what you want, set the system up to “drive itself”, and get you exactly where you need to be. That is, all while enjoying a REAL cup of coffee and YOUR paper.

Step 1: Filters — The Tires & The Frame (what the entire car is built on)

“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure.” — Gordon B. Hinckley

Organization can be a struggle for so many people, simply because there are layers to it. Therefore, building a strong foundation in which one can efficiently organize was our first task. It was clear from the beginning that the root of all organizing within ARI stems from filtering.

We soon realized that the current state of our Filter Feature lacked flexibility and was two-dimensional in its approach (Example: a coach only being able to display the athletes who have a certain tag). This is valuable but very limited. Filters need to be flexible in the sense that they can be applied from multiple angles at once.

To accomplish our task of creating flexible filters (say that 10-times fast), we built a tool called “parameters.” These parameters allow one to choose from literally any field within the system and decide, from a list of options, how that field will be affected in the filter (Ex: Filtering to show all your athletes with a graduation year greater than or equal to 2022).

In addition, we also added the ability to stack multiple filters together within your search, allowing you to narrow down the results in a now unlimited number of ways based on your approach (Ex: Filtering to show all quarterbacks who graduate in 2022 and are from either Florida or Texas).

This filter foundation is incredibly important for coaches in terms of organization, as the only thing they are limited to now is their imagination. Building a three-dimensional approach to filtering was only the first step in the process. We had the tires and the frame, now we needed to make ’em move!

Step 2: Auto-Groups — The Car

“Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication” — Leonardo da Vinci

With our previous Manual Group Feature, the coach was limited by their hand and user efficiency. This, in no way, insinuates that our manual group feature is now obsolete. The ability to manually add and remove athletes when working within a group with less concrete boundaries can be quite helpful (Ex: A football coach heavily recruiting a wide receiver who shows promising running back skills and manually moving him from the wide receiver group to the running back group without changing his profile information).

In addition to manual groups, we now have coaches covered when they narrow in on a specific way they want to organize their athletes and want ARI to handle updates and changes for them.

Our Auto Group feature can give coaches a simple, yet more sophisticated option.

Let’s say you wanted to create five groups for your 2022s with every individual star rating, 1-5. After setting your parameters, each group’s athletes will then automatically change based on how their information is adjusted through the recruiting process (Ex: John Smith could be a 4-star recruit one day. However, after watching him play in person, you’ve adjusted his score to 5. He has now automatically switched groups in the blink of an eye.)

In collegiate sports, where schedules change on a dime, and you spend more hours on the field or at the pool than you do at home, finding spare time is like finding a needle in a haystack; it rarely happens.

Having a feature that thinks and organizes for you while you coach so that your allotted recruiting time is spent more efficiently can be an absolute game-changer.

Take your hands off the wheel, catch your breath, have some coffee, and let ARI do the driving for you!

Help

Contact us (support@arirecruiting.com) today for a refresher on Filters and Auto-Groups. Our team will reach out to set up some time together.

Your self-driving car awaits!

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