About:

Moresports is a non-profit organization based in Vancouver, BC with the vision of creating an active, inclusive and enriched life for children and youth, irrespective of ability to pay or play, within the diverse communities of a city. Moresports creates, facilitates and promotes recreation, sport and leadership development experiences for children and youth through a city-wide network of community partners. They believe that every kid has the right to play and sports is the most accessible activity that brings community together.

Website:

https://moresports.org/about/

Interviewee:

Cynthia Lee, Coordinator

Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder? What was the problem you had that you needed PLAYBuilder to solve?

A: A year ago, Moresports had 11 hubs all across Vancouver and had no capacity to share resources centrally. There were issues of being able to train staff on what and how to coach the basic fundamentals of sport to their children. Needing something to keep all their training resources available, Moresports came on board with PLAYBuilder.

Q: How has PLAYBuilder helped your organization? List 3 key benefits?

• Shareable capacity
• Keeping all resources available for future staff
• Utilizing the pre-built Sport For Life activities and lessons

Q: What has been your favourite feature of PLAYBuilder? And why?

A: The centralized database and sharing ability of PLAYBuilder has been invaluable to the staff at Moresports. Being able to share across 11 different organizations has helped the most in streamlining lesson planning and fundamental training.

Q: Has PLAYBuilder saved your organization time and / or money?

A: PLAYBuilder has helped us in saving time during our staff onboarding. The ability to save lesson plans and activities and use those from year to year has helped us immensely as we transition new staff between our 11 Vancouver hubs. In the long-term we believe PLAYBuilder will also help us save money in that our updating of lesson planning content and staff turnover will be minimal.

Q: What were your steps to rolling out PLAYBuilder to your team? What did you find successful in that strategy?

A: We started with a trial of rolling out PLAYBuilder in 3 sites from spring until September last year. The program worked well and so we decided to then expand it to the managers at our other 8 hubs across Vancouver from September to March. We are aiming to roll it out to our high school volunteers in September this year and believe it will work well due to the simplicity of PLAYBuilder's user interface. This methodical roll-out process has worked well for our organization thus far.

About:

Halifax Municipality Recreation works to better the Halifax community through recreation information and offerings. Their mission is to give everyone in Halifax the opportunity to participate in sport through their various programming options from swimming to skating, kayaking summer camps and more.

Website:

https://www.halifax.ca/recreation/programs-activities/online-recreation-services

Interviewee:

Damion Stapledon, Community Recreation Coordinator

Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder? What was the problem you had that you needed PLAYBuilder to solve?

A: HRM chose the Playbuilder because we helped to design it with municipal recreation in mind. We wanted “one-stop” shopping for our staff to be able to build lesson plans, built from vetted activities, that were developmentally appropriate. This did not exist until the Playbuilder was created.

Q: How has PLAYBuilder helped your organization? List 3 key benefits?

• Our front line staff have access to hundreds of activities to choose from in order to have consistent Lessons plans
• Our supervisors now have the capability of tracking staff’s program planning habits
• Our participants are getting a higher quality service that is consistent throughout our region

Q: What has been your favourite feature of PLAYBuilder? And why?

A: The media component has been essential for us. Seeing a video of a drill is great for staff to understand it. We have also used it to show the kids/participants what the drill is. Adaptation has also been a key feature for Halifax Municipality Recreation. Although it has yet to be set up for some activities – the potential is phenomenal. At a touch of a button you can make an exclusive activity, am inclusive activity.

Q: Has PLAYBuilder saved your organization time and / or money?

A: We are estimating that the Playbuilder will save hours of planning heading into our first full summer with the platform. Staff are adding arts and crafts activities, lunch breaks etc, into the lesson plan. These can be saved for years. Currently we are still using papers. We have binders of previous lessons plans that get lost or that outdated. The real time benefit will be seen a few years down the road when they are many save lessons plans that staff can simply save to their device for the day/week. The saving in time will go from days to hours, maybe even minutes. It estimated that current HRM Summer Rec staff spend 21 hours (3 days) on lesson plans. We are estimating that the time could be cut in half. This would result in a savings of over $40,000 for the year for our organization.

Q: What were your steps to rolling out PLAYBuilder to your team? What did you find successful in that strategy?

A: Training took place during our High 5 and/or FMS courses. It aligned nicely with philosophies and requirements of the curriculum.

Background:

Athletics Australia is the national governing body for athletics (track and field, running, and race walking) in Australia. The Athletics Australia Growth and Development Department is responsible for leading a range of functions, including workforce training and development, program design, and program delivery in areas such as schools. Adam Bishop is the General Manager of Growth and Development and has been working with Sport for Life to utilise the PLAYBuilder platform to support Athletics Australia’s work in delivering quality programs. Adam and the Athletics Australia Growth and Development team are passionate about providing positive experiences and environments for participants and opportunities for kids to develop physical literacy so that they can be active for life.

Website:

https://www.athletics.com.au

Interviewee:

Adam Bishop, General Manager of Growth and Development

Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder? What was the problem you had that you needed PLAYBuilder to solve?

A: Through the Australian Government’s Sporting Schools program, Athletics Australia delivers just under 1000 athletics programs to 110,000 children in schools across Australia each year, utilising more than 200 accredited coaches. Kids’ Athletics makes up the majority of these programs. In late 2019, we also piloted a physical literacy focussed program as an extension of Kids’ Athletics that was delivered in the community setting. Alongside this, we’d also previously completed some research in partnership with La Trobe University and Sport Australia which demonstrated that Kids’ Athletics helped children develop across all four domains (physical, psychological, social, and cognitive) of the Australia Physical Literacy Standard.

Since the inception of these programs, the content for the 8 week Kids’ Athletics program has been provided to deliverers in the form of large PDF manuals. These manuals were fine for viewing on desktop computers or laptops, but were impractical for taking out in the field to support program delivery. We wanted to provide coaches with the ability to access the content via a phone or tablet wherever they were delivering with the view that this would improve program delivery and coach effectiveness to enhance the experience and learning outcomes for participants. In order to address this challenge, we were exploring the development of an app or mobile response platform to provide access to the program content to coaches when they were out delivering the program.

Q: How were those challenges affecting you and your organization?

A:We recognise the importance of program content being delivered as intended and for participants to have a great experience. We also want to ensure that our coaches (and teachers) are supported in the delivery of their programs no matter where they are delivering. Having program content, including information on instructional cues, equipment, and safety, along with supporting visuals (images and video) of how the activities operate available to deliverers out in the field will help us support coaches to provide high quality and effective programs.

Q: What other possible solutions did you consider?

A: Our original intention was to develop an app or web-based mobile responsive platform to house and serve the content to coaches via their smart phone or tablet. We knew this would be a challenging project, but it was something we thought would be beneficial in helping us achieve our program outcomes and to provide ongoing support to coaches after they had completed the online program upskilling.

Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder?

A: I (Adam) had been following the work of Sport for Life via the regular newsletters and whilst we were considering the development of the app, I came across PLAYBuilder. I explored the platform’s functionality and realised that it very closely matched what we were intending to build. Given the complexities and the cost associated with building an app for what we required, I reached out to Sport for Life to enquire about the opportunity to potentially license a white label version of PLAYBuilder that we could develop our content in.

Q: What would have happened if you had not chosen to license the use of PLAYBuilder?

A: We would have pressed ahead with the development of an app or web-based platform. We would have probably arrived at a similar solution, but it would have been significantly more expensive, would have been very time consuming, and would have likely had significantly less functionality. Building this type of platform ourselves would have also resulted in significantly longer lead time in releasing the content in this form to our coaches.

Q: When you first purchased PLAYBuilder did you intend to share full access to your members? If not, what were the reservations or limitations in sharing access to your members?

A: We intend to provide licenses on an as needed basis to our accredited coaches and teachers in schools who have undergone the online program delivery upskilling. In this way, we can control access to the content and ensure that those who have access to the program content are accredited and appropriately trained in the delivery of the program content.

Q: Recently you decided to contract Sport for Life to implement and digitize your Athletics Australia Curriculum into PLAYBuilder, how was that experience for you?

A: It was a really positive experience for us. Like many organisations across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic had seen us take some difficult decisions as an organisation around staffing. This particularly impacted the Growth and Development team with most of the staff on reduced hours. We had hoped to use the pandemic period as an opportunity to build this content in PLAYBuilder, but with work volumes remaining relatively unchanged and with reduced staffing levels, we didn’t have the human resource capacity to devote to populating the content in PLAYBuilder. Engaging the Sport for Life team to do this work for us, particularly with their knowledge of the system, was a very efficient way to quickly build the content in PLAYBuilder and have the program content ready to deploy. It also allowed us to easily build in the Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum content descriptors that had been mapped against the program content.

Q: What measurable benefits have you seen or have projected since implementing PLAYBuilder? What organizational processes does PLAYBuilder enhance? How much does it reduce the cost and time to complete these particular processes?

A: Given the current restrictions and uncertainty in Australian schools with programs like Sporting Schools at present, we have delayed the deployment of PLAYBuilder until term 4 (October 2020). We believe PLAYBuilder will make it easier for us to provide access to and control the distribution of the program content to our workforce, as well as improving the effectiveness of our coaches by providing easy access to the program content no matter where they are delivering to kids across Australia.

Q: What would you tell others who might be considering PLAYBuilder? Would you recommend PLAYBuilder to your peers?

A: If you’re looking to digitise your content to make it more usable and accessible and improve its look and feel, then PLAYBuilder may be a suitable solution. If you’re looking to build a bespoke platform to distribute your content, given the time and cost associated with doing this, PLAYBuilder is definitely worth exploring as part of your thinking.