MIKE GREY – CO-FOUNDER OF BRAVARA – EPISODE 1315

Website – https://bravara.com/

Email – [email protected]

Twitter/X – @bravara.app/

Mike Grey is the co-founder of Bravara, a youth sports league management tool that streamlines evaluations, team building, scheduling, communications, and player development.

On this episode Mike and Mike discuss how technology can improve the youth sports experience for coaches, players, families, and league administrators. Grey explains how digital evaluations and team-building tools can reduce paperwork, address rating bias, and help create more balanced basketball teams. The conversation also covers scheduling tools designed to account for coach and parent conflicts, player availability, venues, and rescheduling needs. Grey describes Bravara Reps and Playmaker, which coaches can use to assign drills and plays, support at-home learning, and track player engagement. Looking ahead, he argues that better use of game and player data could help match teams more fairly, support player development, and give more kids a positive place to keep playing.

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Pay close attention and jot down some notes as you listen to this episode with Mike Grey, co-founder of Bravara.

What We Discuss with Mike Grey

10 Key Takeaways for Basketball Coaches

1. Make team balance a development priority.

Mike Grey describes how lopsided games can discourage players on the losing team, and offer little challenge to the winning team. Coaches can use player evaluations and past performance to build more evenly matched teams, so more players get meaningful competition.

2. Agree on what your evaluation scale means before tryouts.

Evaluators may use the same 1–5 scale but interpret it differently. The episode recommends briefly calibrating the group, for example, discussing what a “1,” “3,” or “5” looks like for shooting, dribbling, or rebounding. That makes ratings more consistent and useful.

3. Evaluate several basketball skills, not just scoring.

The episode gives examples of rating shooting and passing separately, and describes customizable categories such as shooting, dribbling, and rebounding.  A broader view helps coaches identify players’ strengths and needs beyond who scores the most.

4. Watch for bias in tryouts and drafts.

Mike Grey notes that a coach might overrate their own child or rate players strategically to influence the draft.  Coaches can reduce that risk by using multiple evaluators, consistent criteria, and a transparent process for handling ratings that differ sharply from the group’s.

5. Treat friend requests as part of the player experience.

The episode says kids often value having fun and playing with friends; some leagues have been able to honor requests while still balancing teams.  When appropriate, coaches can consider social connection alongside skill, while avoiding combinations that create unfair teams.

6. Look for a challenge players can overcome.

Mike Grey’s point is that players grow through challenges that are difficult but manageable: a dominant team may not improve much from an easy win, while repeated blowouts can push players away.  Aim for matchups where both teams have something to learn.

7. Use player data over time, not just one tryout.

Mike Grey explains that a single evaluation session gives a limited picture, while game information accumulated across seasons could provide useful context for future team formation.  Coaches can track development over time and avoid making big judgments based on one afternoon.

8. Make at-home work specific to the player.

In the episode’s example, a coach could assign ball-handling work to a player who needs it, using selected videos or a coach-created demonstration.  Tailored practice gives players clearer next steps than sending everyone the same generic workout.

9. Build accountability into learning plays and drills.

The episode describes assigning a play or drill for players to review at home, then checking who completed it before practice.  That can make practice time more productive and help players take ownership of learning the team’s system.

10. Protect young athletes in coach communication.

Mike Grey describes a safeguard in which a guardian is automatically copied when a coach messages a minor, with no private coach-player messaging through the app.  Coaches and programs should use clear communication practices that protect athletes and adults alike.

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THANKS, MIKE GREY

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TRANSCRIPT FOR MIKE GREY – CO-FOUNDER OF BRAVARA – EPISODE 1315

[00:00:00] Narrator: The Hoop Heads Podcast is presented by Head Start Basketball.

[00:00:20] Mike Grey: Bravara is where automation meets youth sports. So with our website and our app, we are really key on automating these administrative workflows, the player experience, the family experience, the coach experience in youth sports. So we’re streamlining it like no one’s ever seen before and improving the quality of the experience for everyone at the same time.

[00:00:45] Mike Klinzing: Mike Gray is the co-founder of Bravara, a youth sports league management tool that streamlines evaluations, team building, scheduling, communications, and player development. Ever since I founded Head Start Basketball in 1993, we’ve helped young players develop their skills, confidence, and love for the game.

Now we’re partnering with coaches and athletic programs to bring the Head Start Basketball camp experience to new communities. Our camps run for five days, three hours per day, and serve boys and girls in grades one through six. You or someone on your staff directs the on-court portion of the camp while Head Start Basketball manages registration, promotion, parent communication, T-shirts, trophies, website setup, and administration.

There are no upfront camp planning headaches, and the profits are divided fifty-fifty between your program and Head Start Basketball. If you want to reach more families or strengthen your youth basketball pipeline or just create additional revenue for your program, visit headstartbasketball.com to explore hosting a camp.

[00:01:45] Phil White: Hi, this is Phil White, author of “The Leader’s Mind,” and you’re listening to the Hoop heads podcast.

[00:01:53] Mike Klinzing: Pay close attention and jot down some notes as you listen to this episode with Mike Gray, co-founder of Bravara. Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here tonight without my co-host, Jason Sunkel, but I am pleased to be joined by Mike Gray from Bravara.

Mike, welcome to the Hoop Heads pod.

[00:02:12] Mike Grey: Thank you, Mike. Appreciate you having me on.

[00:02:14] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on. Looking forward to diving into all of the things that Bravara can do. But for our audience who maybe hasn’t read the show notes yet, give us a quick idea of what Bravara is all about, and then we’re going to dive a little bit into your backstory before we get into all the nitty-gritty details of what Bravara can do.

[00:02:32] Mike Grey: You got it. No, sounds great. So Bravara is where automation meets youth sports. So with our website and our app, we are really key on automating these administrative workflows, the player experience, the family experience, the coach experience in youth sports. So we’re streamlining it like no one’s ever seen before and improving the quality of the experience for everyone at the same time.

[00:02:59] Mike Klinzing: Awesome. I can’t wait to hear all the details and share those with our audience of coaches and see how it can benefit them in the work that they’re doing. Before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit about your background as an athlete, your background in tech, your background of, hey, how do you get to this idea of Bravara and putting it all together?

So just kinda lay out sorta your bio, for lack of a better way of saying it.

[00:03:25] Mike Grey: Sure thing. You bet. Growing up like a lot of us listening to your podcast and guest speakers on, grew up just playing a lot of sports. I played a lot of baseball and soccer and got into basketball on the on the playgrounds and the courts outdoor courts around town to play with friends.

And on the basketball part though, Mike, I have to say I married into a basketball family, okay? My wife played quite a bit of basketball growing up was a, a very, very competent player in high school. And she can tell you her story one day. She had the, had an opportunity to play at Division I and then li- life kinda took her a different direction.

So that, that’s a story for her one day to share. But between her and her brothers and a nephew and a cousin and an uncle and so forth- We’ve got the they have covered the whole spectrum of the basketball experience, from recreational to competitive youth to college to professional in the United States and abroad all represented within her family.

I have to tell you, the family reunions, family gatherings are quite interesting. They’ve got quite the basketball crew going, and maybe a little bit as we go into our call, I’ll tell you a fun story about one of those family gatherings over Christmas and how I really have to be aware of whom I’m around on the court because these guys don’t mess around.

But it’s it’s a great time, and I’ve come to to learn and love basketball more through my wife and her family. And I kid you not, one time I was getting into it, and, we have kids, so I was playing the video game with my kids, and I’m like, honey, I, I think basketball might actually be like the best sport here.”

… ‘Cause there’s just so many so many different aspects to it that I wasn’t exposed to in other sports. So anyway that’s my athletic background playing as a kid and just always enjoying being active and being around around sports and activity. Professionally, I’ve been in a, a career of sales and marketing for about 20 years, and about three years ago on the other side of town, I ran into a guy.

His name’s Brian. Spoiler alert he’s now my co-founder, okay? And we got to chatting, and he coached his kids, and I coach my kids, and I was on a board member for a rec league, and we were comparing notes on our experience now as dads with our kids and their their sports activities.

And comparing notes and, what, what’s going well for you where did things struggle, and we really landed on, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool, wouldn’t it be fun if Brian could take his career in software development, put it together with a little bit of my sales and marketing experience, really understanding users and what they need to solve problems?”

is where my mind is. And if we could put that together and create some solutions to some of these challenges that we all see in youth sports some of the common ones that people talk about, maybe some of the lesser-known ones that, that still could use a little bit of a boost to improve efficiency a-and quality in the experience.

That’s what brought us here. We took our experience and then just started talking with a lot of people, okay? Just started talking with a lot of league administrators and coaches to ask, “This is what we’re seeing. What are you seeing? Where do we line up? What else do we not see that you have as a solution or a problem that we could work on?”

And that has led us to a, a pretty nice basket of product now that we have solutions for a variety of problems.

[00:06:36] Mike Klinzing: What was the number one thing that maybe you guys thought was a bottleneck, and then how did that compare to what you were hearing from league administrators?

[00:06:45] Mike Grey: Yeah, sure. Our earliest kind of identifier of what could really use improvement and efficiency was this process of evaluating players and then taking those evaluations to form a lot of teams in a very short amount of time.

And yes, that is most common at the recreational level. I would say for any club administrators out there sometimes you have your competitive arm of your club, but then you also run a house league or a rec league in your club as well. And so there is overlap in terms of how this data is collected on players to log and record very easily in an organized way.

Hey, this player’s really, strong on shooting, let’s rate him a four out of five there. A little weaker on passing, three out of five, et cetera, et cetera. So what we saw ourselves and a lot of people echoed to us was that they were still using paper and clipboards and pens and the whole thing, right?

And then so get this A lot of folks let’s say you have 300, 400, 500 players to evaluate in one weekend or maybe two weekends worth, and then you have to roster teams that you really want to be competitively balanced teams. And this is where quality comes in, because we all know what it’s like to show up at your kid’s game and they just get spanked, 86 to 12 in a basketball game or whatever, and it’s just no fun, and Grandma and Grandpa came from 30 minutes away to watch that game and, it– little Timmy is just, tired out and discouraged at the whole thing, and so this process from evaluating players, skills assessments, and leading that into roster formation, team creation, either through a coach’s draft process or with a board member, someone like you or I sitting down at a spreadsheet, no kidding, taking a stack of papers this tall from coaches that evaluated players, and manually entering all these data points for all these player ratings, and then figuring out, okay, let me average them because multiple evaluators were involved.

And I’m just talking 10, 20 hours of work sometimes. So there was our first opportunity to say, “Let’s get rid of the paper and the pen. Let’s just digitize this.” And we got a, a real streamlined process I can walk you through if you like just on, on how to minimize, absolutely minimize the need for manual entry and take data and automatically put it right where you need it.

Coaches enter the scores on their phones now with the player list already automatically populated, no manual entry in any of this, and then coach just puts the scores in once. Coach retains those scores for themselves if they’re going to do a live draft and they want to know who to pick. League administrators have the ability to log those scores season over season, refer back to them, et cetera.

So there’s a lot of variation we’ve learned or some variation in this process from league to league, and what we’ve really done is a good job of listening to all these variations and building solutions that will map exactly to your journey. And so we’ll have an onboarding call, for example, and just say, “Hey, tell us about how you’re used to doing things.

How do you want to keep it the same? How do you want to make it different?” And then we just line up what our technology does and say, “Yeah, we match you here. Hey, we have a suggestion here. You could even make it better. What do you think?” And at the end of the day, Mike our customers are saving about 70% of their time that they used to spend.

70% of it is gone and and now they’re– What used to take 10, 20 hours of admin work to evaluate and roster, 300, 400, 500 kids is down to about maybe a couple hours of admin work.

[00:10:25] Mike Klinzing: All right, so I’m going to give you a real-life example here. All right. So I have for many years here in my hometown, for a while, I was just the, quote, “evaluator.”

I would come in and help to evaluate players for our travel basketball program, where we would have, let’s say, it’s for grades three through six, boys and girls, and we might have in one particular grade, let’s just say we have 40 kids, and we want to see if we can field how many competitive teams out of that 40 kids.

And so what’s always been done is we have the list of 40 ki- let’s just call it fifth-grade boys. So we have a list of 40 fifth-grade boys that have registered for the program. That list of 40 fifth-grade boys comes in on a piece of paper with a clipboard. On that clipboard, it will have whether the kid was on a team last year, which team they were on.

Were they on the A team? Were they on the B team? Were they on the C team? Did they try out last year and get cut, or did they not try out at all, so they’re completely new to the program? So you have all that information there, and then we might have… Year to year it varies, but we might have a one-hour tryout twi- two times.

We might have an open gym and then two try… it varies, but there’s- Yep, I gotcha … there’s a limited amount of time, obviously, to be able to evaluate.

So there’s typically, we have five evaluators. Everybody watches all the kids play. A lot of times we’ll write down A, B, C, or put a check mark next to a kid who we think is a, c- was correctly placed the last year and should be back on the same group.

But basically what we end up with is with five different people who, even though we talk about it beforehand, kinda how you’re going to evaluate The reality is everybody evaluates differently, and so my check mark and someone else’s plus or someone else’s A or B might be– they might not mean the same thing.

And so eventually what happens is we all come with our ratings after the tryout process is over, we all sit down and we talk about, “Hey, this kid,” or, “this kid,” or, “that kid,” or, “this team,” and whatever, and then we end up parsing it out like that. So that’s the real-life situation. All done again with pen and paper, us in- Yep

in front of each other talking in a meeting. So given that situation, tell me how Bravara helps us to do that more efficiently.

[00:12:52] Mike Grey: Yep. You gotcha. So the first question I would ask someone in your shoes there is where is this data from past seasons currently kept, right? So you talked about what team were they on last season and some of these other factors.

Whether that is in a current software program that you’re using maybe you use like a, a large registration plat-platform. I say large ’cause those tend to be larger companies that do the registration platforms. And so if you have data from prior seasons there, those platforms very typically have a CSV export of your data.

What we’ve done that makes things so simple and eliminate manual entry and editing and all that kind of stuff my co-founder Brian spent a good amount of time on refining this, and it’s working super good, has been for a few years now. You just take your CSV file from your other software system that has some of this data.

Don’t edit it. Don’t follow a template. Don’t stress. Don’t worry about it. Just come over to Bravara, you set up your account, and you import that file. And that– Whatever’s in that file, Bravara will give you an opportunity to map it to match where it belongs in our system, and it prompts you with something that’s usually accurate, say 95% of the time, and if it makes a mistake, you can adjust it.

So it’s really super, super friendly that way. That brings your current data that you have over to us and puts it right where it needs to go. That is already just like a breath of fresh air “Oh, great. It’s right where I need to go with very little effort.” If instead you keep that data, I don’t know maybe spread across a few spreadsheets or a note here and a spreadsheet there and some paper here true in that situation, to get yourself started in this journey of better efficiency, you will want to consolidate that information.

It could be o- into one spreadsheet, into multiple spreadsheets is fine. You could do multiple imports to Bravara. But yeah, that’s that’s just where you want to start. And that is potentially, and ideally, that is the last spreadsheet you’re going to touch, okay? It’s just to get everything over to us the first time.

Or from season to season, if you have a new enrollment data set, then okay, then each season, one time, one import of a spreadsheet. Again, no editing, no template, and then you’re you’re good to go. So we’ll map it from there. So that’s how you bring the data over, and then like you said coaches are going to show up with this player list.

In your CSV export or in your– from your registration data, your sign-up forms, or however you have gathered this information it typically has that division for that player that they signed up for. And Bravara recognizes that and categorizes every player automatically from the get-go. Coach opens the phone.

They see, I say coach or evaluator, ’cause yes, coaches themselves can be evaluators, or like you, Mike you can be an independent evaluator, right? And there are credentials and logins for these folks to see what they need to see the way that the administrator wants it to be. So lots of customization, visibility, access the whole thing there.

But you’ll show up, Mike, to the gym, and you’ll see the divisions laid out that you’ve been invited to evaluate. You tap a division. There’s the whole player list. There’s an automatic assigning of a number that the player can wear on the shirt i- if you like that method. Some people skip it- Yep … and just go off of the name.

Fine. You have a little search bar to search for a name if that’s what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’ve got numbers that are in order. You tap a player, it brings up their profile sheet. You’ve got your categories that you can customize, that you want to look for to evaluate. You can customize your scale.

You’ve got a stopwatch built in if you want to do timed runs. You’ve got so many things. In addition, like you said, that data that comes from prior seasons or prior, registration information, that can also populate right into the evaluation sheet if you like and/or into the draft section of the app.

That’ll be a fun one for us to talk about. It’s a fantasy style live draft adapted to youth sports for some very, youth sport friendly and needed mechanisms. So that’s a fun one. But yeah, that’s that’s the process to get the evaluation in the app with the coaches and evaluators.

You touched on a topic that actually could potentially open to quite a discussion. I’ll keep it limited for now, but that is quality of ratings And the fact that what you, Mike, see and rate to three or a four or a five might be different from what I see, right? I will say that typically folks that have been around the game, whether it’s this game or another sport, when you’ve been in it for a while you we tend to see more alignment on what people consider on that scale.

When you have a variety of folks across experience level of coaching and evaluating, they tend to vary more in, in what they consider the right number. Again, a lot that could go into quality of ratings, but I’ll say this I’ll hit a couple bullet points for now. And that is it is helpful to calibrate in conversation your evaluators to discuss, “Hey, this is what a one looks like for our purposes.

This is what a two looks like, a three, a four, a five,” et cetera. A little bit of conversation can go a long way to level set everybody on what these ratings mean. A couple other interesting options. This is another reason why you should use software instead of paper for all of this, and that is because, Mike, a computer can analyze this data and manage it so much faster than you and I can, right?

And so when coach put these, puts these ratings into the app, which by the way, you don’t even have to have cell phone or Wi-Fi reception in your gym for this to work, okay? So it works offline. As long as you’ve downloaded the app beforehand, which populates all the players, then you’ll enter the scores when you’re in the gym, and if you don’t have reception, then when you do regain your cell reception or Wi-Fi, open the app, give it 30 seconds, and it all syncs up automatically.

Okay. So as this data is syncing to the league accounts or the admin account, we do some really fun things with the quality of ratings to improve it, especially when you have these really large programs or rec leagues that might have, they might have eight, nine, 10 evaluators or coaches. Some of them are the coaches’ parents, right?

And then, and this coach is trying to sandbag the, the ratings here so that he can gain advantage this way, and, oh, he’s going to overrate here because he knows that’s a coach’s kid, and he’s going to slot that kid higher in, in, in the draft to make sure that there’s no make sure that he takes advantage of every possible competitive advantage he can.

All right. So We know there’s a lot of interesting things that people can do, and our software automatically builds in some protections for all of that. We have something called Rating IQ. When you activate Rating IQ when you have at least five evaluators it will automatically identify outliers and toss them out.

It’s like, hold on a second. We’ve got five evaluators, and four of them are rating around the, the two to three range, and then somebody rated a five? What’s this? Toss it out. Okay? So we automatically toss out outliers. The person who entered that rating won’t know that their rating was tossed out of the average.

It just automatically gets tossed. Again, five ratings or more, if coach rates their own kid There’s just too much chance for bias. We just automatically take it out. Whether it fits in the average or not, we just toss it, okay? And so these are a couple of things. There’s also normalization of data.

This gets a little more technical but we can software very easily can identify if Mike Gray has a tendency to rate players consistently lower, but Mike Klinzing has a consistency of rating tendency to rate consistently higher. The software can identify these things very quickly and just make a little bit of a nudge of an adjustment to normalize the data.

So these are some examples. There’s even a few more. But there you go, Mike. I think I covered player data coming into the system, collection of that data being very user-friendly in the app, automatically syncing to the league or admin accounts, and that data now going through an analysis already without any effort, no finger-lifting preparing you for the next step, which is either your live draft to form your teams or in your case, Mike, that could j- just be a group of evaluators or administrators talking about, “Hey, let’s all sit in a room and now talk about these players.

We need to decide who is qualified to join the competitive team.” And some folks have a mechanism where those who don’t make the competitive team, then they go into a draft pool in a rec league, all under the same umbrella. So whatever your, again, whatever your process, we match you out and and meet you where you’re on at.

The, the other third option is for a board member like you or I, to sit at the computer with Bravara and say, “Hey, Bravara, I have a list of criteria that I like to use to form my teams. I need my teams to be competitively balanced for a good quality recreational program, and it’s better for player development as well.

I also want to group my players by the school they attend because I like to, I like them to build, team camaraderie that way.” Or maybe it’s I need to I need to honor friend requests, right? ‘Cause our league– what if your league likes to honor friend requests, and some don’t because they’re concerned that creates stacked teams, right?

Oh, this, this friend requests that friend, requests that fr- friend, and you get the daisy chain of these all-star players, right? So we can consult with you on a couple of things to help manage that as well. But I’ll let’s get to tech speak real quick, and I’ll then I’ll turn it back to you for questions.

Tech speak real quick on our AI team builder. So in this situation, we’re talking about criteria for team formation. And people often want to create these ideal rosters and just don’t have the time because if I put this player here, it messes up the balance there. But wait, I messed up my friend request.

But wait, they had a coach request. But hold on, they’re at the wrong school. It’s just so much stuff. So what the technology is, we call it AI Team Builder. It does use AI. I think the analogy there is more like a AI-assisted. If you think about self-driving cars this is actually a really good analogy here.

When self-driving cars were kinda new, the technology were– was almost a little bit oversold. It’s like, “Oh, they totally drive themselves,” right? No, n-n-n-no, that’s not it, right? And now we have what we call full self-driving, but even that needs to be, n-needs a human presence to keep it safe and effective, right?

So in that spectrum of very little AI or all A-AI, I would call us somewhere in the middle for sure. And the other aspect of the program, it’s really a constraint-solving program. So it has constraints, it has a defined optimal solution, and the computer does what you or I do, but lightning fast.

It tries all these iterations of possible team rosters, and then it checks against your criteria, and it does this, it’ll iterate 10,000, maybe a million times over a few minutes, and it says, “Hey, I found the best one. I found the best solution for your, for all your rosters.” And now, Mike, you’ve rostered, you can roster 20, 50, you could roster 100 teams in five minutes

[00:23:34] Mike Klinzing: So let me ask you, I want to come back to a couple things, but just in relation to that last point that you just made in terms of forming the teams, right?

Because we’ve all seen many different ways of taking a list of kids and making them into a team, right? There’s the just random, I count every, whatever, I have 10 teams in the league, I just count every 10th kid, and that kid goes on this team, whatever. We’ve seen the we try to look at what their height is.

We try to look at what their experience is, and we try to balance that all out. And so again, I know people… I haven’t personally had to do that piece of it for anything that I’ve done, but I do know people who work for our local recreation department that when they’re putting together, again, the, quote, “draft,” the way that our community typically does it is a coach would draft three players, so typically their kid and then two other players, and then the rest of the roster is just randomly assigned.

But I know that process is very unscientific based upon what the parent puts in of the kid’s height, who, if they’re anything like me, when my kids were seven years old, I have no idea when I’m filling out the form what height my- I hear you … kid is when they’re seven. I’m probably just writing down anything.

So who knows how accurate any of the data is- Fair point, yep … that they’re getting. But so I guess the question is, what kind of feedback have you gotten from leagues, administrators about how well what your tool does, how well does it do it, I guess is my question.

[00:25:04] Mike Grey: Sure thing. Yeah. I would love someday, Mike, to have just some real hard data and, like white paper and this kind of stuff, on, on, on tracking- Yeah

Before and after and season over season, the old way, the new way. Until then what I can share is just the, the anecdotal information the feedback that the league administrators have given us. So what they’re seeing is fewer mercy rule games Okay, and leagues can have different rules around that.

Smaller margins of victory again, fewer blowout games with or without a mercy rule, fewer blowout games. They’re seeing they’re seeing more defensible rosters which we didn’t really start with that being our objective, but I will say administrators are a lot more comfortable, a lot more confident with the rosters that they build with Bravara.

And if they ever do get questioned on it, they’re able to speak to the fairness of it all. The com- the competition outcome, just more, more level set in terms of these games fewer blowouts for sure. They’re talking about the satisfaction of families and players. There are some leagues that we work with that did not used to allow friend requests, again, because it was too much time and too much risk of imbalance.

We showed them a better way to do it, and they reintroduced it to their community because as probably a lot of us have heard from the Aspen Institute and others who study, youth sports, what are kids looking for? What do they value the most? They want to have fun and play with friends, and if we can allow some of these kids and to, to each league their own circumstances, right? But I will say in my community across multiple sports, I’ve heard that particularly when young girls start playing, it can actually be even more important for them to have a friend on a team.

And again leagues are telling us they’re now able to honor these things honor these requests, even practice day conflicts they’re able to manage with our system here for a, a, a more family-friendly experience

[00:26:55] Mike Klinzing: I love the idea of reducing or coming close to eliminating blowouts, which again, any parent who has ever sat through that, and I always say it’s not really fun on either side.

I guess it’s more fun to be on the winning side of that, but it’s not fun either way. Your kids aren’t getting a whole lot out of it if they’re on the winning side, and certainly if you’re on the losing side of that, nobody leaves that experience thinking, “Wow, that was fun.” And again, I always look at youth sports, Mike, a- as a situation where as a coach or as a league or me running camps in the summertime, whatever it might be, that I want the experience for a kid to be a positive one, so they want to return either to my team if I’m a coach, to my league if I’m an administrator, to my camp if I’m a camp director.

I want that experience to be a positive one, and if you’re experiencing half your games being games that you’re not even competitive in, or conversely, games that you’re just killing other teams, that’s not really very fun for anybody, and it makes it much less likely that people are going to return. And so if you guys can help to assist in making those teams fair, I can see the value in that.

Forget about the time savings and all this stuff, but just the ability to balance a team and make it fair and make it so there are less games that turn into blowouts, you’re going to end up with a better experience for everybody across the board. The teams that are slightly better and the teams that are slightly below, they’re still going to have a better experience than when you have a gap that’s huge in that way.

You’re absolutely right. I want to go back to something that you said about the evaluations, ’cause it’s something when I think about just trying to evaluate and put kids on teams, and I know when I was looking through the website and just kinda trying to figure out some questions that I wanted to ask, this was one of the questions that kind of piqued my curiosity anyway, and then you talked a little bit about it in terms of when you’re evaluating, being able to customize What are the criteria that I’m evaluating on?

So it looked to me like, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you had a couple of tiers of there was a basic model where there was some things that were automatically populated, and then if I want to go to a next tier, maybe that gives me more control over the customization of the different criteria I can put in.

So just talk a little bit about that when it comes to the evaluation process.

[00:29:19] Mike Grey: Yeah, you’re exactly right. Our free plan includes our default categories. For whatever sport you are, we have some default categories loaded for you, and that’s also on a default scale of one to five, and yes, it accepts decimal points.

And that’s what you get in our free plan. If you choose to upgrade we have a per player charge per season. You can take a look on our website to see how that, that pricing structure works. But with that, you get a lot of customization options one of them being customizing your categories.

So we just do a basic, shooting, dribbling, rebounding and we’ve got a couple more in there for our default. If you have a little bit more preferred or perhaps more tried and true for your program evaluation method and like I mentioned before, if you like to do timed runs for speed or not again, this is for multiple sports.

We see a lot of that in flag football, a lot of timed runs. But anything you want you can customize those on the website as an administrator, and then that pushes out to all those coaches so that everyone is entering data in the same type of evaluation categories.

[00:30:17] Mike Klinzing: All right. So that answers those two questions for me, which I think were the two main things that, again, when I think about my own personal situation and things that I’ve done, those are categories or areas that I’m like, “Oh, that really I could see where that could help me to be able to streamline what it is that I’ve done in the past.”

Another thing that I know you guys do has to do with then once the teams are made, then there’s the scheduling piece, right? And everybody who used to do a schedule by hand knows how that takes. I’ll even give you an example. Like at camp, I don’t have that many teams, so it’s usually not that difficult.

But in leagues that have 100 teams, things get a little bit more complicated. But even that being said, I’ll sit down and I have 13 teams, and I’ll have an old piece of paper that I printed off the internet 15 years ago that has the round robin for 13 teams, and I’ll be like, “Round one versus two, three versus four, five versus six.”

And I’ll literally hand write that in my notebook as I’m going through for the week and putting that together. So for somebody like me or for somebody who has a, a larger league where doing it by hand with 100 teams isn’t really feasible, tell me a little bit about how Bravara can help with the scheduling side of things.

[00:31:26] Mike Grey: Yeah, you bet. If you remember, I mentioned the constraint-solving program that our AI team builder leans on, right? You have criteria, you have constraints. The computer works out the iterations and gives you the solution. It’s the same concept for the AI schedule maker, okay? There’s three kinds of schedules to make in Bravara.

You can do your game schedule for the season so like a recreational program and map out, 10 weeks or whatever your timeline is of your game schedule. We have a practice schedule. It could be built at the same time so you can run these together. And then we’re just in the final stages, putting the final s- final touches on a tournament scheduling, okay?

So that’ll be an interesting one and that we’re diving into some different structures and inputs for tournament scheduling. You had a, a speaker on recently who we align really well on his values. He does he does these developmental tournaments, right? And I love the idea.

I absolutely love it because, again, whether you’re a recreational league trying to have evenly matched competition for the quality of the experience, both on a player development level and also just a family experience level, again in the travel ball travel competition realm in these tournaments, again, you want to have evenly matched competition for the quality of the experience for everyone involved and for the quality of player development.

So I love it, and if you think about it if you think about the data that Bravara has and the way we collect data when it comes to tournament scheduling, that’s going to be a very interesting area of growth that we can work on. Because yes, we can take inputs of team history or even individual player history of data that might be in Bravara or even pull that data from somewhere else and work it into these really well-crafted brackets and so forth for the scheduling.

Again, the tournament section of Bravara scheduling is in the works putting some final touches on. So in the meantime What a league administrator could do who has, 100 teams or whatever to to schedule for the season. If you’ve used Bravara for your player evaluations and your, either your fantasy style live drafts or your AI team builders as, as we’ve mentioned guess what?

That data flows right into the AI schedule builder. So the schedule builder already knows who your teams are. We already know who the parents are who have players in different divisions. We already know who the coaches are and whether they have a team in this division only, or they have two or three div- teams across divisions.

So all that data is already there, and it feeds without a touch of a button. It’s already there for the schedule builder as some of these constraints. So here are some of the constraints that we apply by default, and then other ones that you can apply yourself to really get these schedules mapped out just pristine the first time.

A lot of programs out there, if you’re using a schedule builder, some of them even call themselves AI schedule builder, at least the feedback that we’re hearing is you run it once and then you still have to spend five hours to fix it. I’m just saying that’s what people tell us, right?

And so some of the criteria on ours is you’ll have no coach conflicts which I know some other programs can do that as well but we take it a step further. You’ll have no parent conflicts, meaning, Mike, you’re going to be able to see both your kids’ games and you won’t have an overlap. If it’s mathematically possible, Bravara will find that possibility and that’s the schedule that’ll be built.

So no coach conflicts, no parent conflicts. We can vary the start time of games by venue by court space. So you can divvy up, I have this rec center here,” or, “I have this outdoor court here,” whatever it may be. You tell the system what all your venues are. You tell Bravara how that venue is sliced up in terms of space, which space is for which division, ’cause maybe you’re doing the crossways for your lower divisions, and you got the full court for your upper divisions, et cetera.

So you put all this criteria and constraints in. We even vary things like in basketball, I don’t know if it’s as important as, as some other games other sports like like baseball maybe really likes to vary the home and away. Okay? So hey, this team’s always home team. What’s with that, so we mix up the home and away games. We make sure the same team doesn’t always have the Wednesday night seven o’clock game every single week, or the 8:00 a.m. game on Saturday. Like we vary start times for teams. We put the younger divisions in the earlier time slots, especially on weeknights, because we don’t want them going to bed late, right?

And so we do all this stuff automatically, and you have options. We show you these smart defaults we call them, and you have the option to turn them on or off, right? And then so you can really customize what is important to you and how to get the schedule built. So between the venues, the dates, the days of the week.

Mike, we also manage overtime or I should say overcapacity and reschedules automatically, okay? So before it was, hold on a second, it rained, or if you have outdoor basketball, right? But you can tell my mind’s in, in soccer right now. Soccer season is still- … about, about to wrap up, and we’re about to get into ba- basketball.

But rain outs in soccer or whatever your reason for cancellation, right? Actually, maybe it was a rain out because there was a leak in the roof, huh? May- maybe that could happen too. There you go. Okay. There we go. Yep. So whatever the reason for your cancellation, before Bravara, it sometimes could mess up your whole schedule.

You almost had to rebuild it all. Or it was I’m going to leave the schedule, but where do I fit this? I don’t know. I have to check my capacity. Do I do it on a Sunday? Do I do it on a weeknight?” Et cetera. You set the rescheduling rules yourself in Bravara when you generate that season schedule, and you tell it, “Yeah, if I overflow to a Tuesday or a Sunday or at the end of the season or whatever.”

And so you set all this criteria, Mike, and you hit the button, and the thing goes to work for you. And about 10 minutes later you could have 400 games scheduled flawlessly with all these criteria met. We are in what I call late beta stage for this product build. Early beta stage was when there was a hiccup it took us maybe two to three days to fix it and then that schedule produced successfully.

Late beta stage I describe as it takes us maybe an hour to– or two to fix something if there is a little fix needed. So that’s where we are and really confident and we’ve been successful in our last several runs. They’ll either be right the first time or with just a little bit of a tweak from from Brian, the developer.

He’ll do a tweak, and that schedule will be ready within just a couple hours.

[00:37:31] Mike Klinzing: Couple things that jump out at me there. One is the not double booking parents, hence their kids, so that a parent can, A, get their kid to the game that they need to get to, but also then be able to watch them play. That’s a concern that anybody who’s been involved in youth sports and sat in the stands has heard people voice over and over again “We’re just running from here to there,” or, “My wife is with Suzy, and I’m here with Johnny, and I want to be able to see both of them play.”

And it’s just, isn’t possible. Which again, if they’re in a different league, understandable. If they’re in- … the same league, man, if you could solve that problem.

[00:38:10] Mike Grey: Yeah. All, all the info’s under one roof in the same league, right? So we have the data. Correct. It was just too hard to wrestle the data before.

Yep. Yep … and now that’s what Bravara does, is it does it for you.

[00:38:19] Mike Klinzing: For sure. And then same thing, concept with coaches who are coaching multiple teams, which I know again, here in my community, when our recreation department is asking for people to coach teams, oftentimes it’s the same person who steps up who has multiple kids, and they’re coaching two teams.

Yeah. And then that’s something that the league administrator has to be con- conscious of and be worried about is figuring that out. And again, I’m not involved necessarily in that process, but I can imagine that at various times, depending upon how that’s done, that it’s not a fun process of whack-a-mole, trying to figure out how to get this game here, and then you move that, and then all of a sudden it messes up this and that.

And so- Yeah … again, building- It unravels quickly … for your software to be… Yeah, to be able to take care of that, to me, makes a ton of sense. And-

[00:39:06] Mike Grey: Yeah …

[00:39:06] Mike Klinzing: then the other piece of it- And Mike, Go

[00:39:08] Mike Grey: ahead. Yeah. Can I do one more for you real quick? You mentioned- Sure … these, these coaches are stepping up and what’s their availability?

Did anybody think to ask them, and I know I, as a coach, sometimes I had to tell the league, “Hey, listen I just can’t do Tuesdays. Okay? Like I’ve… my work schedule is such, I just, Tuesdays I’ll never be on time. I can’t do it.” And again, it was just another chore, another heavy lift for these administrators to keep track of all this stuff.

So check out what we’ve done. In the same Bravara app that you’ve done the evals, the live draft the team format team formation AI is on the website, but the, the, the app for the evals and your draft is done from the app as well, is also a communications module. And these same coaches that have probably participated in the evaluations, or you’ve at least added them to teams that for team formation’s sake, okay?

You can do forms in Bravara. You can create forms to ask their availability A few clicks on the website, or you could do it in the app as well as an administrator, you say, “Hey,” and we have a default templated form for you to ask coach availability. You send the coach availab- availability form out to all these folks that are already in the app.

They answer the questions. That data does not have to be double entered, just entered one time. It’s in the system. And guess what, Mike? That’s another criteria that goes into the AI schedule builder. It already knows the coach availability criteria to make sure the practices and games are scheduled around everybody’s availability.

[00:40:30] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. It’s amazing. Every time I talk to someone like yourself who is at this intersection of sports and tech, and I know that the tech and AI and just what it’s doing in all different areas of work, life, society, it’s always amazing to me when you think about what we used to do or how we used to do it, and then just the amount of time that can be saved by just setting up the correct system that runs in the background to be able to make all this stuff work.

And that goes back for me to something that I want to just dive a little bit deeper into it with you. You talked a little bit about our previous guest that we had on, John Verdine, who runs DY Sports, and the idea of running a tournament that’s not an elite tournament, but a tournament that is more at a lower level for teams that have difficulty finding competitive games, that don’t want to go into a tournament and lose two of their games by 60 points, so they can have one competitive game.

Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. And then you said something that piqued my interest, which I think is probably ultimately where grassroots basketball is headed in some way. And again, I don’t know the exact path. You probably maybe have a better idea even than I do. But when I envision sort of the AI piece that you talked about, where we now have all this data about teams and their performance, and they’re in this tournament, and here’s their scores, and they played this team, and this team, and now we have the data not just from that team, but we’ve got the three teams that they played against.

And so you start collecting and accumulating all that data. And one of the things that I think is always A struggle for teams is when I go in this tournament, how do I know who I’m going to play and if I’m going to get good games? I’ll give you an example. The guy who coaches my daughter’s AAU team, he is a huge proponent of trying to find the best teams in every tournament that we play, and he’s not really concerned about the teams, if we win, we lose, winning a tournament.

He says, “If we’re going to go and play three games this weekend, we want all three games to be competitive games where we’re going to have an opportunity to test ourselves.” And so when I think about what you’re talking about and when I think about kind of the future of what this looks like, I start seeing all this data being compiled, and then when I enter a tournament, now my team’s data gets compared with the data of all the other teams that are in our division, and you start to be able to figure out and put these teams into matchups where, again, the goal is to create competitive games that both teams get a lot out of it.

So I know that, again, we’re talking more, this is something that’s coming, but just talk a little bit about kind of-

[00:43:14] Mike Grey: Yeah …

[00:43:15] Mike Klinzing: is my vision kind of the correct one? Am I seeing what I think could happen? Does it seem like that’s a possibility at some point moving forward?

[00:43:22] Mike Grey: We think so. Yeah, we definitely think so.

There is so much untapped data in youth sports that we can use to improve the experience for everybody. And I’ve mentioned it a couple times that it really all, it really does keep coming back to It improves player development, right? That, that player that you mentioned and that team that you mentioned that just crushes all the other teams because they’re a stacked team in the league or the tournaments or whatever, right?

What did they really learn? We don’t grow. Pe- people do not grow without a challenge that is able to be overcome. So what that means is, if you’re that upper hand team, you weren’t presented with any meaningful challenge in that game, guess what? You didn’t get better, okay? And unfortunately, especially in rec leagues and can happen at tournaments too, you’re not going to go back to the same tournament, you’re not going to go back to the rec league when you feel like, “I’m too good for this,” okay?

As an individual or as a player as a family, and you take off. And I’ve seen it happen in my community so many times across different sports. Those high achievers in the recreational teams, their, their chest is broad and, their shoulders are back and they’re feeling so confident, and they take off and they go form a, a travel team or join a travel team.

That same rec team converted to a travel team, same coach, they go to a travel tournament, they get crushed, and so there definitely is sometimes, may- maybe often, at least sometimes, this misunderstanding that players not s- players are the kids, so I don’t put much on them, right?

But their parents have this misunderstanding of, “Where does my kid really fit in this huge wide world of youth sports and competitive levels?” Like, where do they fit? And I really do think that This goldmine of data that exists in youth sports, Bravara is doing more and more to capture that data. I’ll give you another example that we’re about to roll out here just probably within a week or two.

In, in if you’re collecting a game card on paper that’s the rollout in a week or two. Let me say this for our basketball audience, though. We have a variety of free tools for league administrators and coaches. One of the free tools we have is a scoreboard. It’s web-based.

You just, you go to the website and you’re doing a scoreboard. If you want to connect it by Bluetooth or cable to a TV in the room for everyone to see, that’s fine. You can have a live feed for those who are not present at the game so they can at least be tracking the score. My point here, Mike, is that even game cards or game sheets or game data is one of these goldmines of data in youth sports that hardly anybody is doing anything with.

Follow me on this for a second. If we can collect essentially box scores, okay, throughout the game so we collect data throughout the game, they turn into a box score at the end, right? We’re tracking who’s scoring the points, what position they’re playing if it’s a position-relevant sport what’s how many fouls free throws, attempts made, three-pointers, all this kind of stuff, right?

And if s- by the end of the season, we’ve got a lot of data on this player now, and our current build with this free scorekeeper is you tap these buttons. My wife was playing with it the other migh- the other night, Mike and okay, for my wife, this scoreboard, this scorekeeper is her favorite thing in Bravara.

She’s like having fun with it, doing all sorts of stuff, okay? So it’s very intuitive. It’s very friendly. At the end of your game, you have an export option to export as a CSV. Our current build would allow you to have that CSV, feed it back into Bravara potentially for data aggregation and for a future season to say, “Hey, I’ve got data on all these players.

I no longer have to rely only on one afternoon of evaluations. Now I have real data from a prior season of that same player that can feed into my AI team builder or feed into my live drafts.” Similar but different is, and this is future for Bravara. We have this in beta testing right now.

But again, that scoreboard right now will i-is shareable so that someone who can’t be at the game can at least log in to see a scoreboard update and track what’s going on. And there are a lot of video and streaming companies out there. Here is where I think Bravara has something unique to, to offer there.

‘Cause you see a lot of the streaming companies and video companies be either so dedicated, so siloed to that, And I give them credit because there are a lot of good ones out there, and what they do well. But I’m answering your question, Mike, in terms of what does the future look like You can be really good at streaming and really lousy at data management.

What are we really doing with that data that might be collected during the video? Is AI interpreting it? How are we using that data? Again, for what purposes? Brevara is all about, roster creation, fair play, all that kind of stuff. But the sky’s the limit. There is so much there that is just completely untapped.

So I do think that you’ll see some really unique things from Brevara, not just, “Hey, there’s a dozen apps out there that I can send messages to my players and my teams and whatever.” Yeah, I get that. Some of these things are connecting pieces, and what you’re going to see from Brevara the more we move forward is Brevara has a really unique way of connecting the different pieces to make this data and information more useful and more meaningful, again, for a better player development experience and a better family experience.

In our communications app right now yeah, all the messaging, all the pictures, the, the video kind of par for the course, right? Standard, standard issue kind of stuff there. We built in some, some child safety guardrails, okay? Th- this is something that, you know, not a lot of people like to talk about ’cause there’s a little bit of risk around it.

It’s oh, there’s, one- once in a great while, there’s some ugly stuff be- between adults and minors in youth sports, right? And it’s really unfortunate, and it’s not something we need to dwell on, but it is something we need to take responsibility for. And so as a software company, what we did was we said, okay in our training modules, our player development modules that we have in our app, which are really unique, that, that’s definitely if I were a coach of an AAU team, a coach of a rec team the first thing I would look at in Brevara is Brevara Reps.

It’s our library of drills you can use to assign players specific drills specific tasks that they can complete at home. They can record themselves doing that, and coach has visibility to that to give feedback on it, okay? You can customize that library and then customize for each player what they need to work on.

This is a great way to enhance player development. Instead of just some, throw against the wall library, this is a tailored library to that player. In that process, Mike, you can see where there could be some coach-player communication happening in the app. So coming back to, to, to safety guardrails, one thing that we do is anytime a coach communicates with a minor in Brevara, the guardian is automatically copied.

You can’t override it, right? So there will be no private communications between an adult and a minor. We don’t reveal the, the, the player’s cell phone number in Brevara to deter a coach from using that to, to contact outside. So if you’re an administrator and you want to de-risk your communication, this would be a great way to do that

[00:50:35] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it’s one of those things that, as you said, it’s unfortunate that we have to have all those guardrails in place, but they’re obviously absolutely necessary where we are as a society right now.

And to be able to enable that communication, but yet at the same time enable it to be done in a way that protects everybody, right? It protects most importantly the child, but it also protects the adult in their interaction because nobody can come back and say, “Hey, you were doing…” Everything is recorded and sent to the guardian, and so there’s- That’s a

[00:51:08] Mike Grey: great point,

[00:51:08] Mike Klinzing: dude.

And you, you- It

[00:51:09] Mike Grey: protects

[00:51:09] Mike Klinzing: the adults as well … yeah, there, there was a-

[00:51:10] Mike Grey: You’re right …

[00:51:10] Mike Klinzing: for sure. And I think that, sometimes we forget about that there it all goes both directions. And again, if everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to do, all the tools become irrelevant, which is the case in 99.99% of coach-athlete interactions.

But again- Yeah … we have to protect ourselves for that- Agreed … for that small percentage. And you talked about the Bravara Reps piece of it, and I think that was the last part that I wanted to get to, was just to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about how that can play into what it is that a coach has at their disposal in terms of the tools, and you explained it a little bit, and when I was going through- Sure

and looking at it, if I want to put together… if I’m your coach, I’m going to put together a plan, “Hey, Mike really needs to work on his ball handling,” so I’m going to put together a 12-minute ball handling routine, or I’m going to give you three or four different videos that have some ball handling stuff that you can do.

So just talk a little bit about exactly how that works. If I’m a coach and you’re my player, or you’re my coach and-

[00:52:06] Mike Grey: Yep …

[00:52:06] Mike Klinzing: i’m your player, how does that process work for utilizing Bravara Reps to be able to get that player development piece of it going?

[00:52:13] Mike Grey: Yeah, absolutely. Bravara Reps has a library of existing YouTube videos.

They’re already out there, they’re on the internet. They can be embedded into our app, and so that’s what we do. You as a coach you’ll look through that library in the app and you can select which videos you want to send to which players. Or you could just say, “Yes, send this video to everyone,” bulk send at once.

And you’re basically tailoring a at home training program for your players. The other thing that you can add to that, two more things that are really important. One is, we like our library. Like we, we think it’s a good library, right? But Mike, what if you know some videos that we don’t have, and you’re just like, “Ah, I have to have these videos,” right?

Any YouTube video that you can find, just have the link for it, bring it on in Bravara, and yes, you can bring your own YouTube videos into Bravara. You can record yourself on your camera and create your own video that, again, will live in Bravara that your players can see, ’cause maybe you just want to demonstrate it your way.

So that’s available as well. The other one is, it’s a little bit of a crossover. It’s, it starts as a separate product, but then it crosses over into Reps, and that’s our Playmaker, okay? A lot of coaches we’re making our our plays on a maybe a whiteboard a sort of clipboard, but whiteboard, and then we draw it up, and we scribble it, and then we erase it, and then we do another one, and all that kind of stuff, right?

Or maybe it’s on paper. There, there’s a lot of ways that people do it. It does… the, the Bravara Playmaker does exist on its own, even if you just wanted to use that by itself, and already what you have is a digital playmaker board, okay? Half court, full court diagram your offense, your defense, both teams, whatever you want.

You’ve got all the symbols, all the the screen, the pla- the pass, the it everything you need. The cuts, the, the dribble, everything is in there So you can create these plays now. You can, again, choose from our library of plays and say, “Yeah, click this, and share it with my team.”

That is already one thing that exists by itself, just the creation of plays and the sharing it with your team. That’s its own free product that everyone can go to right now. Honestly, Mike, if I were, again, like I was saying, if I were an AAU coach or a rec league coach, that is the first thing I would go to Bravaro for.

Again, it’s a little, starts as two products but then overlaps is the Playmaker and the Bravaro Reps. So the overlap where one becomes the other there is instead of just creating a play and sharing it, through a PDF or through an animation, ’cause yes, they do animate by the way, you hit the play button and you see it all work out, right?

So you can just share that kind of with your own method, your own email, your own text, whatever, okay? It overlaps into Reps, now it becomes an at-home assignment for your players. And you will see as a coach who has completed it, who has checked it off. They need to watch it. They need to… If they need to perform it, if it’s like a drill that they need to perform at home again, there are mechanisms now where you as a coach will have visibility to who’s completing these things.

And we a little bit gamified it for the players to make it engaging and fun. They will track their own status on how many of these they’re completing and what they’re learning and doing, and so they feel this boost of, “Hey, this is fun. I get positive feedback. I see my, my s- my stars and my points go up,” and they’re feeling good about learning the game of basketball.

[00:55:23] Mike Klinzing: I love the idea of, A, the accountability, right? The coach can share, and then the coach is able to check and see who’s doing the things or who’s looking at the things that they’ve sent. ‘Cause I know that’s one of the things that coaches sometimes get frustrated with is, “I’ve gone over this play X number of times-” Yes

“and come to practice the next day, and there’s one kid that knows it, and the other nine are looking around ‘I have no idea what… i’ve never even heard of this before.'” So to be able to have some accountability of look next time you come to practice, I’m going to check right before practice to see which of you have gone through and at least looked at this a-and clicked on,” and that’s going to help us to improve as a team.

And then, again, when you then flip it around to the other side, like you talked about, where the athlete can then check it off and see themselves making progress and get some reward as a result of that, again, tremendously valuable from that side of it. I can see it as a kid where it would be attractive.

I can see the value of that as a coach. And I guess what I’m… When I hear you talking about what Bravara can do, and and I’ve had conversations with other people that are in a similar space, that are doing things in the basketball world with AI, with technology, with trying to figure all these pieces out, and with statistics and just the amount of data that’s out there, and I start looking at what is going to be possible moving forward?

How are we going to do that? And it– that, to me, is super interesting, just to see some of the things creatively and just from a tech standpoint that- … five years ago, we all would’ve been like, “There’s no way that we’re ever going to be able to do this or collect this data or have the data and then be able to do all these other things with it.”

And so to me, that’s really exciting. So I guess I would leave you, unless there’s anything else that we didn’t hit on related to the product, which you can go ahead and share as well. But it– I want to leave you with one final question here, which is: as you look out in an ideal world, is there some pie-in-the-sky thought, idea, product that if you could just wave a magic wand a-and make it happen what would the holy grail of what you would see for youth sports, what would that look like for you?

[00:57:31] Mike Grey: Yeah, sure. Gosh I I probably won’t articulate it as well as I would like so I’ll put it out there and do my best as we talk through it. But what I envision and I’m trying to put my finger on as to what it would actually look like and do is it goes back to something I mentioned earlier about parents not really knowing where their kid fits in this wide world of competitive youth sports, right?

Of, from between recreational, competitive youth sports. And- What I think a product could do with good data over time is we can find out, hey, look, if you’re tracking like this in your evaluations, if you’re tracking like this in your team performance, your game performance with this kind of team at this kind of level, and then you go here and then you go there, if we can capture all that, we could have so much more clarity for parents so they don’t go chasing the wrong programs.

Okay? And when we do that, again, coming back to quality of experience and quality of player development, what I see is with more clarity around that data and use of that data and sharing it with parents and improving the quality starting at grassroots I think that parents will be so much more informed on how to guide their child in that journey of sports.

And I think that some of the stigmas on both ends and in between all along the spectrum of the stigma of recreational sports, the stigma of co-competitive and overly competitive sports, all these stigmas that exist, I really think that a good product with good data and good transparency can have a very solid impact on improving quality starting at grassroots.

There will be fewer reasons to leave to programs that don’t meet your needs and probably more stratification of programs so that you’re not leaping from rec to something that’s way out of your league competitive, you don’t belong there either. Okay? So I think that could be materialized over time with the right collection of data and and producing analysis and, presentation of that data in a way that improves it for everybody.

And I do tend to think about the parent first. May-may– that’s where I am right now. I-my, my coaching days, I’m a little removed from it. It’s been a few years since I was coaching, but but you’re absolutely right. The coach actually wrestles with the same issue, which is, I’ve got this team, we’re all invested together here in this experience, I have to find the right tournaments, or I have to find the right matchups.

So the coach actually experiences it just the same but in a different role. And again, if coach can have better data to know where his players are and and lastly, what that does as well with better stratification of where you are in that journey removing stigma, et cetera, I think it also opens the door to a greater acceptance of recreational sports.

And when I say that, I do include pure recreational as well as competitive recreational. I’m leaving just a very thin layer at the top for the sincerely elite programs, okay? And so that, that’s my loose definition there of those categories. But what I’m saying, Mike, is There are a lot of kids that can really enjoy sports and even enjoy it more, and their parents can enjoy it more, and their coaches and the admin.

We all can enjoy this more if we have a more clear understanding of where we belong in this system, and know that there’s a lot of fulfillment to be had in between bottom, top, and in between. And it’s not just this, you’re either at the bottom or you’re at the top and what else is there? I don’t even know.

So I think hopefully that, that put it together well enough. I have… I appreciate the question. I’m going to have to, kinda think it over and better articulate that in the future, but but that’s what I see and what and would love to see in the future.

[01:01:32] Mike Klinzing: No, I think you articulated it honestly very well, and it hit on two points that I think have been talking points here on the podcast, but also just things that I think about and conversations that I have in my normal everyday life.

And those two things to me are, one, I always feel like one of the barriers to kids having a great youth sports experience is parent education, or even parent just understanding of what you talked about, right? What level is my child? We all tend to be biased and think that our child, generally speaking, is better than what they probably are.

We’re all biased as parents. But a lot of times that causes us to chase things, whether that’s higher levels, whether that’s more training, whether that’s a different league, whether that’s a different organization that may not be the right fit for our kid. And so if we can help parents to better understand, as you said, where is it that my kid should be, then that goes back to what we talked about earlier, where now my kid’s on a team where we can play in a league, we can play in tournaments where every game or most every game is competitive, and I’m not playing these games where we’re– my team is killing everybody or vice versa.

I’m not playing in a tournament where I’m getting blown out every single game, which neither of those results in people having a whole lot of fun. And so I think there’s that piece of it. And then the other thing that I think you hit on here is that we’ve gotten to the point where You either kind of progress through the sport and you get to this, quote, “elite level,” and then there are only some kids who can excel at that elite level.

Most kids end up just falling out. And then when they fall out of that elite level at 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, whatever it is, there’s not a place for them to fall back into-

[01:03:31] Mike Grey: Yeah.

[01:03:31] Mike Klinzing: Yeah … where they can still participate. It’s like I’ve gotten to 13 years old. I, my progress has stalled. Maybe I just don’t want to practice five days a week.

Maybe I’m just not good enough. Maybe I want to play another sport. And now I’d love to be able to play in a competitive rec league-

[01:03:47] Mike Grey: Yeah …

[01:03:47] Mike Klinzing: whether it’s basketball or baseball or soccer or whatever it is. But in a lot of places, those opportunities no longer exist. So I go from this kid who’s on this track of being, quote, “elite” or putting in a ton of time-

[01:04:00] Mike Grey: Yeah

[01:04:00] Mike Klinzing: and I don’t want to do that anymore, but I’d still like to play, but that option is gone. There, there just- Yeah … isn’t anything there. And so I think your vision of being able to have all that data to say if you’ve been on this track, this is kind of the space where you can play, and you can find other kids who are on that same pathway.”

That to me makes a lot of sense, and it would be really exciting for youth sports if we could get to that point, because as you said, we could give so many more kids a better experience, but also allow them to play their sport for a lot longer. And we all know the statistics of how many kids drop out and stop playing around age 13, and that they’re just- because of, again, the way that the system is set up. And so I think that’s a, it’s a very good vision, Mike, that you laid out, and I certainly hope that we can get there. Before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance to share how can people find out more about Bravara?

How can they connect with you guys? Give me the website, the app, an email, however, whatever the best way is for them to reach out to you or find out more about Bravara, give that to us, and then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:05:13] Mike Grey: Excellent. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, everyone can log on to bravara.com.

If you’re listening, that’s B-R-A-V-A-R-A, so all the vowels are A. It’s bravara.com. You’ll see that we organize the site by sport, so you can jump into basketball, and you’ll see a basket of free tools there for coaches and administrators. Check those out. Scoreboards, drill library playmaker all sorts of things for you just to get started and jump in.

From there if you’re an administrator running evaluations and forming teams through a fantasy style live draft as we have or other means then you can jump into the more administrative part of our website. All accounts start free. And from there, if you desire to have one of our upgraded tools or features then there’s the per player pricing there that you can look at.

And stick with us ’cause you’re going to see, like I’ve said a lot more connecting of good tools. Software is easier to develop and create, especially from a principal engineer like my co-founder. This is not vibe coded stuff. Vibe code is what I would do because I don’t know any better, right?

But but legit coding with good tools is what my co-founder does, and that’s what Bravara has. So start your account free grow with us, stay with us, watch how we connect things watch how we save time and improve quality of experience for everybody. I think you’ll really be pleased, and appreciate the opportunity to work with y’all.

[01:06:39] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Mike, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us, to walk us through the capabilities that Bravara has. I think if you’re a league administrator, if you’re a coach if you’re a player, you’re a parent, take a look at it, see what the tools are all about.

I think you’ll see that they can benefit you no matter what your role is in youth sports. And again, we’re not just limited to basketball. I know there are people out there that are listening to this that are basketball people that may also be involved and have kids that are involved in other sports, that Bravara is not just strictly a basketball company.

So please be sure to check out what they have. And again, Mike, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time tonight to join us. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening, and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.

[01:07:26] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads Podcast, presented by Head Start Basketball.