SETH GOODLAXSON – GAMECHANGER SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER – EPISODE 1016

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Seth Goodlaxson is the Senior Product Manager at GameChanger.  Seth has extensive experience in product management with a particular passion for sports technology.  GameChanger’s Film Room feature enhances the coaching experience, making it easier for coaches to capture and analyze game footage, ultimately leading to better player development and team performance.

On this episode Mike and Seth talk about GameChanger’s innovative Film Room feature that is designed to enhance the coaching experience in youth basketball. Seth discusses the challenges coaches face in reviewing game footage and how Game Changer aims to simplify this process. He shares his background in sports technology and the importance of making advanced tools accessible to coaches at all levels. The conversation also covers the technology behind the Film Room, the ease of sharing clips with players, and the marketing strategies to reach youth coaches effectively. In this conversation, Mike and Seth discuss the transformative impact of technology on coaching, particularly through the use of film study and video analysis. They explore how tools like Game Changer can enhance the coaching experience, making it easier for coaches to capture and analyze game footage, ultimately leading to better player development and team performance. The discussion also touches on the future of coaching technology, emphasizing the importance of efficiency and automation in supporting coaches’ needs.

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Get ready to learn about the latest features from GameChanger on this episode with GameChanger’s  Senior Product Manager, Seth Goodlaxson.

What We Discuss with Seth Goodlaxson

• How the Game Changer app is revolutionizing coaching by making video analysis more accessible for coaches at all levels
• The Film Room feature aims to simplify film review for coaches and allows coaches to mark critical moments during game footage for better player development
• How coaches can easily capture, analyze, and share game footage with players and parents
• AI technology helps streamline the film review process
• By utilizing AI and computer vision, Game Changer automatically removes dead time from game footage
• GameChanger’s goal is to provide valuable insights without adding to coaches’ workloads
• Providing youth coaches with high-level tools previously available only to professionals
• The importance of making technology work for coaches, reducing their workload while improving efficiency
• GameChanger is a free tool for teams, promoting inclusivity
• Automating video capture for coaches
• Efficiency in film review
• “It’s an entire video coordinator in your pocket.”

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THANKS, SETH GOODLAXSON

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TRANSCRIPT FOR SETH GOODLAXSON – GAMECHANGER SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER – EPISODE 1016

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host, Jason Sunkle tonight, but I am pleased to welcome in the Senior Product Manager at GameChanger, Seth Goodlaxson. Seth, welcome.

[00:00:16] Seth Goodlaxson: Hey, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:00:22] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on, Seth. Looking forward to diving into this new film room feature that you guys have come up with at GameChanger.

Let’s start there with just give us the brief intro. One minute, 30 second overview somewhere in there, just to kind of give people an idea of what we’re going to talk about tonight. And then we’re going to dive a little bit into your background before we go a little bit deeper with GameChanger and Film Room.

[00:00:37] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah, absolutely.  the premise is pretty simple. We think that one of the most powerful tools in a coach’s toolbox is being able to go to the tape. Being able to look at the film, see where their team is performing well, see where their team maybe has struggles things that they need to work on or emphasize in the next practice or at the next game.

But the problem is reviewing film is time consuming. It’s difficult. There’s a lot involved. You have to be a very dedicated coach to do all the work and all the labor that comes with it. And we want to make that easier. We want to make that simpler. We want to take all the power that is contained within a good film review session.

And make that as accessible as possible to all coaches at all levels rather than just the big budget college pro programs, of course, they’ve got that all taken care of, but we want to bring this to the youth coaches, to the kids, make sure that we can really help them develop and give the coaches the tools that they need to bring the team to the next level.

[00:01:31] Mike Klinzing:  I’ve definitely seen that with teams that I’ve been involved with, both with my own kids and as a coach, trying to work with. Teams work with film. And as you said, especially at the youth level, where you don’t have that dedicated camera that’s set up in the rafters recording everything. And you don’t have a video coordinator.

You don’t have somebody who’s dedicated just to becoming an expert in these different systems. So to be able to have something that I know we’re going to get into it here, that that works sort of in the background and almost automatically seamlessly with what coaches are already doing, especially when you start talking about at the youth basketball level, whether it’s.

AAU basketball, whether it’s a middle school coach, somebody who has the opportunity to be able to utilize this feature. I think every coach out there is going to be super excited to hear about that. And we’ll dive into that in just a second. Tell us a little bit about your background, kind of how you got to GameChanger and just what led you to this spot that you’re in and getting involved in this.

[00:02:29] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah, absolutely. So  GameChanger, I’ve been in GameChanger. I joined in the early spring of 23. So I’m starting to approach the end of my second year here. So I still have a, still have a lot of work to do at, at GameChanger here, but it’s, it’s been absolutely wonderful experience since I’ve been in.

 I was in sports tech for a while. I started my career in broadcast media. Working for my local television station right out of college running the master control room, hitting all the buttons causing problems. And I really just fell in love with that type of world. And as I built out my software skillset sports technology is just absolutely always the place I wanted to be.

So I was so fortunate, so lucky to find a home here with GameChanger. And it’s been, it’s been absolutely wonderful since I’ve been here.

[00:03:15] Mike Klinzing: So tell us day to day, what’s your role? in the company. What is it exactly that you do as the senior product manager?

[00:03:22] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah. So my goal right now is pretty simple.

My goal is to make our basketball product as valuable as it can possibly be for the coaches who use our system. Scorekeeping basketball, as  is very difficult. It’s very fast paced. There’s a reason why it’s done with really high level software and a team of people at the professional level is the reason it’s done that way at the D1 and college level.

It’s a really challenging thing to do at the youth level. And we want to make that as easy as possible. Same thing with capturing video. Like you mentioned these teams, they’re not going to have video coordinators, they’re not going to have big video budgets. GameChanger is free for these teams.

It’s free for these coaches and we are really proud of it. We want to make sure that if you’re using GameChanger, you are able to really elevate your team. You’re able to take that next level, kind of get that basketball IQ, not just of you as a coach, but to help your whole team, Get better. My job is really single minded.

My job is to make basketball at GameChanger the most powerful tool in a coach’s toolkit. Just as simple as that.

[00:04:25] Mike Klinzing: So I’m going to share my own personal GameChanger story with you. I’ve told it a couple times on the podcast, but I think it’s worth kind of going back to it right now so that you can hear it and then we can kind of build off of that.

So my son, who he’s a freshman in college this year, but when he was entering his junior year, so we’re talking about two years ago. Sure. And We’re playing in an AAU tournament and there were a couple of dads that were running the GameChanger scorekeeping. And so one dad had the phone and he’s doing his thing with that.

And then the other dad was like the spotter. So he was yelling out, this kid did this and that was him and whatever. And I watched them do that for a game or two. And I’m like, Oh man like, cause I like to just stand and watch the game and take it in and, and whatever. And the third game, those two dads, for whatever reason, weren’t at the game.

So coach asked me, Hey, can you do the GameChanger? And at first I was like, I don’t want to I don’t want to keep score. I don’t want, I don’t want to do that.  I just, I just want to sit and watch the game. And so they finally convinced me to do it. And so I get out my phone and I log in, create an account, whatever I need to do and get connected to our team and I started doing it and And seriously within like, and they were doing it as like a two man as a two man team.

And so I’m sitting there by myself. And honestly, Seth, within like a minute, like I hadn’t figured out, it was so intuitive and easy. And from that point on, I just kept doing it. I’m like, no word. I don’t need anybody else to do it. I’ll just do it. Because I also felt like it kept me as a parent connected to the game.

And so I could tell like, okay, here, this kid’s taking this many shots and here’s who’s scoring. And I can keep track. I know what the foul situation is. I got timeouts. I got all these different things right at my fingertips. Just, and again, I’m a parent as a fan. This is not in my role as a coach. And so I just love the ability to do it in such an integrated and seamless way.

And to be honest, when I think about going back in my time as coach, As a player for so long in basketball, you think about scorekeeping and just how tedious that process can be. And when I was doing it, it did not feel at all. That’s what I love about the GameChanger product is it just makes it so simple to be able to get all those things down and the information and collect it.

And then boom, at the end of the game, you got a box score, you got all this that you can look at. And those statistics, again, especially when you’re talking about. AAU basketball, right? Or youth basketball, where maybe if you’re lucky in the past, maybe there’s somebody scoring at the table and maybe they get the final score right between the two teams.

But they, but they certainly don’t have any individual statistics of how many points somebody scored or what their shooting percentage was. Or, and again, you can track a whole bunch of different things. You can track assists and rebounds. Everything is trackable within the game shirt. I just loved that piece of it.

And then the other thing that was great that we used it for was, again, when you’re traveling for AAU basketball, you have parents who obviously can’t make a trip. So you maybe are going three, four hours away and somebody doesn’t make the trip and boom, now our coach would just set up his iPad in the one corner on the tripod and stream that right through the GameChanger app.

And parents, and I know there were times where I didn’t make it to a game and boom, I just pull that right up on my phone and I can see it. And so what I’m getting to is, is that film room now is the next step. from the things that I’ve experienced with being able to scorekeep, being able to view that game remotely when I’m not actually at the game.

You take over the story from here of kind of what FilmRoom now allows a coach, or in some cases a player, a parent, to be able to do with that film.

[00:08:13] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah, absolutely. And first I just want to acknowledge your story because I’m really, I’m really proud of what the team here has been able to put together so far in GameChanger Basketball and Just like you said, sometimes that manual scorekeeping on paper especially, it, it can be a real challenge.

And I think what we’ve got here with our, with our product is really helping a lot of people out get that data that they need. But, and the reason I bring this up is, so now, now you’ve got this data, what do you do with it? And, and this is a really important part of this film review process is, you’ve got a game, you’ve got something captured, you’ve got video captured, you maybe have stats from the game, maybe you’ve got a lot, maybe you’ve only got the score just like you said.

But we’ve talked to coaches all over this country and we know that they want to take advantage of every little piece of information that they have. They want to look at that and they want to help their team get better for the next time. But at the same time, all these coaches are very busy people.

They’re very busy people and for us to ask them to do more work on top of what they’re already doing, that’s a really bold ask. So we’re trying our very best to ask them to do less work by giving them more power and more ability to quickly find these moments, right? Every second of a basketball game is not made equally.

There are these key moments that you can find. There are these really important pieces. Maybe your team is struggling with the press break. Maybe your team is struggling finding the open man on the wing. Or whatever it is, right? Every team is individual. Every team’s got their own strengths and weaknesses.

I take it really seriously that our job is to help those coaches find those moments as quickly as possible. Help them kind of take that content and distribute it. And so in terms of the nuts and bolts, because I think you were really asking about that as well, What, what we’re letting coaches do here is as they’re reviewing film, they’re able to mark what we’re calling moments at any time during the film.

And when you create this moment, you’ve got a clip that you’ve created, and with that clip you can add whatever coaching notes and insights you might have. So now you’ve got this log of all these most important moments from the game. And we want to do a few things here. One, we want to make finding those moments really, really easy.

We want to make finding them as simple as possible. So we’re bringing a lot of power to bear on that. We’ve leveraged our computer vision team to do some really excellent work with what we’re calling dead time removal. And what this lets you do is when you’re watching the video, if basketball isn’t actually being played, let’s say there’s a timeout, let’s say it’s halftime whatever else it is, there’s, there’s a lot of occasions where Phil might be running, but nobody’s doing anything on the court.

We’re skipping those automatically for coaches. We’re going to let that go right past. As long as you’re making your stream on an iOS device, on an iPhone or iPads, similar. We’re going to skip that stuff for you. We’re going to let you focus just on the actual gameplay. Then you can find those moments really quickly.

You can navigate through the film. You can call out whatever your coaching moments are, and now you’ve got this library, you’ve got this playlist of the most important stuff that you’ve seen. You can bring this to your next practice. You can share it directly with your players or potentially with their parents, depending on the age level we’re talking about, things like that.

You can share it with your other staff members. You can take these coaching insights that you’ve gathered and distribute them to the right people at the right time. Some of your players. Might not want to be called out at practice, right? Especially at these youth levels. You got to be careful with how you’re giving critical coaching.

So maybe you share that privately. Maybe you share that privately and you say, Hey here’s, here’s what I’m seeing, here’s what I’d like you to work on before the next practice. In other circumstances, maybe you want to share your victories really publicly, right? At the next practice, you bring this real and say, look at all this amazing stuff we did at the last game.

You guys really took my coaching to heart. You really focus, you practice, and look at that we, we killed him in the paint, or whatever it is. This is what we’re trying to do with this post game content. I think it’s going to be really, really powerful. Tell me a little bit about the

[00:12:12] Mike Klinzing: technology behind it, and just capturing those data points, and just how the continued use of this continues to even make it, obviously each time somebody uses it and creates these moments.

The AI technology gets smarter. So just give us a little bit of, you don’t have to go into all the technicalities. Sure. Just give me a little bit of an idea of the technology behind how you guys go about putting all this together.

[00:12:36] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah, sure. So what I’ll say first is, like I said, we’ve got our first computer vision feature here looks for active gameplay and it skips anytime we don’t see gameplay.

I can’t explain to you fully how those models work because we’ve got a team of incredibly smart people who put it together and I’m not one of those incredibly smart people. I know it works really well and that’s good enough for me. That is our initial feature here for computer vision for assisted technology to help you find these most important moments.

I would be absolutely shocked if that was our Last computer vision feature. It’s just what we’re launching with right now. And you can, I think, let your imagination kind of run with this where we want to go. Right? So now we’re finding where no basketball is. Well, that’s the easy part. Finding no basketball.

That’s the easy part. How do we help users find, how do we help these coaches find the moments that are more important than other moments?  how can we refine them? Some of that is going to be very high tech. Some of it’s going to be low tech. Some of it’s just like helping people navigate quicker, helping people have landmarks and milestones, right?

We’re going to use every tool at our disposal to get them to hone in on those most important moments as fast as possible. I’m really excited about  this is not, We’re not launching a feature and then walking away from it. We’re, we’re launching a feature and we’re going to continuously invest in this for a really long time.

Our roadmaps are deep for what we’re going to do with this post game experience. And so what you and I are talking about is just the beginning, and I’m really excited to see where it goes next.

[00:14:12] Mike Klinzing: Tell me about. The process, if I’m a coach and let’s say I’m watching the game film and I pull out three, four, five clips for a particular player that I want that player to see, what’s the process?

Once those clips have been selected and identified, what’s my process for then sharing them with that player? What does that look like? What do I as a coach have to do in order to get that to

[00:14:38] Seth Goodlaxson: my players? Oh, it’s real simple. It’s a couple of buttons, right? So the sharing function here is, is not too dissimilar from frankly, any other sharing function that you might be familiar with in any other mobile app.

Right? So you, you can hit this share button and that allows you to send this to a contact, whether it’s via email or, or whatever else is, is your method of choice. So. Again, at a certain youth level, you’re probably, in fact, sending it to their, to their parents. At a certain youth level, you’re probably sending it directly to those kids, whether it’s at their school email address or whatever else it is.

But you can get it directly to their, their, to their contact. And because of this. Thanks. They’re going to be able to receive this in whatever form you choose. And you’re going to be able to distribute this to whoever you feel like is important enough to, to get this right. So if it’s the kid, great.

If it’s their family, awesome. If it’s your assistant coaches, if it’s a scorekeeper, if it’s any other interested party you as the coach are in the driver’s seat. Now, this is a. Coaching specific feature, right? So the coaches have access to do this. And I want to be clear. We’re not letting anybody necessarily show up and start distributing clips of all your kids to whoever they want.

That’s, that’s not the way we’re going to go about this. This is a coach’s tool right now. There’s a possibility of us expanding access to other people on the team. But this is launching as a coach’s tool. And so only your coaches are going to have access to do this. But they’ll be able to share it with whoever is appropriate to them.

And that persona, that, that person that they’re going to share it with could change team by team. And this is why we built it to be as flexible as it is, is because it’s not my business to tell a coach how to coach. It’s my business to help the coach have the tools they need. to be a good coach.

[00:16:25] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. So if I’m again, coaching a team and I have this access to film room and I’m, I’m utilizing it and pulling out the clips and doing all that different part of it. When I’m sharing that with players and I’m sharing it, whether it’s again, as you said, via email or however it is that I’m getting that to them.

And then I’m having a conversation back and forth with them. I can just see the value that a player is going to get from this and that. Eventually, again, the coach is going to get from that because of the ability to impact those individuals. And then I also picture just being able to sit down with my team, like before a practice and I’ve got my screen pulled up and boom, I can pull out those clips.

I’ll go back to the olden days, Seth, when I was playing with VHS tapes and trying to hit. the rewind button and missing 17 plays and then having to watch six totally irrelevant plays to get to the one that the coach wanted to see and skipping over it and this and that and going back and forth. And so the more efficient, I know this is one of the things that I talk to coaches about all the time when we discuss how they utilize film.

And one of the things that they always mentioned is the need to be as efficient as they possibly can. And so you start talking about if you’re trying to prepare for. an opponent, or you’re reviewing a particular game that your team played, the more efficiently you can do that, obviously the better off you’re going to be.

And I think that that’s one of the tools that for sure this film room, especially again, at the youth level, at the AAU level, at a level where this type of technology typically isn’t available. I mean, if you’re at UCLA or you’re at Ohio State, you obviously have technology that can do the things that we’re talking about, but.

When we’re talking about somebody who’s coaching a high school AAU team or somebody who’s got a team of fourth grade girls, like you just don’t have the access to this type of technology. So what’s the process for you guys in terms of getting it out in front of people and Marketing it and getting it into the hands of coaches.

How do you guys go about that? What channels do you use to get it to people?

[00:18:36] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah. No, that’s a great question. And we’ve been really focused on on making sure not only we can reach coaches where they are But sort of reach coaches where they want to be if you understand what i’m saying I had the privilege I think two weeks ago.

It was I had the privilege of walking through this new feature with coach steve eichel of of rutgers And he was just blown away and it was so gratifying to see his response and the very first thing he said is like, can I give you my kid’s coach’s number? Can you set them up with a, with GameChanger?

Which is the best possible response I could get from, from a man of his pedigree. I was really, really happy to see that he saw the vision that, that we did. And we’re working with people all the way up and down the spectrum.  we, we want to work with coaches like Steve Paykel.

We’re working with coach Lisa Bluter formerly of the Iowa Hawkeyes. At that level, we want to make sure that we understand what those coaches care about so we can help our youth coaches get to that type of standard. We’re also doing all the things that you might expect in terms of getting this into coaches hands.

We’re going to their seminars, we’re going to their summits, we’re going to state associations, things like that. And we’ve got a very, we’ve got a lot of material coming out to help not only our current coaches, but help the people who aren’t yet our current coaches. Help them understand. What we have to offer and what value we think it brings.

And so you’ll start seeing that all over  the internet and the airwaves coming out, I think as early as next week. So I’m really, really excited about that. And of course, we’re making sure that everybody currently within, within the app, already in the GameChanger family knows what we’re bringing to bear here.

I am really excited, like I said, to, to work with some of these D1 coaches who have an obvious pedigree, an obvious aptitude for this type of thing. And you’re right.  big level programs, big name programs, they have the same problem, but they have a much different set of tools to solve it.

But I want to let somebody with no budget and an iPhone get the same kind of value, right? This AAU teams you’re mentioning, these can be really shoestring budget teams. Now, some of them are doing very well for themselves and, and I’m, I’m very excited that they are. We want this to be as widely available as possible.

And so if you’ve got a cell phone, you can use FilmRoom. If you’ve got a cell phone, you can use GameChanger. And again, and I’m sorry to repeat myself too many times, but this is a free product for those coaches. This is a free product for those teams. We’re really proud of that.  we want them to use it.

We want them to get the value. We want them to help their teams progress.

[00:21:11] Mike Klinzing: That’s one of the things I think that is so valuable for, especially again, a youth coach who doesn’t have a big budget. Look, we’ve all probably seen, read, heard about the AAU teams that have big budgets and that are flying around the country, but I can tell you, Seth, and I’m sure I don’t have, I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know, the vast majority of kids who are playing AAU basketball today are not playing for those teams where they’re being given a bunch of gear and they have a bunch of people.

in support of what they’re trying to do. Most of the time it’s one coach and some parents and they’re kind of going around and just trying to figure things out. And so to be able to have the power of a tool like this in their toolbox, to be able to help them to grow and improve. And from a coaching standpoint, yeah, you’re helping your players, but you’re also helping yourself to grow as a coach, because one of the things that We’ve been fortunate enough here on the Who Peds pod to talk about Seth as we talk to coaches at all different levels of the game and it’s always amazing the number of coaches that they might have started out coaching at the YMCA or they might have coach started out coaching at the the local AAU tournament where they weren’t a big name or they weren’t coaching high level players they’re just coaching an average team and they’re trying to learn and they’re trying to get better too and I think that’s one of the things that.

I think is underrated when it comes to film. When you, when you start talking about people who are not coaches, when you’re just talking to parents or even just talking to players, I think they see and understand the value in learning for the players. But I don’t know that people who are outside of the coaching profession really understand how valuable film study is for a coach who wants to improve their ability to X and O.

And we’ve heard that from so many coaches that. Hey, when I was a young coach and I got my first job, so and so took me under their wing and showed me how to watch film or they said, Hey, you should just lock yourself in the office and try to learn and put the film on and just study and hours and hours and hours of film work.

And again, if you’re talking about being able to bring that to the youth level, to the AAU level where not as many people have had access to it. I just think that’s an incredibly, incredibly valuable tool for, for learning for coaches in addition to, I think people understand how it can be valuable for players to watch film.

I’m not sure like the average parent understands how important that is for a coach to be able to improve.

[00:23:38] Seth Goodlaxson: Well, and that’s a great point, right? I mean, you can always watch tape. You can be tired, you can be worn out, you can be away from home, you can be anywhere in this world. If you’ve got the GameChanger app.

You can watch tape and you can get those insights and you can get those collected, centralized, and shared to the people you want. No matter where you are in the world, no matter what you’re doing at the time, right? It’s, it’s an entire video coordinator in your pocket and that’s a, that’s a really big deal.

And what you said before about kind of different teams have different levels of budget and resourcing and things like that.  one of the things we hear a lot from coaches and from teams who, aren’t doing things like this is they desperately want to do things like this. They don’t have something, there’s something in their way.

They don’t have the people to tape the game. They don’t have the staff or the equipment or whatever else it is. They want to be doing this. And those are the exact people I am most focused on right now.  and this starts way up front at, at capturing video. Capturing video is its own problem. Cause getting coaches or coaches rather they’re frequently at this level, they’re looking for some mom and dad and they’re going to volunteer them.

They’re going to say, you, you got to record the game from you today or, or things like that. Right. And now that mom and dad, as much as they want to help their team and they want to help their kid, they might not be there for that. They might be there cause they want to watch their kid play and now they’ve got a job.

Well, we’re focused on those problems too, right?  last year we introduced AutoStream, which is Another feature that we’re really, really proud of, where if you just set your iOS phone up, we’re going to pan and follow the game for you. We’re going to follow those kids up and down the court on your behalf.

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to have any special equipment. You set your iOS device up on a tripod, you walk away from it, you can watch the game. We’re trying to solve these problems that are very real. These teams, they don’t, they don’t have just hordes of assistant coaches waiting for something to do.

And they certainly can’t do it themselves, they’ve got a game to coach. And so we’re starting up front, but Even past that, now into this film room piece, into the post game review, again, how can I make it easier? I can’t be giving people more work to do. I can’t give people another job. I mentioned this right at the top.

These coaches are working at maximum capacity. It would be naive to think otherwise. So I have to take work away from them. And that’s really what we’re focused on here up and down the, the chain.

[00:26:08] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that ability to follow the action when you start talking about just setting the phone up and. It follows.

That really is a, a game changing piece of technology. I mean, it really, really is because when you talk about being able to just automate that, where again, if I could set the phone on a tripod and boom, it’s my job there is done. Whereas again, before you had to rely on human beings who again, as I’m watching, as I’m watching the action at this end and oops, I forgot to tune the camera as I, as I turn and watch and then it’s late and then again, we’ve all been there as coaches to thinking back again to the past where somebody who’s a human being is filming that and they’re watching the action, their head turns, but oops, they forgot to turn the camera and now you’ve missed a whole, whatever, a whole series of plays or a play that could be a very important one that you wanted to see.

And so to be able to just

[00:27:01] Seth Goodlaxson: automate that, go ahead. No, I was going to say, or the other thing we see people having to do is they have to choose. They say, I’m just going to film my offensive hoop. I’m just going to film my offensive hoop and I’m just going to let the defensive hoop go because that that, that’s the sacrifice I have to make to get any kind of video coverage.

And I hate them having to make that choice. That’s terrible because yeah, offense is great, but  defense wins championships, right? So how can you be forced to ignore that defensive hoop? That’s a tough decision to have to make as the person capturing video. I don’t want people to have to make those choices.

I don’t want them to have to make these compromises. Of do I get half of what I want or do I get nothing?  how can we let them get everything that they need while respecting the constraints that they have, they have some very real constraints and we need to respect that and play within those boundaries to help them find creative solutions.

[00:27:51] Mike Klinzing: How much of what you guys have done in other sports has impacted what you’ve been able to do in basketball and how much synergy is there, obviously, Different sports. I know you guys are big into softball, baseball, volleyball. How have those impacted what you do with basketball and how much does the, does the research and development piece of all four of them kind of fit together?

And then obviously you have to get it specified for each one of those sports.

[00:28:22] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah. There’s some general principles that are very, very common across most, if not all sports, but just like you said, every sport is going to have its own nuance. At its heart, every coach of every sport. is interested in helping their players develop, helping their team get better.

And helping their team get better does not necessarily mean having a 30 and 0 championship run. It means helping their team get better, helping the players become better people, as well as better athletes, right? And that motivation, you don’t get into youth coaching for the glamour of it. You get it because you care.

And that type of motivation is ubiquitous. That’s common across all of our coaches. And so building tools that can help them do that, that’s common across all our sports. Absolutely. Our film review workflows right now are being released, they’re released simultaneously on basketball and volleyball. So those are live today with some more features again, we’ll continuously roll out more and more features through the winter here which is obviously a big a big season for both of those sports.

So Film Room is live for volleyball and basketball now it’s absolutely important to us to make sure we don’t keep it locked in, in such a small box. We want it to be exposed to our other sports. It’s a matter of choosing which targets come first, which targets come second. There’s a whole lot of good ideas and only so much time to achieve any one thing, right?

So we’re working through that list, but it is, it’s there on volleyball and basketball. I think there’s some really interesting similarities between all these sports, but then there’s some stuff that is very different, right? Basketball is up and down constant action. It’s always moving. Volleyball, baseball, softball, they’re all sports of Discrete place, right?

A play will happen, a unit of sport will happen, one play, one pitch count, one at bat, whatever it is. And then it stops and you kind of get, you reset, you get ready for the next one. Volleyball and other net sports are similar, right? You play that rally, you play that point, and then you reset and you do another one.

And so there are definitely some nuances here for how coaches might be best served by a post game review process that might be different between a sport that flows more like basketball and a sport that has these discrete plays like volleyball or baseball. And we want to make sure that we’re taking care of those coaches.

We are also, just like I said, we’ve got this, the downtime detection for basketball that will be coming as soon as possible for volleyball as well. We’re making great progress there and that will be released I don’t, I can’t give you a timeline, but it’s going to come out soon and then we’re going to see what other major problems we can solve.

So we’re starting with basketball and volleyball, but we’re certainly not stopping there.

[00:30:55] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of being able to take out the dead time that you talked about earlier and just mentioned again, because. As you said, time is at a premium when you start talking about somebody who’s a youth coach, an AAU coach.

It’s probably not their full time job, so they’re not spending four hours a night poring over the film. They want to be able to get through it and get what they need out of it for both their players, for themselves, for their team to try to improve. And by making that process faster, by not having to sit through, okay, here’s a timeout, here’s halftime, here’s a dead ball where the referee’s coming over to talk to the scorers table.

All that stuff just Disappears and all of a sudden, boom, you’re going from one play to the next to the next. It just goes back to that word that I keep coming back to for coaches watching film, and that’s efficiency. The ability to be efficient, I think, is probably if I had to describe or mention one word that coaches keep saying to me over and over again when I talk to them about, hey, what do you want to do with film?

We just want to be as efficient as possible. Coaches want to watch as much film as they possibly can to be able to get a handle on their own team, get a handle on their opponent. And then to be able to share the film with their players. And obviously all coaches have different philosophies in terms of how much film they share with the players.

You mentioned an interesting point a few minutes ago, but it’s about sharing film with players that is both positive and a film clip that might be a critique of something that they need to improve and do better. And it’s funny, Seth, cause that’s one of the things that I’ll talk to coaches about is how do you balance out.

How do you show, Hey, here’s what we’re doing really well. And here’s some clips. And then how do you balance that versus maybe some clips of things that you want to see the team improve. And I know that back in the day, I could speak for my own experiences first as a player, and then probably even as a coach early on in my career, most of what, most of what was shown at the time.

was probably negative of, look, here’s what you did wrong. Here’s what you need to fix. And now I think so many more coaches are looking for those positive plays that they can share with players, especially to your point about youth players and being able to share that publicly with the team. Hey, look, here’s where little Johnny or little Sally did this play correctly.

Let’s recognize that in front of in front of everybody. And then if there’s maybe something that, Hey, you want to be a little bit more critical of, maybe you do that behind the scenes with. Again, you’re talking to the parent, you’re talking to the player, Hey, here’s something that you can work on to try to improve.

And I can see the ability to do it in a public way, and then also to be able to do it in such a way that it’s just private between one player, one coach. I could see the value in that, especially again, at the youth level.

[00:33:35] Seth Goodlaxson: Well, yeah, and I think it depends on, on a lot of factors, right? One, coaches, they know their kids, they know their team.

And they know how to motivate them and motivation is a big part of it. And this is where I see that positive reinforcement come into play and far be it for me to give a coach advice. This is, this is so none of my business, but far be it for me to give a coach advice. But if you can give that kid that motivating thing that says, yeah, I am doing this, I’m crushing it.

I’m, I’m, this is one thing I’m doing really well. But over here here’s six other things I got to focus on. I think you got to balance that out a little bit. And when it comes to that critical advice, yeah, maybe, maybe you’ve only got one kid who’s, who’s really just doesn’t understand the zone defense that you’re trying to set up or whatever it is, and maybe you do talk to him privately, if you see that struggle is common to your team, then yeah, then you bring that up at the practice and be like, Hey, this is clearly not something that we’re executing well.

Our press break is terrible. Here’s some steps that we’re going to take to fix it next time.  I think, like I said, it’s all very contextual and this is why, again, GameChangers, our job is not to tell you how to coach. Our job is to give you the tools you need to coach to the best of your ability.

And so much of this is contextual based on the age of your kids, based on the competition level of your kids, right? And then based on their individual temperament and your individual temperament as a coach we want to make sure we can support whatever contingency you need. And I think we’re doing a really good job of that with this, with this first offering.

And I’m very looking forward to hearing from these coaches.  I get critical advice and I get complimentary advice too doing in my job. And what I tell people all the time when I’m talking to coaches compliments make me feel good, but they don’t help me make a better

[00:35:21] Mike Klinzing: Right.

[00:35:21] Seth Goodlaxson: And so hearing where we’re really knocking it out of the park, sorry to mix my sports metaphors here. But hearing where we’re really knocking it out of the park is, is great and it’s good to reinforce our value, but hearing where there’s something that we’ve missed that we should change, that we should improve something we haven’t thought of that we need to consider.

Oh man, I love hearing that from coaches. I love having those conversations. Cause that is absolutely my primary motivation is to, to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of, of these people.

[00:35:50] Mike Klinzing: What’s the next need on the horizon that maybe the technology isn’t quite ready yet to solve, but if you had to kind of predict and look out a year, two, three, five years into the future, what do you think is something that maybe you’re hearing from coaches, maybe something that you guys are thinking about internally?

I don’t want you to give away any company secrets, but what do you kind of see as the future of, of where this can go in your mind? What’s something that you think, man, if we could do that, that would be, that would be incredible.

[00:36:23] Seth Goodlaxson:  I’ll give you a few different answers, I think. In the, the more near term, the more kind of we definitely have plans to do this kind of, kind of a response.

There’s so much more power we can add to this, this film review process. I’m really proud of what we’ve got right now. I think it’s going to be amazing for coaches and teams. But it is our first step. And so, Just like you said, efficiency, that’s the name of the game. What can we do to really help a coach hone in on that?

How can we do a better job of letting them use the statistics that were gathered at the game to inform their film review session? How can we do a better job of taking every coverage source that they might have and centralizing that into one common experience where they can just quickly get every single thing that they need, squeeze as much juice out of this as possible and really get the every last insight.

That’s it. That’s the short answer for what we want to do next. The long answer, when you asked me to dream a little bit, you’re asking me to dream, think big. I think when it comes to thinking big here, it gets back to what can we do for you? Not what can we ask you to do, but what can we do for you?

What can we automate away? What. manual tasks, what tedium can we say, no, that’s our problem, right?  we did this with autostream, for example, we said, you don’t have to sit there and pan a camera back and forth. That’s our problem. Now we’re going to, we’re going to solve that on your behalf. So when it comes to things like scorekeeping or when it comes to things like film review  you can dream really big about what we can automate.

You could dream really big about what jobs there we can take away. To completely honest we don’t know how far away from reality. Some of those are, some are probably going to be closer than we think. And some problems are going to be harder than we expect. And this is just part of the software development process.

Right. But the more we can take jobs away from these teams and let mom and dad watch their kid play basketball and just focus on that and let grandma and grandpa at home have the best possible experience watching the live stream they can. And let the coach get as much information as possible out of this coverage and use it to elevate their team.

But now how can I do that without asking these people for any more work? That is, that is my dream. So what can we automate? What can we find? Can we find patterns that says. When your team is your team was on an 0 and 20 run and here are some patterns we saw that might be useful to you. I don’t know.

I don’t know if we can do that, but I want to think about it. Can we automate coverage even further? Can we take that job away from people even further? I think we can. It’s a matter of finding the right way to do it. And so that is, I realize I’m giving you somewhat of an ambiguous answer, but it does really matter to me.

And it matters to GameChanger in general.  what can we do to make sure that your job on game day is just focused on the kids? And what can we do to make sure your job post game is as easy and fast as possible to get a direct path to these insights? I think we can take away a lot of work. I think we can let the coach offload to GameChanger as their film coordinator, as their assistant coach, as their scorekeeper.

Give us those jobs so you can focus on the stuff that we can’t do for you. It

[00:39:44] Mike Klinzing: makes total sense. I mean, I think, and again, you said that your answer was ambiguous and obviously it’s in the future, so we expect it to be ambiguous in that sense, but I think you did a really good job of articulating kind of what you want to do and what the vision is, which is As I think about it from a coach’s perspective, right, I sit down and you look at sort of the way that film has evolved, the way keeping statistics has evolved.

I know that there are tons and tons of high school and college coaches out there who remember sitting with their own film and statting that over and over and watching in a rewinding place. Who got that rebound? Who had that turnover? Who scored that point? And just doing that by hand with a yellow legal pad.

And you’re talking about how long did that take? And if that’s something that you can take out of their hands, or even just again, my story right from two years ago, where I’m sitting with my phone and I’m doing that process. If there becomes a point where that video is just sitting there and it’s following along and boom, it’s doing the statistics in real time.

There’s another thing that I’m a parent now that I can just, again, sit and watch my kids. Not that, I might not want to take it out of my hands to be honest with you, I kind of enjoyed that. I kind of enjoyed it. I guess I could hold the phone, it could just be doing it right in front of me and I could be watching it.

I guess the point, again, to what you said is, you want to be able to allow coaches to focus on the coaching piece of it and take all these other things that can help them to be a better coach and put them at their fingertips through the technology and through the use of Film Room and what you guys are going to continue to build out.

And I just think, like I said, everything that I have used GameChanger for, for, for has worked flawlessly. And that’s a credit to the software that you guys have built. It’s a credit to the app because we all know that we’ve all been on apps and used things that when they work, they’re tremendous. But when they only work, 45 percent of the time, they’re extremely frustrating to use.

And I can honestly say, like, in my experience with GameChanger, with both my son’s team, my daughter’s team, with the ability to keep the stats, with the video features, with all that, it’s just been seamless and so easy to use and so intuitive. And again, that’s one of the reasons why I’m just a big believer in what you guys are doing.

I think the film room here takes it to a whole nother level, again, A group of coaches that previously didn’t have access to this same type of technology that maybe coaches at a high level in high school and certainly college and the pros have access to, but your average youth coach or average AAU coach just didn’t have access to these same tools.

And that’s what you guys are starting to do is be able to, to level that playing field, to give coaches the ability to learn for themselves, to be able to teach their players better, and just to make it a tool to help their team improve. So. I guess the last thing we need to do is just remind people where they can find GameChanger.

How can they get connected? Where do they get the app? Just tell us everything that a coach would need to do to get themselves set up. Where do they have to go? How do they do it?

[00:43:00] Seth Goodlaxson: Yeah, absolutely. And this is the easy part, right? Because it’s GameChanger in the App Store. It’s GameChanger in the Play Store.

And the website is GC.com. GC.com will have links to those stores if you don’t remember them. And there’s also lots of really good material on there about Film Room about the rest of our features, the rest of our sports. There’s some really good content as well that you can use to help get familiar with the system if you need it, but also to make sure you understand all the power that we have to bring to bear.

So GC. com or GameChanger in your app store of choice. That’s all you need.

[00:43:36] Mike Klinzing: Seth, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule to jump on with us tonight and talk a little bit about Film Room and GameChanger. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.  Thanks.