Any young organization that experiences explosive growth invariably runs into many of the same problems. Building a scalable infrastructure while offering the best customer service are two challenges that faced Shaka Smart Basketball Camps, LLC as they strive to provide the best basketball experience for its campers and parents each summer since 2009 in Richmond, Virginia.
Smart is the head coach of the surging Virginia Commonwealth basketball program, the college basketball Cinderella story of 2011 and the success of his program has driven greater attendance to his summer camps in the Central Virginia region. With the added campers came scalability concerns for the staff in 2011 and 2012 and with more campers in store for 2013, the team had to huddle to come up with a winning result.
The mission of the basketball camp is to “encourage self-esteem and a love of fitness and nutrition” through a fun and informative week-long camp. As part of that mission, the camp’s curriculum teaches its attendees lessons about practical financial responsibility through a camp “bank account” that the children can use to purchase items from one of a number of the camp’s stores.
For Shaka’s staff, registering each camper, tracking who was in attendance each day and the unique challenge of monitoring the balances of each camper’s “bank account” across a five day basketball camp presented problems. Keeping up with the swelling number of campers over the past few years with a paper process found difficult and time consuming.
After last year’s camp, the staff needed a better way to supply right-time account balances, perform inventory control, provide updated balances to the staffers at the camp store and then offer reports for parents to reinforce the camp’s lessons of fiscal responsibility. To accomplish this, Shaka Smart Basketball Camps teamed with us at Shockoe Mobile Application Development to come up with a solution for the staff. To meet the team’s needs, we created a back-end database built to automate inventory control, track camper attendance, and track camper account balances all while providing an intuitive front-end display on iPads for camp staff to quickly learn and efficiently access the system. The devices were then integrated with Square payment software to make payments as simple and accessible as possible.
Last week was the camp’s first of three weeks and was the first real test of how smooth and scalable the application could be for the staff. So how did it work?
With the new application, registration went more quickly, attendance was efficiently tracked and there were no discrepancies in balances at the various camp stores based around the location of the camp, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center. Reports were then provided back to parents on how their children spent their allowances during camp for additional reinforcement of sound financial management.
With the new application in-hand, Smart’s staff of administrators and educators were able to focus on what matters most, teaching children the fundamentals of basketball while establishing a healthy lifestyle resulting in a win-win for everyone involved.
ABOUT SHAKA SMART BASKETBALL CAMPS, LLC
Founded in April of 2009, the mission of Shaka Smart Basketball Camps LLC is to encourage high self-esteem and a lifelong love of fitness and nutrition through fun, high-quality basketball instruction and games. The camp provides a wealth of experiences for its attendees including both current and former Virginia Commonwealth University basketball players, youth coaches from around the nation, conditioning experts, medical staff and VCU graduate assistants from the Center for Sports Leadership. This year, the camp will run for three week long sessions providing instruction and learning to hundreds of campers. Learn more about the camp at coachsmart.com.
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