As the state’s governing body for high school athletics, the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) serves more than 400 member schools and 160,000 student-athletes. And with tournaments for its 21 sanctioned sports—plus, athlete eligibility and official licensing & management among many other responsibilities—to oversee, the organization’s internal team had become bogged down by a very manual and tedious workflow.
IHSAA’s legacy software system had been in place for more than a decade and was comprised of a mix of spreadsheets and other lo-fi tech tools. This disconnect in systems and patchy UX (user experience), meant that virtually anything that needed to be processed had to be run through the IT team. IHSAA needed a solution that would unclog the IT bottleneck and continue to scale along with its athletic programs and user base.
Introducing: myIHSAA! This custom portal is more than just an association management system (AMS)—it’s truly a full business solution that serves IHSAA’s entire workflow for every single sport. The comprehensive web app allows admins to register athletes; officials to manage their credentials and tournament applications; coaches and athletic directors to rate their officials, in addition to the ability to run and pull reports, send SMS reminders for various deadlines, and so much more.
Even better, this centralized hub is completely responsive, so busy athletic directors, coaches, officials, and staff can access what they need on the road, wherever they are.
Simply, there is no other tool like myIHSAA in the country that serves high school athletics. The efficiency gained by the IT department has enabled the team to grow beyond being a help center for antiquated technology, instead focusing on other strategic technology initiatives—for example, a data center migration project with a target of 90 percent savings.
The upgraded portal UX has already resulted in greater participation and engagement from members, including a 10% increase in applications for boys basketball tournament officials. Implementing the Google Distance API and an SQL database to calculate officials’ travel distances to tournament events has dramatically reduced calculation times, something only fellow geeks might appreciate. As more features continue to roll out, the IHSAA internal workflow and audience experience will only continue to evolve and improve.
And while business impact for IHSAA and improved UX for audiences is always a priority, this project has also helped earn an exciting accolade for our project partner and IHSAA Technology Director, Luke Morehead. In 2018, he was named a 2018 CTO of the Year by the Indianapolis Business Journal!
