Ep 368 What If Player Evaluations Took Fifteen Seconds Instead of a Whole Weekend? ( Part 1)

TeachHoops.com

UPLVL.com — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show)

CoachingYouthHoops.com

Show Notes

Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams.

Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone.

Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night.

Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night.

The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it.

The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason.

The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice.

Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email ab