Middlebury College
Athletic Department

The Athletic Department was already using FileMaker Pro to manage a database of potential recruits, but they wanted new features, improvements, and connections to the college’s enterprise systems. The college’s IT department was open to outsourcing the work but had concerns about the ability to support and maintain independent systems, consistent data structures, security, etc. After vetting the Silver Lake team, IT agreed to the project and the Athletic Director got what he needed.

Before

The existing recruiting database schema was too simplistic. It provided a limited number of attributes like contact information, high school, sport and position played, and left handed or right-handed, etc. It allowed only one sport to be associated with one recruit. If a recruit played two or more sports, the database created two separate records, preventing the coaches from identifying attractive multi-sport players. The coaches couldn’t quickly and easily access the right information to make informed decisions.

After

Silver Lake worked with the coaches and IT to build a database and reporting system that provided a more focused comprehensive and actionable view of each recruit.

• Multi-sport players were easily identified because individual recruits could be associated with more than one sport.
• Additional attributes and information per recruit, including:
  1. Grades and test scores to maintain academic eligibility
  2. Athletic and performance stats per recruit
  3. Links to “game tapes” or media files to see players in action
• Tracking of correspondence including the date of each instance, type of communication (email, phone, letter, etc.), the actual text of the communication, result, required follow-up with date triggered alert, and NCAA compliance regulations.
• Allows each coach to search a subset of the records, segmented by sport or geography
• Easily and quickly produces actionable reports