If you’re like many athletic directors, you probably spend more time every day than you’d like managing endless paperwork, tracking down students, and parents to get signatures, and reconciling incomplete or incorrect data.
Investing in a modern student-athlete management system can address many of these frustrating daily struggles. In fact, with the right technology, you can also make it easier to keep parents informed, while increasing the likelihood that athletes meet eligibility requirements and are healthy enough to play—not to mention reducing medical, legal, PR, and insurance risks for your school and district.
Here’s how a student-athlete management system does all those things:
1. Streamline Registration
With fewer paper forms to manage, ADs will spend less time hunting down students and parents to get signatures and verify information. Online registration through a student-athlete management solution, gives students, parents, and ADs alike a convenient, real-time approach to registration.
With FinalForms, for example, when signatures are missing, parents and students receive automatic notifications alerting them when their John Hancock is required.
2. Improve Communication
With the right student-athlete management solution, all stakeholders—from coaches, nurses, and trainers to athletic directors, parents, and athletes—can easily access the information they need when they need it. Student-athlete management systems facilitate better communication by eliminating silos.
For example, mental health alerts, missing equipment notifications, and medical condition updates can be automatically sent to the relevant people at the right times to encourage complete transparency and open lines of communication.
The Benefits of FinalForms: The Leading Student-Athlete Management System (3:01)
3. Achieve Compliance
In a world where regulations seem to change every year, maintaining compliance can be a tall order. With the right student-athlete management platform in place, it’s much easier to ensure compliance, thanks to the ability to add custom-built forms to your system.
For example, you might decide to add district paperwork requirements, emergency medical authorizations, pay-to-play fee forms, transportation authorization, pre-participation physicals, state requirements, technology use policies, social media policies, emergency procedures, and more.
“I sleep better at night knowing my compliance is 100 percent,” says athletic director Jamie Lee of Cleveland High School in Johnston County, N.C.
Want to learn more about how FinalForms can help you achieve 100% compliance? Schedule a demo today.
4. Enhance Student Safety
Student-athlete management systems can also help boost student safety by making it easier to ensure physicals haven’t expired and injury status updates are communicated in real time.
Beyond that, they can also help with things like concussion test reminders, relaying known issues to EMTs, sending out injury reports and treatment tracking information, and more. Add all of this up, and it translates into a safer experience for student athletes—which is a big boon for parents and the district as a whole.
"The [FinalForms] real-time Emergency Cards have prevented major medical mishaps,” says athletic director Jim Wright of Walt Whitman High School in New York. “We've improved our communication, processes, and procedures, and the parents love it.”
5. Decrease Costs
Saying goodbye to paper-based management systems does more than make your life easier. It also reduces costs considerably—for a number of reasons. For starters, ADs and other staffers will spend much less time manually processing forms and looking for information.
Student-athlete management systems also make it much easier to keep track of equipment and other inventory—decreasing the costs associated with locating or replacing lost items.
6. Improve Data Security
When you’re managing student-athlete records manually, it’s easy for them to fall into the wrong hands. If they’re just lying around, an unauthorized person might catch a glance at them.
In addition to the previously mentioned benefits, student-athlete management solutions increase data security. With a software like FinalForms, you’ll receive industry-leading security capabilities—including industry-standard and proprietary security protocols, policies, and procedures to protect your data—giving you and concerned parents the peace of mind that comes with knowing sensitive student data is always secure.
7. Reduce Risk of Liability
The right student-athlete management system helps districts mitigate legal risk by making it easier to store and track student documentation, relevant certifications, information about injury treatments, waivers, medical clearances, and more. With more than 2.6 million youths heading to the emergency room every year for sports-related injuries, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, waivers and documented injury information translates to reduced risks—and a stronger district.
Ready to Get Started?
If your district is still managing student-athlete paperwork the old-fashioned way with siloed, paper-based processes, it may be time to find a more efficient way forward.
Nurture a happier school community with the FinalForms student-athlete management system, and you’ll increase productivity, improve the athlete and parent experience, ensure compliance, improve safety, reduce risk, and so much more. Schedule a FinalForms demo today.
