The Manitoba High Schools Athletic Association (MHSAA) operates over 50 sports championships for more than 190 schools and 37,000 athletes across the Province every year. Coaches, athletes, and families go to the MHSAA website for the latest information about their sport. This is where they find game schedules and results, team information, policies, athlete recognition, and news and event details.
Challenge
Staff alone can't handle MHSAA's extensive publishing requirements. They rely on schools and coaches to keep up with game results, tournament details and team information across the Province. They needed a user-friendly system that lets coaches manage their own team and tournament information and makes it easy for their different audience segments to find the specific information they’re looking for on a data-heavy website. They also wanted to update their brand.
Approach
In addition to MHSAA staff, every high school sports coach in Manitoba uses this system, so their feedback was critical to the success of this website. Our discovery stage focused on user input and MHSAA's complex data needs. We took time to truly understand their goals, their existing systems and data history, every sport, and each audience type. We wanted this site to look great, enhance MHSAA's efficiency and output, and meet the needs of their many user groups.
Branding
MHSAA wanted a complete brand refresh driven by the website launch. We updated their existing logo and created fresh brand elements for a modern look.
Website design
From a data standpoint, this website has a lot of heavy lifting to do. But it’s also a marketing tool for MHSAA, so we created an eye-catching website that puts usability first.
Data Conversion
In addition to their main website, MHSAA used a third-party solution for managing games and roster history plus a third website to manage Provincial tournament information. Data from all three websites had to be combined without losing any history. Doing that successfully meant having a deep understanding of their needs, how their existing systems worked, the data requirements for every sport, and the extent of their data history.
We built an import tool that included historical data analysis and achieved their goals in a single import. It maintained a complete history with records for over 125,000 students dating back to 2002.
Coaches accounts
Nearly 3000 coaches lead high school sports across the Province each school year. We built a module that gives schools and coaches full management of their team data. Through their user accounts, coaches can create teams, add and edit team rosters, create tournaments, post game schedules, and submit game results for immediate public viewing. It saves MHSAA staff from doing that work and empowers coaches to manage it themselves.
Mailchimp integration
When a coach or site administrator updates a contact in their user account, our Mailchimp integration ensures contact lists are in sync and tagged for easy segmentation. This makes it easy for MHSAA staff to streamline communication with coaches across the Province and send targeted emails to people who are interested in specific sport information.
Tournament brackets
MHSAA needed a way to separate games that are round-robin format from games that are tournament bracket structured. We developed a tool that ties in with their existing game structure and reporting system. It allows tournament managers to create and customize tournament brackets in a visual layout. When coaches submit game results, the tool automatically moves teams to fill in the next round of tournaments. Game results are updated in the brackets and in the sports ticker that’s live across the website.
