Our friends at Basketball New Zealand have offered their thoughts on GameDay’s digital basketball offerings.

Read it in full below:

Attending an U13’s tournament in Canterbury back in 2018, Eastern Southland coach Glen Perkins directly saw the benefits of the Glory League video engagement system.

Our players were incredibly excited to watch their personal game highlights each night and show family back home who couldn’t attend the game, and from a coaching point of view we were able to use the video footage to help teach court positioning and develop team structure.

Eastern Southland Basketball Association (ESBA) voted to adopt the Glory League platform in early 2021 ditching paper score sheets and going fully digital.

Our secretary, Colleen McKinnel, had some experience with GameDay, but we weren’t using the system other than for rep teams.

After Glory League demonstrated the benefits of integration directly with GameDay it seemed like the right move going to GameDay and self-registration.

Basketball New Zealand organised an online training session with Ross from GameDay, who along with Glory League and BBNZ were extremely efficient in answering all questions and providing ongoing assistance along the way.

We made the choice to create all teams into the competitions ourselves, although next season we are likely to have teams self-register their team into their grade.

Our association then created a player registration form and posted the link along with team codes onto our website. All players then self-registered to their team.

The amount of admin was absolutely minimal, and with just over 400 players in our regular basketball season, less than 15 required assistance from us to complete registration.

Within GameDay the draw for the entire season was generated within seconds.

This data is pulled through multiple times a day to Glory League automatically, so all games and players appear on the iPad ‘scoresheet’ without us needing to do a thing. Any new players joining throughout the season self-register without any involvement from us.

The information GameDay provides us is crucial – we can pull accurate data from GameDay promptly with various filters for funding applications and accurately track players for finals eligibility.

We had the choice to make certain fields compulsory which include emergency contacts and have up to date details for sub payments. While we didn’t use the feature this year, we may enable online sub payment as part of online self-registration next season as well.

Our players love the game stats and video highlights after every game which will now track their basketball career within our association and assist with pathways to higher level development.

Gone are the days of paper scoresheets and collecting them for results – everything is fully automated and results, points tables and stats appear online every day.

While there was a lot for us to learn initially, the support to get this running has been exceptional and we wouldn’t want to go back!