Brian AmatoAssistant CoachOregon State UniversityHow long have you been at Oregon State? What is your role with the team?I’ve been at Oregon State for three years as an Assistant Coach. My main event is bars. I also help with recruiting and am in charge of our team’s social media presence, advertising, and marketing.What does success look like for Oregon State Gymnastics?We focus on a few things. Wins, losses, and national ranking are the easiest thing to look at, and those are important to us, but we’re also focused on the success of our student-athletes long-term. We want to see them graduate. We want them to find employment after college. With gymnastics, your athletic career is more or less over after college, but it is just the beginning of the rest of your life.What challenges were you trying to solve when you first started looking for a solution?We needed a way to centralize our information in one place where we could ensure everyone would see it. Before Teamworks, we were using several different systems, and inevitably someone – be it staff, coaches, or part of our team – would get lost in the system and not receive the information. We also had a lot of duplicate information because we had to do things more than once, or two people on our staff were giving out the same information.We also wanted to make sure our student-athletes held on to the information we gave them. With paper, it would often be misplaced or someone would claim they never received it. With Teamworks, we know everyone has the information they need. There is no excuse.Why did you decide to go with Teamworks? Was there anything that stood out?Compared to other solutions, Teamworks is the only system that included everything we were looking for in one place. There are systems that cover pieces of what Teamworks does, but Teamworks is the only one that is complete.Another aspect that sets Teamworks apart is their customer service and training. Having an account manager, someone we can call who will answer our questions or address our concerns, and who will train our staff, our support staff, and our auxiliary staff was incredibly important to us. If you have a question, they’re right there to help you. There’s no lag. They really take care of you.What aspect of Teamworks has helped you the most?It gives us one answer to the vast majority of information questions we get. If someone has a question, most of the time our answer is to go check Teamworks.Did anything surprise you about Teamworks once you started using it?Going in, we knew Teamworks would be beneficial for our student-athletes. However, we hadn’t thought as much about how it would help the staff communicate and coordinate among ourselves. Having everything in one place with the ability to see who is doing what has really helped us.We also didn’t realize how valuable the travel module would be. Being able to put all of our travel information in one system where we can all access it on the road is incredibly beneficial. I also don’t think strength and conditioning knew what they were missing. Our strength and conditioning staff have always done a great job of tracking metrics, but now they have a system where they can input that data and look back not only at where we are right now, but compare that to where we’ve been in years past. They weren’t expecting that functionality, but now that they’ve seen it, they are really excited about it.What do your student-athletes like about Teamworks?Having one place where they can see all of their practices, community service events, academics, and any other obligation as far as our program is concerned is really beneficial to them. We add things to the calendar that may be a month out that we haven’t necessarily discussed yet, and they enjoy having that visibility.Our captains, especially, also like having a place where they can send out group information and coordinate with the team as a whole. They can go in and message particular groups, or specific grade levels, and that’s really been a benefit for them. Before Teamworks, they had to do all of that manually.What role did the mobile app have in your decision?The mobile app for us was key. In this day and age, one thing I can guarantee is that our student-athletes aren’t without their phones for long. When we need to make changes to the schedule or send out a reminder, we know we can reach them. With the Teamworks mobile app, we can give our student-athletes access to all of the information they need on the devices they are already looking at.What would you say to programs that don’t have Teamworks?You are missing out on an opportunity to consolidate a lot of the work you are doing into a single place. With Teamworks, we are much more efficient and have more time to focus on developing our student-athletes.