Whether on or off the court, a single moment can make a huge difference. Indecision that costs a second can lose a game. This is why it's essential for sports development and education professionals to have access to tools that help them leverage every minute, hour, and day in the best possible way. When talking to a player or a prospective team member, it’s common practice to communicate in an efficient and understandable manner, yet that's not always easy in the heat of the moment. This ability to communicate and think strategically during pressurized situation is one of the reasons coaches are so impactful.
The Value of Efficient Communication in Coaching
Coaches are experts at sharing succinct situational insights. They always back that up with actionable advice about how things could be improved and connect those facts to steps players can take to make that all happen. Imagine how much sports would suffer if, instead of just being able to call out a player when noticing a problem during practice, coaches had to first book an appointment with them. I know this sounds ridiculous, but this is an example of how inefficient regular meeting scheduling is. It’s challenging when you know what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to share that information in an efficient way yet are unable to take timely action. This disruption is caused by the fact you still have to engage in a whole bunch of back and forth in order to secure a time when all parties are available to meet.
The Cost of Inefficiency
Inefficiency is at the heart of so much waste. I'm not just referring to physical resources like water, electricity, or food; I'm talking about time-based resources. Every second, hour, and minute that passes is one that we're not going to get back. This is one of the reasons why education is such a key component of modern culture. Even when you have the determination, discipline, and talent to go far, doing so in a reasonable amount of time is next to impossible without the right advice. Youth and energy can’t make up for a lack of experience, which is what coaches have in spades. Being able to learn from someone who has already walked the path that you hope to travel and overcome the bumps along the way means that you can directly benefit from the time they've already invested in perfecting a craft. Remember diamonds aren’t formed overnight, and the best swords are those made by experienced smiths.
The Impact of Coaching on Athlete Development
Efficiency born of experience is a key reason why coaches make such a big difference in the development and progression of an athlete's career. Coaches aren't just people who enjoy the game; they're people whose lives are devoted to the preservation, promotion, and progression of their chosen sport. Whether a coach is in charge of an amateur children's team, a varsity team, or a national team, they're all operating with the same mindset of wanting to help people grow through the art and science of sport.
The Challenges and Rewards of Coaching
Being a coach isn't easy. There are disappointments; often, coaches have to make lemonade out of lemons. Sometimes they end up shattered only to pull themselves back together stronger than ever so that they can help their team achieve new heights. In many ways, coaches are master composers, turning stray notes into timeless masterpieces. Take Beethoven, for example, a man who didn’t quit after losing his hearing or being disappointed by politics. Instead, he finished composing Eroica, a symphony inspired by heroism and democratic ideals.
Being a coach means devoting your time, energy, and focus to help other people achieve their dreams. Coaches are a lot like infrastructure; they're essential. They help people get from point A to point B, but not everyone is aware of how much they do. Many people, if asked to think of a team as a human body and to name what role the coach plays, might say the heart. However, the coach is much more than that; they're the entire vascular system. They make sure that nutrients are pumped to every single organ so that the body as a whole is ready to perform.
The Importance of Supporting Coaches with Efficient Tools
It's essential that coaches are adequately supported in their work. They give their all, and they need tools that are capable of withstanding that. One thing that rarely crosses people's minds is how much admin coaches have to deal with. Not every coach has an assistant or a secretary. Often, a coaching team is just one amazing person who might not have been allotted the biggest budget. Thankfully, tools like Cal.com can help coaches save them time without negatively impacting funds that have been allocated towards their department or team.
Leveraging Cal.com for Efficient Scheduling
Cal is an open-source, no-code calendar scheduling solution that helps people get to the heart of the matter. It lets you book and manage meetings easily and effortlessly without having to waste time cross-comparing agendas and availability. A lot of calendar scheduling products focus on helping people arrange online meetings. This makes sense, after all, lots of people work in a digital-first environment. But that’s not everyone, and Cal.com understands this. Cal.com has unique features that make it super convenient for arranging in-person, real-world meetings. This includes things like the ability to set multiple locations, appointment reminders, and access QR code generation. These tools help to ensure that when you create an appointment with Cal.com, you can customize it and share it in a way that makes sense based on how you operate.
This all sounds great, but you probably need a practical example, right? That’s reasonable, so let's whip one up. In this scenario, you're a basketball coach and you're organizing a summer training camp. You only have a limited number of slots available, and you want to ensure that every person who signs up takes their commitment seriously.
You also don't want any time to be wasted by people not being sure where to go or what's going on. In order to solve all of these problems, you've made yourself a free Cal.com account. You chose to do this because this means that you have access to an unlimited number of active events.
Simplifying Registration
You create one active event type with multiple seats (spots available) and this is the initial event that people use to sign up for the training camp. You also use the customizable booking questions field to double the impact by creating a built-in registration form. Next, you set the location to in-person and add the address of where the training camp is going to be. Now, some say you're old-fashioned, but you prefer to think of it as just being human, so you don't want to just send an impersonal link. Instead, you choose to use Cal.com’s built-in QR code app to generate a printable and scannable item that you put on a handout that players and parents can take home. Any team member that's interested in signing up for the training camp can scan the QR code with their phone to be redirected to the booking portal.
Ensuring Commitment
Now, in order to protect your time and investment, you've decided to take advantage of an additional Cal.com feature called held payments. This feature requires that a credit or debit card number be provided at the time of booking. That card won't actually have any money deducted from it at that time. Instead, an amount that you feel is fair will be placed on hold. As long as the person who was supposed to come to the appointment, in this case, the training camp, shows up, the funds will be released. However, if the person fails to show up without following the appropriate cancellation protocol that you've communicated, then you'll be able to issue a nominal charge on the specified payment method. This helps to protect your time and ensures that the only people who sign up for the event are actually serious about it.
Setting Attendance Limits
You might remember that I mentioned something about booking seats earlier. I think now's a good time for us to go a little bit more in-depth about that feature. Booking seats are really just a way of deciding how many people are allowed to be at an event (in this case, the training camp). Using this feature, you can set the number of players allowed to sign up for the training camp. This number will be updated as players sign up. This means that if there were five spots to start out with and two people signed up, it would show that there were only three spots left.
Streamlining Day-to-Day Operations
Now let's talk a bit about how you can use Cal.com to manage the training camp's day-to-day itinerary. All Cal.com users can create an unlimited number of active events. This means you can create an event for each thing that's happening during the training camp. You also make some of these recurring events if you know they're going to happen at the same time several days in a row. Once the camp attendees have booked all the events that they're going to attend, each one will be added to both their calendar and your calendar. This happens automatically, so you don't have to worry about giving yourself carpal tunnel by writing everything out by hand.
One Less Thing to Do
Now, as a coach, you do a lot of strategic reminding, but if you want one less thing to keep track of, you can take advantage of Cal.com's automated reminders system. This feature is called workflows. Workflows let you set up conditional reminders. A condition might be a certain number of hours before an event starts. It might be once an event ends, or if an event is canceled or rescheduled. You have a lot of choices for what those conditions are, and you can set things up so that one event sends out multiple reminders.
If you're using the free Cal.com plan, you'll only be able to send out reminders via email. However, if you want to be able to send team members reminders via SMS, you can upgrade to Cal.com's team plan for only $15 a month. Reminders can be whatever you need them to be. It can be a notification that warm-up sessions start in an hour, or it can be a link to a waiver that attendees need to sign before attending the training camp.
To Make a Long Story Short
As I'm sure you can tell by now, Cal.com has a lot to offer. In fact, it might seem overwhelming, but remember, it doesn't have to be. We covered a lot of features in this blog post, but you don't have to use all of them. You can use the features you need when you need them. And as you get more comfortable and gain experience, you can take advantage of all of the options inherent to our product.
In fact, if you think about our scheduling software less as a tool and more as a skill, you'll see it's actually not that different from learning how to play ball. You start out slow, you build your confidence, you educate yourself, you incorporate best practices, and watch you reap the benefits from all the time you put in. As a bonus, the time you spend using Cal.com will actually save you more time in the future. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for your free Cal.com account today.
Learn why MentorCruise switched to Cal.com, and how our product changed their scheduling experience for the better by reducing Cancellations by over 50%.
