SoccerPulse Game Model is Here
Hey everyone,
Hope you are all enjoying your Labor Day Weekend.
Usually when I release a big new update, I like to write a short blog detailing what that update includes.
This blog is going to be a little unique in the sense that I'm going to also talk about some things going on behind the scenes that a usual company blog wouldn't usually talk about, but I feel it's important to give context to the situation we and many other business find ourselves in.
First off, let's talk about the impact COVID has had on the app.
Back in March when everything shut down, I decided to take advantage of the down time to add some features that would be very important for players training in isolation.
We added the leaderboard feature so players could compete against each other within their teams, and also the option for players to add individual training events such as technical work, running, Techne and BMS sessions, and more.
As we approached the end of May, we also knew that teams would need help with their return to play, so we decided to create a symptom screening feature. This feature notifies a coach anytime a player reports a symptom and the coach can follow up with the player directly or reach out to their emergency contact.
Enter July and August, when typically we have our most sign ups for the year, and that revenue helps us plan the upcoming features for the rest of the year.
In a normal year, we see a 3-4x spike in users in August. Couple that with our normal growth rate of approximately 10k new users each year, and we were primed for easily our best year in business.
Then the season cancellations started coming.
It started with just a few leagues at the NCAA level, and before we knew it, almost everyone had cancelled or postponed their fall season.
The fallout from our perspective was massive.
Below you can see a graph of our typical year in average daily users.
This coincided with a huge club deciding to not to renew their subscription, despite having what I thought to be a great relationship with them.
As of this point right now, we're down 38% from this August to last August.
Despite this, we are pushing forward with the features we promised: Game Model Builder
Game Model is now available on the Mac OS app. We expect it will be approved for the iOS versions on Wednesday and you can see a walkthrough of it below.
Game Model builder allows you to build a playing style based on a formation (just 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 for now), select a playing style based on the area of the field, and finding an overall playing style intensity based on those factors.
The main goal of Game Model is to give coaches an idea to the correlation between their playing style, and the ability for their team to be able to maintain it for a certain duration.
Higher intensity playing styles require a shorter duration at first, while low intensity styles can be played for longer.
If you'd like to read our blog on how to Game Model Fitness Test (coming in a following update) please click here!
So what comes next?
In the next few weeks, we are going to be rolling out an admin update which will allow parents to view their players wellness reports, while also giving coaches more control over adding events.
We've made updates to the Periodization view on iOS which will tie into our Game Model Testing update.
If an event has not occurred yet, the view now shows the total # of players who are attending and what positions they play.
We have removed the suggested training durations for small sided game sizes temporarily, as this will tie into the Game Model Testing feature.
If you are enjoying the Game Model update (you can download the Mac OS update by clicking here), please give us a shout out on Social Media and we'd love to retweet your game model design.
Keep an eye out for formations such as 4-2-3-1, 3-4-3 and 3-5-2 to be coming soon! If you haven't signed up for SoccerPulse but want to try it, click here for instructions on starting a 30 day free trial.