Jt Williams

SportsEngine is on a mission to make youth sports a more rewarding experience for athletes, parents, volunteers, administrators, families, and fans.

A critical part of that mission is giving youth sports organizations the ability to manage the memberships, safety credentials, and rosters of every one of their participants and teams to ensure the right people are on the field.

I led the UX effort, from research to workflows to high fidelity interface in collaboration with product management and engineering leads. The user experience inspired a shift in technical architecture that serves as the new foundation of the SportsEngine platform.

SportsEngine SRM was launched in 2019 for US Club Soccer, the nation’s largest soccer organization.

Problem: National governing bodies (NGBs) are umbrella organizations that provide policy, rules structure, and insurance for youth sports organizations. They are responsible for the regulation of safe and fair play for hundreds of thousands of games and participants in their organization. Tracking this interconnected system of rules, requirements, games, and participants has historically been managed via a disparate set of systems, leading to a lack of certainty in fairness on the field.

Solution: A platform, similar to a CRM, that collects all participants’ personal data, safety requirements, and training and applies it to the game and rostering regulations to ensure the right person is on the right field at the right time.

Result: SportsEngine SRM was launched in January of 2019 for Ontario Soccer to facilitate the play of over 400,000 players and coaches. It replaced a system of paper books and stamps that saved administrators thousands of hours in manual labor and allowed them to instantly access participation information for the first time.

Since launch, SportsEngine SRM has been adopted by USClub Soccer and USA Volleyball, two of the largest NGBs in the nation.

In preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics, SportsEngine was challenged with creating an online youth sports marketplace to make it easy for athletes to find sports in their towns.

In collaboration with NBCSports and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), I led the effort from the ground up to conceptualize, design, and implement the new home of youth sports. SportsEngine not only serves as an online directory for athletes but was designed to become a destination for families to learn about Team USA and the primary lead generation tool for prospective organizations to learn about SportsEngine’s core administrative tools.

Problem/Opportunity: For parents and youth athletes, finding safe and dependable youth sports in your area requires research and luck. The process is more difficult than it needs to be and the information you find often lacks the security parents need to know their kids are in good hands.

Administrators of youth sports organizations are mostly volunteers. They are running a business with a bunch of other volunteers on the side. Marketing their programs has typically relied on word of mouth, flyers around town, and community publications.

As a business, SportsEngine relied heavily on outbound sales and marketing. The new SportsEngine.com established the foundation of an organic value-driven inbound strategy.

National Governing Bodies (NGBs), like Team USA [insert sport here] relied on Olympic coverage to drive traffic to their websites to grow awareness and participation of their sports. SportsEngine.com was also made the destination for these goals as well.

Solution/Results: An Olympic marketing strategy backed by NBCSports gave our product the credibility to avoid the marketplace chicken or egg conflict. Knowing traffic would be generated during Olympic commercials combined with a secure and simple process for providing organization and program information, org administrators added over 108,000 organizations and programs to SportsEngine.com over a 4 month period before and during the Olympics. This led to more than 6,900 new warm leads for the SportsEngine sales team.

In that same period, SportsEngine.com served as a single destination for parents to discover (more than 520,000 searches), compare, and signing up (more than 31,000 conversions) for youth sports in their area.

As a lead generator for NGBs, SportsEngine.com drove more than 280,000 unique visitors to NGB sites during PyeongChang 2018, a 64% increase over the previous Olympics.

Valtira first started the Simplicis product in 2003 as it recognized a need in the content management marketplace: a tool that could be priced effectively for the SMB market and yet be used by non-technical marketers. Simplicis is currently used by brands like Sun Country Airlines, Famous Dave's and Caribou Coffee. 

The team at Valtira reached out to me to support their product manager in creating the new modernized version of Simplicis. 

In a short 60 day term, I developed and designed user stories, workflows with red-lines and wireframes. I collaborated with the product manager to establish a UI framework based on Material Design. I also spear headed a much needed taxonomy to connect the back-end language to the front-end experience to drive intuitive usability. 

In collaboration with choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams and composers Robert F. Haynes and Tony Lazzara, UNDER(cover) is a multi-media celebration of movement intended to provoke the audience's conflict between introversion and extroversion. 

The initial iteration of the project (Episode 1) took place as a 2 week residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. The project was granted by the Princess Grace Foundation USA. 

As a core collaborator, my role was to help nurture the concept and provide video aesthetics for the performance. Collaborating in organic development of what I started calling "real art" put me outside of my comfort zone in that type of intimidating "I have no idea what I'm doing" challenge that provides an endless amount of inspiration.

As of this year, Undercover has produced 18 episodes including performances at homes, bars, and galleries, including 2 films.

For more information about the project visit:

http://www.undercoverepisodes.com/

I was fortunate enough to support author Larry Johns and photographer Reed Young on this incredible journey to unite Vietnamese veterans with Vietnamese refugee children. I provided project management, photographic assistance and conducted over a dozen interviews with veterans and refugees. 

The story was published in the Guardian Weekend Magazine in February of 2015. Read the story here.

This story started 45 years ago on an October afternoon in 1969. An American medic named Bob Shirley and some of his fellow soldiers set up a first aid tent in a small outdoor market. In his downtime, Shirley took photographs of local kids who came in with minor injuries and illnesses. It wasn’t until 40 years later that Shirley pulled these pictures out of storage and started sending them to other Vietnam War vets. That’s when my friend Larry Johns saw the pictures and decided to try and find some of these kids.

After two years of hard work and relentless searching, we were able to locate 16 of them. Right after the original pictures were taken, these children and their families were forced to evacuate in fear of the arrival of the North Vietnamese Army. This meant life in the village of Chơn Thành was no longer safe. Today they all live a long way from their original village, but remarkably they’re still neighbors and in many cases close friends.

MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition uses interactive technology and a hands-on approach to allow guests to explore the world of science using the same methods as the hosts of Discovery Channel’s Emmy®-nominated series, MythBusters.

Collaborating with Exhibits Development Group, Geoffrey M. Curley and Associates, The Discover Channel and The Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, I successfully pitched and won the business to create the website for Mythbusters Explosive Exhibition. 

I was the creative director on the entirety of the project.