One of the primary questions I receive from prospective customers is about our updating process: how we update our data, how we make sure it’s accurate and how often we update it.
We update it once-per-month, and send those updates to our customers via email. They usually land in their inbox in the final five-or-so days of each month. This month’s update was sent out on June 26th.
The reason we update our data monthly — not quarterly, or even yearly — is because of a month like June.
Typically, the rate of coaching changes slows in the summer. July, August and December are often the three lightest months for changes. One would think that June would be similar to July and August, with baseball and softball making up the majority of the changes. At this time of the year, football staffs are mostly locked in and gearing up for the upcoming season. So, too, are men’s and women’s soccer staffs. Plus, the college basketball coaching carousel has slowed, with many of the high-profile moves having taken place in April.
But that’s not the case. June remained extremely busy. There were a total of 4,924 people who were added, removed or had at least one piece of information (email, name, phone number, etc.) change. That is a 5.36% rate-of-change in one month.
June’s rate-of-change being that high surprised me.
So too did the breakdown of sports that had the highest number of changes. Here’s a look at the top-ten.
- Football: 675 changes (including 182 in FBS)
- Women’s Basketball: 497
- Men’s Basketball: 490
- Baseball: 374
- Women’s Volleyball: 301 (including 34 in beach programs)
- Women’s Soccer: 274
- Softball: 236
- Men’s Soccer: 222
- Women’s Track: 199
- Men’s Track: 188
Football led the way — even though football staffs are mostly settled. Some of that is a result of the football database having nearly double the amount of people in it, compared to the next-largest database. In my opinion, some of that is also sports-information departments waiting to update their coaches’ information until the end of the school year.
But some of it is also a reflection of the point that I make to prospective customers who reach out via phone call, text or email: coaching changes never stop.
They’re especially high in the three months after a sport’s season wraps up, but they also take place well into an offseason.
Football was the obvious example in June, but that’s even true for a sport like soccer. Men’s and women’s soccer is seemingly in a relatively dead period before their seasons begin in August. They also don’t have the kind of turnover that football or basketball has, yet there is still rolling turnover during the summer months.
That drives home why’s it’s so important to continue to make monthly updates. Skip one month, and all of a sudden the each sport’s data is stale.\
-Eric Van Dril, Founder/CEO (June 29, 2023)