UCF Coaches Adapt Business Practices

College coaches and athletes long have been used to conducting meetings, practices and most other team interactions on a face-to-face basis.
 
Until now.
 
The onset and spread of COVID-19 has changed all that for the foreseeable future.
 
That means UCF coaches and athletes have had to find remote—and sometimes brand new—ways to do business at a distance for the time being.
 
For some, that transition has been relatively seamless. For others, it has brought new revelations in team and staff relations.
 
Lending a guiding—and sometimes more firm—hand in these adjustments is Al Salleh, director of information technology for UCF athletics, and assistant IT manager Denise Reid.
 
"Centralizing and standardizing communications is still an uphill battle," Salleh says. "However I have seen a huge spike in (Microsoft) Teams usage. 
 
"The poster child for Teams is the men's soccer staff. It's clear that the social distancing and stay-in-place order have not affected their workflows very much at all. They adopted Teams many months ago and they haven't skipped a beat in their daily operations."
 
The men's soccer staff currently has offices on the fourth floor of Spectrum Stadium. That meant those individuals had to essentially move out of their offices on the weekend of every UCF home football game the last few years. In many cases, they would move out earlier than the normal Friday noon deadline and conduct their business and meetings remotely.
 
"Luckily for us we had already begun making use of Teams prior to working remotely due to the virus issues," says Knight men's soccer head coach Scott Calabrese.
 
Calabrese and his staff created groups of individuals who interacted based on workflow--including coaches/administration, performance, academics, compliance, business, as well as a few others. Then they created channels to organize the collaboration and all the relevant files and communication with each group by topic or function. 
 
"An easy example to understand is our business team," says Calabrese. "We have channels tagged general, invoices, miscellaneous reimbursements, recruiting travel, team travel—and every channel has a folder where files related to that channel are stored. All the appropriate people have access to the channel and all of the relevant files are located in that channel and worked on within that channel. 
 
"It's very intuitive. We then know where to go for any information that we may need.
 
"An important consequence of this is that our normal email inbox is a little bit lighter and more often used for external business.  
 
"Teams is a great tool that helps us be more efficient. And the more efficient we can be in our administration of the program the more time and effort we can put into why we are all here--to coach and support our student-athletes." 
 
Salleh has been aggressively reaching out to the "quiet" sports and support units and others who have been slower to adopt. He conducts regular tech workshops to educate and onboard UCF staff as quickly as possible.
 
The men's soccer program is among his "tech champions" that he uses as pilot testers for new technology options.
 
"WFH (work from home) is now enforced, it's all the rage and en vogue. Yet we (athletics IT) have been preparing for this day all along," he says.
 
"IT isn't just about issuing computers and resetting passwords for people. IT is also about helping to ensure business continuity in the worst of times."
 
The UCF football department is an example of an operation that had never had particular need for this mode of communication. The virus changed that. Teams helps connect as many as 26 football coaches and staff members into a virtual staff meeting. Head football coach Josh Heupel recently used video teleconferencing for a media availability.
 
Vice president and athletics director Danny White uses Teams for his weekly executive staff meetings—and most UCF athletics coaching staffs and administrative units are using Teams or something comparable for meetings and connections to team members.
 
"What I'm doing is education--tech workshops three days a week to talk about Teams and (Microsoft) OneDrive and (Microsoft) SharePoint--how to use them and get the most out of them," says Salleh.
 
"It's not just trying to get us through this but to transfer this entire department into a truly modern department.
 
"It's not about email or texting, it's about real-time communication. The genie is out of the bottle about collaboration and platforms. After this is over, this should be a part of everybody's lives.
 
"We want to help people get their work done. As an example, the football coaches are sharing their iPad screens to run their XOS (video editing) program."
 
Salleh knows exactly how many chats and meetings have taken place, and he says the major spike is quite noticeable.
 
No one knows for sure exactly when UCF's athletic business returns to some version of "normal."
 
Whenever that is, Salleh is convinced the entire department is better-equipped than ever to utilize technology.