Guest Column: Technology and Basketball Coaching

This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – basket weaving, rugby, running – whatever.

This time it is Dan Dal Degan who runs Central US region sales for salesforce.com. His hobby, coaching hoops to future Michael Jordans

“I am one of the athletic directors and the boys basketball coach at St. Patrick Catholic School (K through 8) in the Chicago suburbs.  That’s me with glasses in the back row in the photo(click to enlarge)

In my day job, I travel extensively and with company headquarters in California, have to continue to balance work with my coaching responsibilities even in the evenings and weekends. So, I am sure glad technology facilitates that balancing act.

Some of the technologies I find very helpful:

• School website with a "school locations" link with addresses & Yahoo Maps directions to all schools at which we play road games.
• My Blackberry, which is primary means of communicating with parents. I set up email groups that make it easier for me to send quick blasts to everyone on the run re: schedule changes, etc. - the key, of course, is to convince parents early in the season to give me their primary (work) email address, not their SPAM receptacle Hotmail or Yahoo account :)
• My Bluetooth earpiece which allows me to be productive and on calls even in my vehicle as I ferry kids around to practice and games.
• We fund our athletic programs partially through our own direct fundraising efforts.  As with most schools, we have a constant gap between our needs and our means.  We also had demand from parents and student/athletes for logo merchandise to show our school spirit.  Therefore, I looked for, and found, a merchandising website that allowed me to use our own logos that I designed.  This on-demand web service, from CafePress, facilitates our fundraising by managing the flow of profit (based on the margin between the consumer price and our organization’s cost) directly to our 501-C3 account.  We’re able to raise, even in a sideways economy, over $300 per year – enough to pay for new basketballs. Of course, working for a SaaS company, I am glad to see CafePress is a web service!
• Of course, the kids continue to benefit from the remarkable advances in basketball shoe technology, protective eyewear, fantasy basketball, practice on the Wii and so much more. I expect I will have to “up my game” with software like Basketball Coach. I also hope the Blackberry ecosystem starts to offer basketball applications like around the iPhone

Some day I hope to spend time with Mark Cuban, a genuine tech entrepreneur who now owns the Dallas Mavericks and talk to him about technology in basketball. Some day I also hope our team gets to practice with our “local boy” who has gone on to bigger things – President Obama who I hear is an avid basketball player.

In the meantime – Happy St. Patrick’s Day from the team at St. Patrick’s!”

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