AI Course Authoring with Valor Soccer

AI Course Authoring with Valor Soccer

Rachel Wilton is the Chief Operating Officer at Valor Soccer. She’s spent her career watching youth sports grow faster than the systems supporting them.

At Valor, she saw an opportunity to build a better way to deliver training across the club’s seven programs, 200 coaches and 3,500 players.

Enter Anna Forslin, who joined Valor as Communications and Events Manager in January.

Within months, Anna had turned much of the club’s existing training and information, from PowerPoints and PDFs into live courses inside etrainu.

The result: information that no longer has to live in crammed documents or slides, but can become accessible, reusable training for the people who need it.

Here is how it happened.

Before joining Valor, Rachel worked with Washington Youth Soccer and the U.S. Soccer Foundation, building curriculum and coaching education for community-based organizations, while facilitating programs on the ground. .

She had seen the same problem across youth sports: the game had grown, but the infrastructure hadn't kept pace.

"The sports industry is so reactionary because nobody ever built up the industry with any sort of intent for it to be as big of a machine as it is now.”
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“It used to be all volunteer-based, and as the industry quickly grew, nobody set up the infrastructure." 

At Valor, training and policies were spread across different departments and formats.

"It was very user-specific and fractured. Depending on the department, they were doing it in different ways. Some Google Slides, some saved to Excel or PowerPoint. They were saved in a bunch of different ways, and they all looked different."

Rachel still remembers the first job she handed Anna after hiring her.

"One of the first things I asked Anna to do was go over our code of conduct, because somebody had done away with all of the margins just to fit as many words as possible on one page, then threw a couple of Valor logos in the corners."

It was a simple example of the bigger problem: Valor needed a better way to deliver information.

Rachel had known about etrainu for years, after repeatedly crossing paths with VP of Sales Cameron O'Riordan at industry conferences.

"Cam just kept telling me, 'You need to join etrainu’, and I just kept telling him, ‘I don't have any money’.”

“Then at this last conference he said, ‘You should really join now, our AI Course Authoring Tool is changing how clubs are delivering education’.”

"And I was like, 'Six years in, you might have finally got me.'”

Anna started with what already existed. The PowerPoints, the season documents, the instructions that had been sitting in slide decks and documents for years.

"A lot of the courses started from content that had been built in a PowerPoint that I just had to upload into the AI Course Authoring tool, and then work my own creative magic on how I wanted it to look."

Since then, she's built 8 courses, including training for team managers and team treasurers, plus season overviews for Valor's 7v7, 9v9 and 11v11 teams.

"When I was first starting to use AI Course Authoring, it definitely took a little while to get used to, because I had to figure out how everything worked and all of the different slides and interactions you could do. But since I've gotten the hang of it, it's really easy.”

“I have the information that needs to go there; I just have to make sure it looks nice."

“Most of them I can get done in an afternoon.”

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“It's nice to have these courses live in a central spot forever. People can access them as they need to, rather than you've seen this PowerPoint once and now that's it.”

Anna also has direct support from her etrainu Customer Success Manager, Lisa, who is in her corner helping out whenever she needs.

"Anything I need from Lisa, I can just ask and know that she will be very quick to respond. She gets it done within an hour or two.”

Rachel reiterates this sentiment.

"Cam, Lisa, everybody at etrainu has been phenomenal, and we've really appreciated the support that everybody on the etrainu team has given us."

"It's been really rewarding to work with Anna and the team at Valor. They come with good questions and a clear idea of what they want, and helping them get there quickly is the best part of this job," said Lisa, their Customer Success Manager.

Asked whether she would recommend AI Course Authoring to other clubs, Anna's answer was about turning what a club already has into something people will read.

"There are a lot of similarities between soccer clubs, but every club has its own very specific policies. Being able to take what we already had and turn it into something engaging, that's really nice."

The club has also added the Coaching HER® library to its course catalog. Built by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota in partnership with Nike, the modules cover how gender stereotypes shape the way girls experience sport, building a caring team climate, body confidence and menstrual health. The goal is keeping girls in the game.

"I had a conversation with one of our male coaches who had never coached a girls' team. He told me he didn't know how, because he didn't know how to handle the things that are specific to girls," said Anna.

"And I thought, it's really great that this Coaching HER training will be available to our coaches now. How will you know unless you're taught?"

The first courses were for the people running Valor. Team managers, treasurers, coaches. The newer ones are for the families behind its 3,500 players. 

"I like being able to use it for our club values and ethics, and as an introduction for new families. It's a way to tell your story and keep everything uniform and in one place."

LOOKING AHEAD

Parent education is where Anna wants to go deeper. Right now it is mostly season overviews and role instructions. 

"Some parents get very passionate on the sidelines, and not always in the best of ways. We want to correct the negative behavior that can be detrimental to our youth players as much as we can."

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