How TeamSnap Is Impacting Youth Hockey with CEO Peter Frintzilas

Hello hockey friends and families around the world and welcome to another episode of our kids play hockey. I'm Lee Elias and joined by Christie Casciano-Burns and Mike Bonelli and today we're excited to welcome a leader who sits at the intersection of youth sports and technology. He is also a hockey dad who has lived and lives the

the six AM rink life just like the rest of us. You've heard me say at the end of

our show many times, share this episode in your team snaps. Well, guess what? Our

guest today, Peter Frintzilas, is the CEO of Team Snap, the platform used by over

25 million families and 19 ,000 plus organizations across 100 different sports and

activities to manage schedules, communication, payments, and more. What kind of stats

are those? Team Snap also just announced a new partnership with Bauer Hockey. You

may have heard of them to launch an in -app content hub featuring equipment guidance,

pro led drills, and community challenges, which are available right now in the app.

I've seen them. I went on there yesterday, kept looking at them. We're talking youth

hockey, team snap, and more today. Peter, welcome to our Kids Play Hockey. Thanks,

Lee. Appreciate you having me. Looking forward to the conversation this morning. We're

looking forward to it, too, man. And we have to ask this right off the bat, right?

you've got three kids and hockey you are right in the midst of the youth hockey

journey why don't you tell everybody their ages where they're at tell me about what

your chosen drink is at four thirty in the morning when you got to wake up how do

you manage all that yeah so I have three sons seven five and three so we are in

the mites mini mites and just getting our three -year -old on the rank and holding

on to a cone on the weekend's phase of things. We are definitely up at 5 a .m. If

not 445 for dad, but always go to stop by either Starbucks or Duncan,

depending on the route to the rink in order to just optimize time overall. That's

typically on the back of carrying my seven -year -old on my back downstairs, getting

him dressed and getting him in the car with a bagel and waking him up along the

way as you guys know.

- Pete, did you play hockey just curious now so I was a two sport athlete baseball

football I played a lot of roller hockey in our neighborhood which didn't require

the six a .m. wake up but you know we were at the firehouse till eleven twelve at

night on some nights under the lights playing after football baseball practice

whatever we're all coming home for so I've always had a huge fitting for the game

a huge Rangers fan and you know we And we had the opportunity, we're in Southern

Connecticut, Ice Hockey is definitely one of the top sports here and got our boys

into the programs early.

And so you feel the chaos that all of us feel as hockey parents, you're right in

the throes of it. We are in the throes of it, day in and day out at this point,

and we're not even full into everything kicking in. That comes kind of mid -October

but our youngest starts to get on the ice. So between my wife and I, we'll have

four or five different skate times on Saturdays and Sundays, and we'll be driving

all around the Tri -State area. - Yeah, Dividing Conquers, absolutely the way to

survive this. You know, one of the things I love in this conversation is that

you're obviously using Team Snap as a hockey parent as well, right? So there's

always conversations around around the rink about TeamSnap and organization, how things

work. So I wanna ask this question, we will dive deep into TeamSnap here, but in

using your own app, I imagine you're seeing things now as a hockey father that

you're like, this is great, this can be improved on. Can you talk about the

experience of being a CEO using your own app in the chosen sport of your children?

- Yeah, so Lee, I had the privilege of stepping to this rollback in April of '21.

of 21. And at that point, my first son was three, our second was one,

and we weren't even kind of scratching outside of the 9am, get the kids on skates

and hold it on the cone and maybe some baseball tossing around the backyard. And so

being able to see what we've been able to do with the growth trajectory of Team

Snap, the passion and the emotion that our organization has around building just

great software. And I'm representative of another nearly 200 employees, many of which

either have kids that are going through it, have had kids that have gone through it

or athletes themselves. And getting to wake up every morning, knowing that we're

building technology, we're building tools, we're building value to millions of youth

sport families around the country and around the globe, that's motivating to

everybody, right? And so now being able to go through it firsthand and, you know,

being kind of Southern Connecticut here, I would say we're in the mecca of youth

sports. It's everything right and wrong with youth sports that I'm seeing firsthand

right now. And yes, there is every day, you know, a different idea or just a

little different way of things that maybe we can do better differently. And, you

know, we'll get into kind of all the investments and focus that we've been putting

in the evolution of our platform and a lot of new technology that we're gonna be

coming out with. But, you know, we're living it. And my executive team, we all have

kids and we would get on, we'll get on here right after the film of this. And our

Monday morning discussion will always start off like how do everybody do this

weekend, right? What are my stories? - That's a lot of stories too. - Yeah, we're

living it every day.

- Right, full disclosure, we use Team Snap for our kids. I don't know what life

would be like without it, because as we mentioned about chaos, you've certainly

helped organize that. For parents who aren't familiar yet, what do you think Team

SNAP solves best in the hockey world? Yeah, so Chrissy, there's two sides of our

technology offering. Like one is the one that we're all using on a daily basis,

which is a mobile platform to help with communication, scheduling, assignments right

who's bringing the oranges in between periods who's responsible for potentially filming

the game and then the other half of it is more of a B2B software suite for the

operators admins and owners of clubs and leagues to organize their programming

organize their organization and that's everything from up front kind of what we

consider registration through financial management through fostering through how does

the organization communicate down to the parents and that's really the utility side

of where we've been focused as an organization over the last 15 years. And what

you're starting to see and we'll talk about the Bauer partnership is kind of one of

those first forays in is now us leaning much more on the lifestyle things of youth

sports and how do we help arm whether it's parents, whether it's volunteer coaches

through content and whether that's in partnership of great brands like Bauer with the

hues who have the professional leagues or Even beginning to get into more of the on

-device video streaming allowing parents coaches to Stream the game for those family

members that can't be there and create highlights and keep kind of the fun focus

For the kids We're much more focused on cool fun digital overlays after the kids

scores a goal that I am telling you how fast the pox going right like And that's

really that family center of orientation that we take as we're building our products.

- Yeah, I mean, thinking about that piece, that family piece, right? And your guys

are living it now. Could you just talk a little bit about the platform and how,

like the protections that are in place for families that, you know, obviously, I

think at any youth hockey organization, soccer, football, whoever's using your

platform, right? It has to be very conscious of, well, what Can we see publicly and

what can we see privately? And then how do those two worlds work together? - Yeah,

and Mike, I mean, that's also like, again, having kind of all of us in this right

now, having just gone through my safe sport training last week, like we all see

that level of governance and that varies, right, by sport, by sport, and also

between the US and Canada, like that's where our prevalent kind of usage is, about

30 % of our overall traffic is coming up from the Canadian provinces. And so we are

constantly looking at, as anyone in this software, mobile space needs to relative to

privacy, security, the various jurisdictions, state governments aren't making this any

easier for us, right? How data privacy is being controlled and managed within

California versus Colorado versus New York. We are extremely attuned to that. And

then there's other things like COPA and just the security of we have kids that are

14 years in under and we gear our offering and everything and then our user and

user license agreement and the security that we're building around it, you know, our

user base is everyone on this call, right? The parents that are managing the

families. But then as kids get a little bit older into the teenage years and they

want to be, take more ownership right of their own scheduling, what time do I need

to get up in the morning? Mom, can I see the schedule because I got to play on

my own social events, we want to ensure that the layer of security underneath that

is rock solid. And prior to leading Team Snap, I was actually at a global fintech

company selling software into the world's largest 50 banks for about seven and a

half years, right? And so that level of security privacy is really ingrained in me.

It's ingrained in our DNA. And it's something we take extremely seriously. We have

to or else We like, you don't have the right to be in the space. - Yeah, I think

sometimes people don't realize how seriously you take that at Team Snap 'cause it is

a massive part of it. You know, when we were designing this episode, one of the

questions we could not get out of the way was privacy and that type of information.

So thank you for sharing that. One of the things I wanna dive into, too, is I've

used a lot of different apps. Again, it's not usually up to It's up to the the

correct organization that I'm with But I haven't found one yet that's been as fully

inclusive as team snap and little simple things like where's the game? I tap on the

map and I have the choice of Google Maps and Apple Maps actually Like that saves

me a lot of time in the morning. I know I can go there I've also seen team snap

from the organization end With organizations that I work with and what you find out

is team snap is actually a lot bigger than you realize I think if you're if and

there's nothing wrong with this if you're just a parent taking a kid to hockey you

see one side of it but Pete can you talk for a second about how vast TeamSnap

really is and maybe even dive into a couple of the features that maybe people don't

know about right that you wish more people knew this is here and feel free to talk

about the Bauerhub as well with that I'm just saying there's so many features on

TeamSnap that I don't think people know about Yeah, it's a, it's a wide ranging

portfolio and from a organizational perspective, you know, we're sitting on for those

that are in technology, like for very different technology stacks. We have our, our

business to business software, what you call a SAS or software as a solution of

kind of software through the website that's used to manage the business. There's an

entire FinTech stack. That's how we help organizations to take in their money through

registration, how do you manage that? There's all the interchange that sits underneath

that. There's all the privacy, the security, the tokenization of credit cards. Then

we have our consumer stack, which is what we're all using, that's much more mobile

focus. And at peak times during the day, we have over 2 million people on platform,

right? And so the scale of that cloud flexibility, stability, being able to provide

that service independent of where people are. And then to the point we just made,

all the security and privacy they need to sit underneath that is a massive

infrastructure. It's a massive part of our operation. And then lastly, as we're

starting out to get into more on the video and streaming side, that's an entirely

different set of technology and infrastructure that sits underneath that. But Lee, to

your point, like Team Snap's a very interesting company, if you look at the history

of this space, about 15 plus years ago, you had what are still kind of the two

predominant leaders. You had Team Snap on one side of Ledger, You had sports engine

on the other side of ledger team snaps started as a family centric Let's build the

mess best mobile app to help with the organization of the team the communication

between parents coach and parent and really hit grassroots wildfire at the time or a

younger generation of parents were coming up with their iPhone and Wanting that app

ecosystem and everything to be on the app and really how did we digitize kind of

what used to being the telephone chain, right? The phone chain. - We've used those

before. - You missed the phone chain, like oh, we switched rings. I didn't get the

message, we were coming right from work. And that was the problem. How do you avoid

showing up at the wrong field, the wrong ring at the wrong time? And that was the

core problem. And on the other side of Ledger, the founding team at Sports Engine

went much more on the business end and started what has now become kind of the

sport management registration market, of which Team Snap over the last six, seven

years has begun to enter into with force. And that's where the kind of the suite

of software that you're mentioning really resides. And that's us more focused on the

professionals and the volunteers that are running these organizations, much of which

are small and medium sized businesses, right? There's 200 ,000 plus of them across

the U .S. that are helping to provide the programming of sport. There's tens of

thousands of others that are volunteer led, where it's not someone's full time. And

so the dichotomy between I am a motivated entrepreneur, probably a former athlete

that really wants to go start the business around the programming of sports to make

kids' lives better, I'm focused on that 24 /7. And I probably have a team that's

focused on that 24 /7. But then I also have the volunteer led, whether it's the

local municipal league, That you know at best someone's able to dedicate four or

five ten hours a week And how do we balance a level of sophistication with the

simplicity of kind of that consumer business end? And all that goes into our product

design and it is a balance that we continue to strike It is an ecosystem and just

before we ask the next question I do just want to just for our audience Christie.

You'll love this too. Let's just reminisce quickly about 1995 hockey and You know,

again, you're right, for the younger parents, I'll tell this in a story. I showed

my dad Team Snap when I just tapped the map and it came up and he starts talking

about, we used to have paper maps and we used to have to draw out the route. He

goes, he goes, Lee, you were no help whatsoever when you were 15 years old. And

then, yeah, there was no communication. Like, you know, on the way to the rink, you

had to hope. You were going there and look, the simple thing of, hey, we're in

locker room 31 on Team Snap today. I mean, it's amazing when you think about what's

happened in the last 30 years. Go go. Hey, Christie I just wanted to walk on memory

and you know, even things like weather, you know, we have Right here, right and you

drive through the blizzard you get to the rink and you didn't get the email The

game's canceled was canceled four hours ago devastation, right? I hope I hope those

grudges on my parents for a week like we some old school to miss the game. That

was an outtool for a week. - Yeah, exactly. - There's nobody feeling bad about

putting Ram McNally out of business, but I think one of the things that I find,

like with technology, right, Peter, is comes like the burden of technology.

Like now, okay, we have all this technology, that's great. Everybody's on the system,

and everybody's, you know, grandma, mom, dad, the babysitter, the nanny, everybody

else is on there. How now, or what would you suggest from an organizational point

of view to manage that technology? Like the, like I get, like even me,

like I'll go through and say, okay, what notices do I want to have on this damn

thing? Do I want emails? Do I want text messaging? Do I want to know when a

game's changed? Do I want to know when somebody starts to chat. Do I want to know,

you know, and me as a coach, like I live by the communication piece from the RSVP

perspective, like I need to know and train my families that you must, you have to

go on there. I need to know if I have two goalies. I want to know if I have a

full roster of players. I want to know if everybody's coming. I want to know

everybody knows it's half ice or full ice or whatever it is. So you could just

talk a little bit about you as you're developing the programs and all the backend

stuff, what goes into determining, what do you wanna have complete access to and

what should you not really have to have toggled on all the time? - Yeah, and so,

Mike, one, let me just stress more. I think that the evolution of this technology

space in youth sports, right? Like we have not, as service providers, done our

audience a great service and as this thing as expanded. And Lee,

you mentioned before, all the different apps that are out there, and oftentimes in

most cases, frankly, it's not the coach or the parent's choice. It's coming from the

administrator, the operator's decision. And their first and foremost decision point

should be, is this going to help me run my organization better? And secondary, what

is that experience for the parents? And that's really the unique position of you.

Anyone's asked me what's team staff, it's like unique, you know magic sauce and

space is like we come from that consumer lens But we've rebuilt the organization

with experienced enterprise software developers and now we are focused on Mike your

administrative operating Day in and day out while still balancing that consumer mobile

side and the challenge of this is just the proliferation of all the apps That are

out there right whether you're using you know or cross bar for registration, you're

using Team Snap, using another mobile app for communication, you've got Live Barm for

streaming, you've got game sheets for scoring, like how do we start to bring all

that together? And so Mike, to address your question head on, like first and

foremost, like what we take a lot of pride in is being very upfront with our end

customers on what we can do and what we can't do. And I do think there are

Unfortunately, too many of our peers that might try to sell an all -in -one platform

where maybe they only have 50 % of what you're doing.

Second, I think through that partnership discussion, if you are feeling in a position

where someone is overselling you on certain value, I understand you need this, but

let's talk about this. It's probably because they can't do this that you really need

that well.

I don't know, Mike, should you have the emails or the text or how to to take that

communication, but I have a team that's gonna walk you through that and help to

understand what are those real challenges that you're going through? What type of

family do you have across these different teams? Are these the Uber engaged families

where you actually don't have to worry about people going on the app, they're gonna

put in availability, or is it, you know, I have other teams that I'm on by five

-year -old soccer team that I'm coaching, like the parents are never in the app. So

it's like, I got to text everybody and like, how do you balance Um, some of the

other things we're doing too is like, why as a parent, should I be going into the

app? How do we build more value in it? And we'll get into Bauer, but like, how do

we start to integrate what my son is going to do at practice tomorrow from the

coach's lens, but with value that I'm going to see in order to prep him as we're

getting to practice. So is there visibility into, Hey, here's going to be the

practice plan. Here are the drills. Here are some of the key concepts that we're

going to be hitting on in practice tomorrow from the coach, easily selectable, that's

then pushed out to the parent so that on the ride home, we not only make switching

to directions, but it's, hey, you know, Romeo Tristan, like, here are kind of the

three things you guys are going to work on today. What do you think about that?

Like, is there any other questions you have as you're getting in there? And so

they're actually a little bit more mentally prepped going into that practice, then,

you know, coming in blind. - I want to to say this. Yeah. So, Mike, to your point,

yeah, we need you to make a coach's emergency button where we tap it and

everybody's phone buzzes. Are you coming to practice tonight? Yeah. Just the joke on

that, but you know, I do want to ask this too. It's not a bad idea though. Yeah.

Coach emergency, the phone just goes crazy. Look at the eye on that one. It's like

the Apple emergency thing. It's just such availability for tonight. Yeah. But I do

want to say this too. Look, I'm the owner of a small hockey company, right? And

one of the things I hear all the time is you know what you should do, you know

what change you should make, and it's not that I don't appreciate that. It's just,

I think it's tough sometimes for people to understand, like a great idea is a great

idea, but putting it into play can be hard. And I think what happens with some of

your competitors as you alluded to is they see an aspect of I'd like to improve

upon that, okay? I'm asking you as a CEO, this is actually kind of a hockey

question too, 'cause I could make a metaphor here about aspects of your game and

how you need to improve on your game or find different parts of it. As the CEO,

you are aware of all of these changes and this will lead into the Bauer

conversation for sure. How do you compartmentalize someone saying, hey, look, I was

joking about the coaches button, but saying, you know what would be great? This,

because it's not like you can just snap your fingers and it appears on the app the

next day to 25 million people. How do you approach that as the leader and decide

when something is going to be looked at, implemented, launched, so forth and so on?

Yeah, so that's where I think the maturity and experience of how do you run a

world -class software business comes into play much more than is this a youth sports

tech business. And I think in this space, because of where we are in the maturity

of our market, there are a number of incredible founders that have built great

businesses. But that's all they've done to this point, right? They haven't gone off

and built massive software platforms for either the JPMorgan's or the Apple's or,

you know, more on the consumer oriented side. And so bringing kind of that day in,

day out mentality, I mean, my CTO was leading engineering organizations at Microsoft

and and used to run all of technology at Zanko, right? World's largest digital

gaming company. Like, how do you continue to look at the behavioral attributes of

what's going on in the platform, understand how people are using your technology? But

most importantly, numbers one through three, is our team is out there in the market,

in the field, having the conversations day in and day out. And that's not my

salespeople. That's our executive team. That's our product team. That's our product

marketing team. So that we're hearing these challenges and having individuals like

yourself, we walk us through step by step. You come into the office or you come

into the facility, what are you doing? What are you looking at first? Is it your

email? Is it your Google dashboard? What does that look like and take us through

those workflows and where are the actual points that we continue to improve? And

we've been investing heavily in a modernization of all of our platform that's in

partnership with the company that we acquire called Mojo Sports about a year and a

half back and, you know, we're excited over the next couple of months to begin

teasing out and then bringing all that technology to market and I can tell you

we've done thousands and thousands of hours of conversations across. - I believe that.

- Parents, coaches, operators, admins across all of our kind of top eight team

sports. And, you know, we're really excited about what we've been doing and, you

know, that's the approach we take. It's not the same approach everyone else takes,

but you know, a lot of the automation, a lot of the tooling that's coming out,

that's really helpful to make people maybe development faster, but it's not going to

change the conversation that we're going to have over 30 minutes and me really

understanding your business. Peter, I love to talk about, and you mentioned it a few

minutes ago, we'll get it into Bahur. Let's get into it. Let's talk about the

collaboration and how do you keep that guidance unbiased?

- Yeah, well, interesting question. So one, let me just kind of the genesis of where

kind of Bauer and some of the pro league relationships that we do have came to

about, as I said, we acquired a business called Mojo Sports back in December of '23

and Mojo Sports was being built by and led by two founders, two incredible

gentlemen, one of which it is mentioned, Reed Schaffner who's now our CTO a team

snap. The other was Ben Sherwood and Ben was a long time Disney executive, ran all

of ABC, Disney television for a decade plus under Bob Iger. And, you know, he left

Disney in 2018 and his kids were coming up young teenagers and he thought there's

got to be a better way to improve the experience of what I'm going through in

California through all and his kids were playing soccer on the field with media and

how did he apply his media lens and all the experience he had over a number of

decades creating incredible content across the globe down into this youth sports

market. And so him and Reid partnered up. They built great technology. They built

essentially think of what's a master class type of environment for coaches and for

parents. So everything's spanning. Here is a full season in a box, skills, drills,

supporting video, how do you run a 45, 60, 90 -minute practice with a U -12,

U -10, U -8 team and being enabling the coaches to be able to quickly go in,

make those modifications, and then we're essentially presenting what is an idea for

eight weeks of practices. Now, you're higher -end coaches that have been doing this

for a long time. I want to be able to provide the rails for them to take all

that expertise and push it out. this is much more focused I'd say on the 80 % of

the volunteer first -time coach market right so that someone that might be Volunt

told as I'm sure everybody here has I mean you're gonna do this. I Never coach saw

I never played soccer before but I volunteer to coach my five -year -old and I went

on and I've got a ton of backyard drills Soccer the FC Barcelona way. We've got a

great partnership with MLS Junior NBA and hockey's been an area that we continue

continue to expand. And so with the Bower relationship, it is very much focused on

those types of skills and drills and you know, it's everything from on ice drills

and performance tips from kind of ice hockey pros and how to improve performance

through just helpful guidance for hockey families, right? It's also the soft skills

and we want to be very clear and I know you guys have a version of or one of

your four shows that's that's more geared towards kind of that drive home like That

soft conversation when to have it how to help arm the parents. That's also just as

important And obviously look there's you know in partnership with Bauer as you get

into more power Oh, like there's clearly some points in which they're weaving in

their equipment They're a power but it's power and we're fully supportive of that I

mean, you know, they're building great quality stuff and we can stand behind that

and For your listeners, you know, we're starting up a challenge called snap to the

snap to ice challenge hashtag snap to ice challenge where you know you can post

videos to social and in your bower gear and show off your skills and shots based

off a lot of training that we have in team snap and you have opportunities to win

scholarships both for your club for school etc through that so more information on

our website on the bower website but you know we're we're balancing kind of how do

we help arm and educate the coaches and parents and at the same time being able to

use our position to be able to get back to the community. - Fair enough. - Mike,

did you have a question? I felt like we jumped on you there a couple of times.

- No, no, no. It was really just referring back to the technology and the use of

it and just making sure, I think one of the challenges I think all the time is

when parents will say, oh, that app, I can't use that app or that stinks or this

piece I don't like and I think it really comes down to, well, it's what you put

into it is what you get out of it, right? So if you have somebody that doesn't do

a good job of putting schedules in or doesn't do a good job of building lists or

do a good job of getting all the parents, you know, giving them the easy link to

say, just press here and sign up. That's all you got to do. You know, and I

think, you know, so, you know, somebody coming to make, I don't know, practice has

changed. Are you on the app? No, I'm not on the app. Okay, well, that probably

doesn't help that you're not on the app. But I think our reliance on on the tools

is really more of a reason to have all these other great features within the tool.

Because I think my goal as an organizational leader is to always drive people back

to the central place where information accumulates. And I think as much of that

information that can be housed in one click, for me as an organizational leader,

is much better and saying, hey, I need you to download these suite of apps and

you're gonna go here for learning, you're gonna go here for schedules, you're gonna

go here for, you know, this, you know, practice plan, you're gonna go here. - I'm

already lost and I run a technology company, right? - Right, right, it's just like I

can't have seven different logins to find all the information that you're providing

to me, you, one single person. So I love the fact that you could bring everything

into one, you know, under one tent and be in a situation where, whether you're a

Bauer fan or not, doesn't even matter, it's the information's there for you to use.

It's not like you can't use it if you're not wearing Bauer shin guards. It's just

the bottom line is there's a partnership in there and I think people need to

appreciate the fact that in order to get that information out to the consumer and

the player, there needs to be something on the other side supporting that. And

however, whoever it is, we should all be thankful that somebody's doing it. So that

like you're saying, I mean, I think, you know, 80 % of us that are in the youth

hockey space and any sport are volunteers and aren't professionals in what we do.

And I think that's one of the most important pieces about having all this support

around us is to say, Oh, you're telling me I can have an eight week lesson plan.

I just have to press the button. Oh, perfect. That's what I love. And And as you

become a, you know, we talk about this on our show all the time is as you become

like the whole love about coaching is coaching. So now once you get those, you

know, those guardrails in place and say, okay, here's the basics of what I should

be doing. Then you can start interjecting your own development pieces and your own

ability to watch players progress by making it harder and harder and harder. That

might not be in your app, but I'm sure there's opportunity to learn and keep

exploring from that, but I love the fact that you can go to one place, find

everything you need, and then move on from there. But again, it was just really

more of a conversation. - You're also right, it takes so much of the stress away so

that you can be a volunteer told. I love that phrase, by the way. You can be a

coach, you can be a hockey parent with all that out that extra organizational

struts. It really makes a difference. - Yeah, and it's also meeting the coaches and

the parents where they are, right? We were talking about Bower. We also have an

incredible partnership with a company called Hockey Coach Vision. And we have hundreds

of skills, ice hockey plays, like things that are actually animated,

they're mapped out more of the X's and O's of how to run the drill, how to run

the play, how to introduce this to the kids for more advanced coaches,

right? And so it's kind of meeting the different levels of coaches where they are

to ensure that the content's relevant, the materials are useful, and that we're

aligning to where their skill sets are. - Pete, I'm laughing because it's a sticking

point from Mike and I and Christie too, that we do not know how any coach in

hockey can show up unprepared for a practice today because first off, it is very

easy to find practice plans. You've made it even easier, you know? And we're talking

about this, the aggregation of everything into one place. And I think it's such such

a help. I mean, because here's the thing, volunteer coaches, you are busy, you have

a lot of things going on. And I know we all say I wish there was just a place

that could click and have a practice plan. That's out there. And one of the cool

things about the Bauer partnership, I want to actually ask you about the creative

side of this, because it's not just one thing. You know, I noticed when I went in

there, there's a lot of information for new families about fitting and gear and and

you know obviously it's led by power but it's good information regardless and then

it kind of expands from there can you talk about maybe the creative process or the

conversations that happened of okay we're teaming up what does that mean how did you

decide where the value was going to be and then how that was implemented into the

day -to -day yeah so we've got a spectrum of different levels of content content

right I mentioned hockey coach vision that was more they created their content they

stand alone we're packaging it within kind of the team snap package so like all the

descriptions things are easier to consume but we're really repurposing a lot of that

in order to provide that central hub then we have the fully kind of ground up

produced content and bower was unique in that bower is invested in and built their

own bower studio which is this just massive complex to create whether it's, you

know, content, highly produced content and videos around their commercials,

their apparel, or all the way through what we now have in our app. Which is taking

their equipment, taking their apparel and being able to maximize the effectiveness of

that during practice and then also how do you expand into being able to educate and

provide real value to families. But it is a true partnership. in other instances,

whether it be the PLL, Professional Cross League, NFL Flag. I mean,

we sat down and Bottoms Up built the entire inventory and library of content.

I mean, the NFL Flag content we filmed for a week at SoFi Field. And it was in

collaboration with the NFL Flag team when we took their playbook, we digitized it,

we built an entire slew of hundreds of, you know, 30 and highly produced videos on

SoFi Field. PLL, we filmed about nine months ago. We're in SoCal down at one of

their locations. We had all their coaches on the field. We recruited a bunch of

kids for three days. And it is a, it's a ground up, you know,

production of content, right? This isn't something you can slap together. And that's

also, you know, where we've in a very crowded content space, there is no doubt you

can go on YouTube and find any content you content. But is it good? Is it relevant

and is the quality of it there? And that's been the bar that we set. And you can

see that with the bench of logos that we've done this with in terms of the

partnerships we have. Yeah, and you can see like, what's the exact phrase of if

you're a master of everything, you're a master of nothing, right? And in today's

technological age, there's no lack of information, but finding good Information as you

said I want to say that again because you know we tell kids all the time Yeah,

YouTube YouTube is a great resource But hopefully you're watching something of someone

who knows what they're talking about about you know So I love that you guys have

brought this in again. I wonder if our listeners know this is active in team snap

right now I was again. I was looking at it yesterday. There's a lot of information

there for coaches for players for parents now I have to ask you a ceo question.

I'm gonna ask it from the point of view of a consumer. This is an important

question. I'm going to preface it too. You said you have 200 employees, you said,

correct? Yep. You have multiple sports. You got a lot of this is a business that

that Pete is running. Okay. There's a lot of paid options in this app. Okay.

And I want to give you the audience here to tell people why some of the things

are paid. And we got to keep in mind that youth hockey audience is already paying

a lot of money, you know that, you're in the game. I think it's a fair question.

I think you'll have a great answer for just explaining, okay, hey, there's paid

things in the app. Why do I have to pay to unlock things? Where's the value in

that? Pete, your answer. - Yeah, so a couple of things. Let me hit that head on.

We have a mobile platform that has been around for a while.

Right, and so with that comes a need for continued investment in modernization and

scale. We're talking a lot of the privacy, the security things that need to be put

back to the app. We also have, at any given time, tens of thousands of free -based

teams, meaning coaches that have come on and are using kind of the lower level of

our offering just to manage our team for free. And we are not charging for that at

all, but we believe there's a way to subsidize that, that we as TeamSnap want to

be able to give back. And through that, we have introduced a number of different

brand experiences in the user experience that at times can also feel a little bit

cluttered, right? You want to go and get directions to the field. You probably don't

want to know about the latest movie that's popping up. And so we need to get

better and we are going to get better about how we're introducing those brand

experiences in order to help subsidize the cost of the free experience for the

coaches that might not want to use the full breath of the platform. Now on our

four page this is really more sitting in front of the a lot of the content that

we're talking about right and the cost of the content that we're referencing whether

it be with Bauer or whether it be the content that we've developed the NFL flag

there's real cost around that both production fees along with licensing fees for the

IP whether it's the IP and the content that we're receiving from these great

partners or great professional leagues or even being able to use the marks. And

there's also the level of quality insurance that comes with all of the content that

we are developing, right? So that you're not going down a black hole on YouTube,

but you have the good housekeeping, seal of approval. This has gone through 17

different layers of approval through these content partnerships, through these

professional leagues and through TeamStack So that we are bringing the best content

that's out there to everyone, but yes, I mean, it is a business that we continue

to balance, right? How do we continue to scale with how do we bring the most value

to families, coaches and sports organizations across the world? Yeah, and Peter, it's

a great answer. I'll say this too. I think a lot of families and coaches might not

realize a couple of things. Like one is the business aspect of this. You know, Most

of you feel that you're using this for free, but here's the thing, your

organizations actually pay for this for you to have all of these great features. So

when I hear people say, oh, there's an ad, I tell, you know, hey, listen,

they're running a business here, you know, I mean, and, and it was a great answer.

Sorry, Christie, go ahead. I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about it.

You can go on any website, right. Yeah. And you've got the ads, But Peter, I'm

kind of curious as to where you see your industry headed, because AI is changing

everything now. If you had a crystal ball, maybe you could kind of peek in there

and give us an idea of how things may be changing, and probably pretty rapidly,

if it's any indication of what I've been seeing in my Yeah, it's, it's very,

I mean, look, just technology and software as a whole, even where we are as

TeamSnap and an organization versus where we were 12 months ago and how we're

running all of our different functions, whether it be R &D, sales, marketing, finance,

like the level of efficiencies that we've been able to gain by very having some

very motivated leaders that frankly have gone out, educated themselves, brought in the

new technology, new ways of doing things, whether it be AI enabled or elsewhere. And

we as an organization are getting better for that. And that also impacts our ability

to create more value quicker for our audience space. I think where this mark is

going, Christie, over the next five years, you've seen it in the last 12 to 18

months. Like if you, with the exception of Team Snap, there's probably about 80 % of

the major technology and service providers in this space that have either gone

through some type of merger, investment, recapitalization, and the consolidation in our

space, which going back to the point that Mike was bringing up earlier, we as

service providers have created this proliferation of 100 different apps, that's not

going to last. It doesn't last in any market. And so you are starting to see the

combination, the partnership

Technology is beginning to come together and those that I believe we're going to win

Are going to be the ones that do that with the lens through is this right for the

market in which we are serving? Whether it's a parent whether it's a coach whether

it's a sports or it's not to bring more Registration volume together because we can

bring down our margins and there's economies of scale all that like you can take

that lens To any market that doesn't win here And that's one of the things that

I've learned the hard way Over the last five six years and now being in the space

like this the scale and the fragmentation of youth sports And thereby youth sports

technology is real right in the seasonality in which youth sports goes through as a

much different Quote -a -quote adoption cycle of technology than you would see in any

other market or at least those that I've been a part of and So it's scale and

size and kind of distribution power of that technology that's a real differentiator

here. And so I think over the next couple of years, you will start to see a

greater divide between kind of some of the larger players of scale that are able to

bring that level of trust and continue to bring that level of value down into the

communities, be able to unify a lot of the technologies that are out there. And

whether that's from everything registration, scheduling, all the way through video

streaming, through training, through through commerce through power like how do you

continue to build that into a one -stop shop because that is a way that which we

can you know not just provide more value to parents and families but frankly also

help to reduce the cost. Well AI will not replace on ice coaching. So I think

we're at the point right now is if you could you can get me there get the kid

there no worries that have a you know I guess I guess I guess if you want to

wear a headset and play hockey, that's fine all the time, but no one's going to

replace an on ice. - No, it is on us to like,

there's so many different technologies that are coming out of like, "Hey, we're going

to analyze how your kid's skating. "What is the speed? "How's that combined to their

health? "Coach, how should we take that in "and maybe create kind of a plan for

those kids? "What are the wearables market that's starting "to really grow?" You

mentioned AR, like, we've got to also slow down a little bit. Like, this is about

the kids learning. They're on the rink. They're on the field. They're on the court.

Like, you need a stick and a puck. And, you know, obviously, the equipment that we

need for ice hockey, or you need a football and some flags, like, they got to be

out there having fun. And I think that's also where, you know, technology is

probably going a little bit too deep into this youth sports value chain of, like,

the structured approach to youth sports, and I'm seeing it firsthand, is just so

much different than we all grew up with. And I think all of us that are partners

in the space, whether it be from a service provider, a coach, a lead club operator,

like we've just got to balance it. We got to balance it because it's, I don't

think it's the best thing overall for society and for our kids right now. - Thank

you for saying that, Peter. I agree, it can be pretty head spinning when you think

about it. - While. - Yeah. - I always joke about what we want AI to do versus what

it actually does. What I want AI to do is optimize our schedule so we're not

playing the same team 600 miles away that we're playing. - That's it. - That's the

best way to optimize. - Yeah. - Optimize through your hands. - You're gonna get there

with your kids. You're gonna travel 600 miles and you're gonna play the same team

that you played in your hometown. It will happen to you. Mark my words, write it

down to me. - Well, hopefully we can help to solve some of those, to avoid those

trips for the Franzella's family. Yeah, well, Pete, I'm gonna say this. I think it

says a lot about you and your company that you're willing to come on a show and

talk to you, hockey families, about what you're doing. Many who love what you do,

but some who will be critical of what you do, but the fact that you're willing to

put yourself out there. - Yeah, that type of feedback and those voices are the ones

we want to hear. And we've done a lot of things right. And in some places we've

probably overstepped in a couple of areas and we're gonna fix that. But we need to

address that head on, right? And if not, like we're not being genuine, we're not

letting up to the values that I think we've built this company around. And we're

not perfect, right? And so I appreciate everyone's patience as we continue to work

through what's been a pretty significant transformation of our technology and

evolution. And we're excited about where Team Stem's going. - And it's kind of hard

'cause you sports parents usually aren't very, like they don't really communicate

their negative, you know, side of their experience. So I'm sure it'll be a challenge

for you.

- Yeah, you're definitely from Connecticut. And like, it's okay. - It's okay. - Like

you're just as cynical as I am, man. We gotta spend more time together. (laughing)

- No, this has been great, Peter. We really appreciate coming on. I will say this

to all of our listeners that at the end of the day, for me, This is my own

personal endorsement. Team Snap's the one I keep coming back to. It really does have

everything. You can always find something to complain about, but as Pete said, I

look for companies that are evolving and finding new ways to do things. When I get

on an app and it's been the same app for five years, that is not going to last.

And Team Snap has really taken the step forward with your partnerships, with the

features, and everything you're doing, Pete. So congratulations on that. And it's your

whole team. I didn't realize it was 200 people. That is a massive amount of people

you're employing. So thank you for that. - Thanks, Mike. Great conversation. I

appreciate you having me on. - Always, man. That's gonna do it for this edition of

Our Kids Play Hockey. I say it all the time. Share this in your team snap. I'm

sure Pete agrees with that. All right, if you found value in this, and remember you

can email us at team @ourkidsplayhockey .com. The inbox is open. And as we get all

the time, you can text us via a link accompanying this episode in the description

of the episode. Put your name, put where you're from, ask questions, let us know.

We love to talk about those on the air. For Pete, for Mike, for Christie, I'm Lee

Elias. We'll see you on the next episode of Our Kids Play Hockey. Take care

everybody. We hope you enjoyed this edition of Our Kids Play Hockey. Make sure to

like and subscribe right now if you found value wherever you're listening, whether

it's a podcast network, a social media network, or our website, ourkidsplayhockey .com.

Also, make sure to check out our Children's Book, When Hockey Stops, at

whenhockeystops .com. It's a book that helps children deal with adversity in the game

and in life. We're very proud of it, but thanks so much for listening to this

edition of Our Kids Play Hockey, and we'll see you on the next episode.