A brief history of your organisation?

The British Army has been credited with the spread of hockey throughout the world, but in the case of Australia, the British Navy deserves the honours. In the late 1800's, Australia did not have a naval fleet of her own, and relied upon the Royal Army for the security of her coastline. The British Naval officers stationed in Australia taught the locals the game of hockey, and laid the foundations of a sport which Australian's have mastered, and developed a style of their own.

In 1906, Victoria formed a state association. Men's clubs sprang up in Melbourne and hockey became an established sport in Australia. Many years later women in Victoria also formed a state association and competed throughout the state. In 1970 the Victorian Junior Hockey Association was formed to look after the interests of juniors in the state. In 2003 all three associations amalgamated to form Hockey Victoria.

How did your organisation process its comp management / website solution/membership before SP came along?

We did not have a complete database. Each association had their players on paper, disk or not at all. The 3 competitions were run by each association. We used a fixture program to set up each competition. We used a ladders program for each association to process their results. All results were phoned into an answering machine, collated then entered into the ladders program then uploaded to each web site. All team sheets were then posted into the associations. The associations would then get people to tick off the players on a spreadsheet to tally games played.

What made you decide to go with SportingPulse?

1. We used paid staff and volunteers to collated and enter all the results. We were afraid that if we lost our volunteers we would not be able to process the details.
2. We wanted a database of all players.
3. We wanted to own our own data.
4. We wanted to have access to all statistics on players and matches.
5. We wanted an internet based solution that every club could access and enter information on our behalf and be password protected.
6. We wanted to be able to run stand alone championships.

What would you list as the main benefits of the solution?

The main benefit to Hockey is communications with our members, efficiency, a cost effective product and a more professional image with our members. Hockey Victoria has access to every members details, every club now has their own database (many clubs did not have a database in the past). There is only single handling of data by the clubs on our behalf. With every team entering their own results and players into the "Online Results" we are able to results and ladders to the newspapers and onto the web by 7pm on a Sunday evening. The savings in labour time have been immense, in the past we would spend in excess of 30 hours a week collating and processing all the data for the 3 associations, we now spend around 10 hours a week to get a more professional finish.

The processes we find an extra benefit to Hockey Victoria over and above the fixtures, results and ladders are:

Tallying games played, votes, cards and goals, by every player. This in turn gives us finals eligibility, best and fairest, and Milestones. We also use the automated clearances, and Tribunal features. The reports section of Sportzware is invaluable to the office to keep a check on how the system is running.

How have your members responded?

At first we had a bit of resistance to the concept and the extra work the members had fill out for us. However prior to the start of the season we had a 100% compliance to giving hockey their members database. Round 1 saw a 95 % compliance to the "Online Results", and by round 18 we had 100 % of all results by Monday morning prior to the finals. We have never had that before in the past. Members now are putting pressure on their own club to comply with our requests as they are seeing the benefits.

A huge majority of members are very positive about the use of SportingPulse, you will always get the few that complain about the change, saying we had this before why can't we get it now. I think we have over the year adding all the old features plus many more new ones. The negatives we get are about having to login as a member to SportingPulse and Privacy issues. The positives far outweigh the negatives!

How have you justified the cost of the solution?

By year 2 we anticipate their will be a huge cost saving to Hockey. The office will be more efficient plus will only spend half the time on results as it did in the past. The member's costs are kept down as they do part of the work and do not have to pay for it. Their fines are considerably reduced as the system does most of the work and provided they are on time save money.

Have you had any feedback from your peers?

Hockey Australia are very interested in getting a National database. They see a system like SportingPulse as a way they can gain a database from all states. Currently there is no better system around to get a National Database without doing any updating of data themselves. They will also be able to run the National Hockey League live and keep a tab on all the players. Quite a few states have already contacted us to get feedback on what we are doing.

How long did it take for your organisation to build it's online database

We gave each club about a month to collate all their own members and get us a predetermined formatted spreadsheet of all their members. We had a restriction that no team could play from their club without giving us their database. Every club had their data to us prior to round one.

Any other comments?

• We had 3 pre-season open discussions and demonstrations in a computer laboratory which was invaluable training for all the clubs.
• We hope to have a debrief at the end of the season.
• Giving every club and team their own web site has been a big selling point.
• Email reminders have allowed us to make changes and then let the individuals know.
• Sportzware is updating all the time and we are getting the benefit of all sports, not just Hockey.
• SportingPulse is also continually changing and improving, we hope to have an expanded database before too long with many extra statistical features for the players to view.

Brief: Runs hockey competition in Victoria, Australia.
Location: Victoria
Size: 14,384 members
SportingPulse Applications: Sportzware Central, Online Results, Sportzware Websites
Benefits: Administration time saved, Positive response all round, Cost effective