Athletics Australia is the national governing body for athletics (track and field, running, and race walking) in Australia. The Athletics Australia Growth and Development Department is responsible for leading a range of functions, including workforce training and development, program design, and program delivery in areas such as schools. Adam Bishop is the General Manager of Growth and Development and has been working with Sport for Life to utilise the PLAYBuilder platform to support Athletics Australia's work in delivering quality programs. Adam and the Athletics Australia Growth and Development team are passionate about providing positive experiences and environments for participants and opportunities for kids to develop physical literacy so that they can be active for life.

Website:
https://www.athletics.com.au

Interviewee:

Adam Bishop, General Manager of Growth and Development

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Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder? What was the problem you had that you needed PLAYBuilder to solve?

A: Through the Australian Government's Sporting Schools program, Athletics Australia delivers just under 1000 athletics programs to 110,000 children in schools across Australia each year, utilising more than 200 accredited coaches. Kids' Athletics makes up the majority of these programs. In late 2019, we also piloted a physical literacy focussed program as an extension of Kids' Athletics that was delivered in the community setting. Alongside this, we'd also previously completed some research in partnership with La Trobe University and Sport Australia which demonstrated that Kids' Athletics helped children develop across all four domains (physical, psychological, social, and cognitive) of the Australia Physical Literacy Standard.

Since the inception of these programs, the content for the 8 week Kids' Athletics program has been provided to deliverers in the form of large PDF manuals. These manuals were fine for viewing on desktop computers or laptops, but were impractical for taking out in the field to support program delivery. We wanted to provide coaches with the ability to access the content via a phone or tablet wherever they were delivering with the view that this would improve program delivery and coach effectiveness to enhance the experience and learning outcomes for participants. In order to address this challenge, we were exploring the development of an app or mobile response platform to provide access to the program content to coaches when they were out delivering the program.

Q: How were those challenges affecting you and your organization?

A: We recognise the importance of program content being delivered as intended and for participants to have a great experience. We also want to ensure that our coaches (and teachers) are supported in the delivery of their programs no matter where they are delivering. Having program content, including information on instructional cues, equipment, and safety, along with supporting visuals (images and video) of how the activities operate available to deliverers out in the field will help us support coaches to provide high quality and effective programs.

Q: What other possible solutions did you consider?

A: Our original intention was to develop an app or web-based mobile responsive platform to house and serve the content to coaches via their smart phone or tablet. We knew this would be a challenging project, but it was something we thought would be beneficial in helping us achieve our program outcomes and to provide ongoing support to coaches after they had completed the online program upskilling.

Q: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder?

A: I (Adam) had been following the work of Sport for Life via the regular newsletters and whilst we were considering the development of the app, I came across PLAYBuilder. I explored the platform's functionality and realised that it very closely matched what we were intending to build. Given the complexities and the cost associated with building an app for what we required, I reached out to Sport for Life to enquire about the opportunity to potentially license a white label version of PLAYBuilder that we could develop our content in.

Q: What would have happened if you had not chosen to license the use of PLAYBuilder?

A: We would have pressed ahead with the development of an app or web-based platform. We would have probably arrived at a similar solution, but it would have been significantly more expensive, would have been very time consuming, and would have likely had significantly less functionality. Building this type of platform ourselves would have also resulted in significantly longer lead time in releasing the content in this form to our coaches.

Q: When you first purchased PLAYBuilder did you intend to share full access to your members? If not, what were the reservations or limitations in sharing access to your members?

A: We intend to provide licenses on an as needed basis to our accredited coaches and teachers in schools who have undergone the online program delivery upskilling. In this way, we can control access to the content and ensure that those who have access to the program content are accredited and appropriately trained in the delivery of the program content.

Q: Recently you decided to contract Sport for Life to implement and digitize your Athletics Australia Curriculum into PLAYBuilder, how was that experience for you?

A: It was a really positive experience for us. Like many organisations across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic had seen us take some difficult decisions as an organisation around staffing. This particularly impacted the Growth and Development team with most of the staff on reduced hours. We had hoped to use the pandemic period as an opportunity to build this content in PLAYBuilder, but with work volumes remaining relatively unchanged and with reduced staffing levels, we didn't have the human resource capacity to devote to populating the content in PLAYBuilder. Engaging the Sport for Life team to do this work for us, particularly with their knowledge of the system, was a very efficient way to quickly build the content in PLAYBuilder and have the program content ready to deploy. It also allowed us to easily build in the Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum content descriptors that had been mapped against the program content.

Q: What measurable benefits have you seen or have projected since implementing PLAYBuilder? What organizational processes does PLAYBuilder enhance? How much does it reduce the cost and time to complete these particular processes?

A: Given the current restrictions and uncertainty in Australian schools with programs like Sporting Schools at present, we have delayed the deployment of PLAYBuilder until term 4 (October 2020). We believe PLAYBuilder will make it easier for us to provide access to and control the distribution of the program content to our workforce, as well as improving the effectiveness of our coaches by providing easy access to the program content no matter where they are delivering to kids across Australia.

Q: What would you tell others who might be considering PLAYBuilder? Would you recommend PLAYBuilder to your peers?

A: If you're looking to digitise your content to make it more usable and accessible and improve its look and feel, then PLAYBuilder may be a suitable solution. If you're looking to build a bespoke platform to distribute your content, given the time and cost associated with doing this, PLAYBuilder is definitely worth exploring as part of your thinking.