Quarantined junior players remain connected during COVID-19 via Cincopa-delivered webinars

The show must go on – even during COVID-19

The Coronavirus brought the United Kingdom to an abrupt halt, with sports being one in a long line of suspended industries. The 2019-20 Scottish hockey season was shut down during March, and all related team activities were cancelled until further notice. These executive decisions applied to both senior and junior teams.

SIH was forced to consider how the complete and indefinite absence of sporting activities would affect young hockey players in Scotland; both from a physical and mental perspective.

From the onset, SIH believed that the young men and woman it oversees required assistance in maintaining skills, along with a way to optimize time during quarantine. With the lockdown in effect, it was imperative the kids’ morale remained as high as possible.

The need to keep spirits high applied to said players’ coaching staff, as well.

Tasked with finding relevant solutions, SIH’s media team zeroed-in on a series of innovative, motivational webinars developed by Northwestern Hockey Camp Canada.
Hosted by former Calgary Flame Harry Manhood, the three episode series would offer great professional and emotional value to viewers; keeping spirits high, along with providing critical instructions on maintaining optimal levels of fitness in the face of unprecedented circumstances.

Once the decision to present a webinar series was finalized, SIH’s media team faced an additional challenge:

How would players and coaches access and view these webinars?

Needed: a robust, password protected, analytics-providing streaming platform

The webinars would need to be sent to all 16 Scottish Ice Hockey clubs, and would be viewed by members of said clubs’ junior teams. The coaches of these teams would be tasked with seeing to it that the webinars would be passed along to each player.

Three major factors guided SIH’s media team in their pursuit of an optimal solution:

1. Given that these webinars were copy-written, access to them would have to be limited exclusively to SNL players. Users would have to prove they are who they claim to be by submitting a user and password.
2. SIH Coaching staff would require finite details on the habits of all junior players from Scottish Ice Hockey teams.
3. If players were to exhibit high engagement rates with the webinar series, SIH’s media team would then seriously examine presenting players and coaches with additional webinars on a more frequent basis. This would be true even once the restrictions brought on by the global pandemic were lifted. Players’ viewing patterns would have to be registered in a fashion that would enable SIH’s media team to analyze the results.

 

Cincopa Account Site emerges as the perfect solution

Following a thorough research and vetting process, Cincopa surfaced as the platform most suitable for SIH’s unique use case.

Satisfied with its dynamic video player and easy, intuitive usability, SIH’s media team were immediately drawn to a newly-developed Cincopa feature:

Account Site.

The go-to approach towards sharing media, Account Site enables users to showcase videos, podcasts and images without the need to embed them within their website. Users are free to share a link with prospects, customers and students, ostensibly presenting their unique digital asset in a guarded, controllable environment.

Opting to embed their media in the Account Site, SIH’s media team uploaded the webinars to its Cincopa account, and added them to a Cincopa Video Course. The latter gallery perfectly lends itself to SIH’s use case; enabling viewers to keep track of their progress even once they bounce from one video to the next. Especially useful for long-formatted videos, Cincopa Video Course presents videos in playlist format, with a blue line representing the sections of the video each viewer has completed.

After submitting their user and password,
players can engage with these webinars presented on Cincopa Account Site.

The Account Site presents administrators with the option of limiting access to those with registered user accounts and passwords.

The SIH coaching team created a unique user for each Club team. This saw the system identifying over 120 new users. Opting for this approach facilitated the provision of in-depth, granular analytics. Coaches were able to understand the usage patterns of their respective teams and encourage participation amongst users who failed to engage with the webinars.

The process of creating the users was simplified by performing a bulk upload of user names and passwords from a CSV file. The latter was uploaded to the SIH Cincopa account and added to the video galleries. Each club was then sent its list of users whom could access the webinar series. Clubs were allotted 6 individual access profiles that could be used by team members of clubs’ various junior teams.

SIH’s Coaching team began closely keeping track of players’ engagement levels with the webinars. Coaches now provide feedback to the SIH management board as well as to each individual Club, allowing for corrective action.

With Cincopa’s analytical features, SIH’s media team examined the engagement levels of each junior team under specific clubs (e.g. ‘Aberdeen’s U14 team showed 90% viewership rates, while the U20 boasted 94%).

SIH Coaching team has continued to utilise the flexibility of the Cincopa analytics engine by exporting the analytical data. This has allowed coaches to manipulate the data into any format they wish, along with appropriate graphs, and to continue said reporting at both club and board management level.