Overtime Elite
About OTE
Overtime Elite (OTE) is a professional basketball league featuring top 17- to 20-year-old domestic and international players. There are six teams in the league, and games are played primarily at the OTE Arena in Atlanta. OTE, owned and operated by Overtime, brings fans as close as possible to the action through broad digital distribution on accounts that have millions of followers. While playing in the league, players receive innovative, cutting edge education and training to prepare them for college and professional basketball.
OTE’s three founding sponsors are State Farm, Gatorade and Meta Quest. The league offers a year-round development program combining world-class coaching, the latest sports science and performance technologies, top-notch facilities, and a rigorous, highly personalized academic program that energizes and enhances each athlete’s journey from proficiency to pro. Markus Klusemann is OTE’s Director of Health, Performance, and Development.
Key Takeaways
The Opportunity
To attract, retain, promote, and develop the best high-school aged basketball prospects from the US and across the world, OTE needs to operate efficiently and effectively and for every department to work together harmoniously. To do so, it’s vital that information is current, complete, and immediately available to everyone who needs it. On the performance side, OTE recognized that uniting medical and performance data would enable better load management, injury monitoring, practice planning, and attendance. Such a system also offered the potential to streamline OTE’s extensive athlete onboarding/ intake process, and improve other administrative workflows.
The Challenge
As a new sports league, OTE had to build processes and procedures from scratch across the organization. For the performance team, this meant taking the knowledge and prior experiences of eight skilled professionals and using it to create best practices for medical care, injury rehabilitation, and performance training. The operations staff was tasked with gathering and managing a wealth of information from players, parents, partners, and more across a wide variety of sources. Some data sets were too large or complicated for end users to sift through, so they needed the main details to be summarized in a concise, meaningful, and visual way.
The Solution
From the moment a new player and his parents first walk through OTE’s doors, they have touchpoints with Smartabase. The administrative group collects information on everything from academics to consent forms, ensuring each player is onboarded successfully. Medical data is collated via a custom EMR and presented to staff and athletes in a readily accessible way. Load management data is presented to staff and coaches to inform practice plans and ensure each player is being challenged without being overloaded. Smartabase also enables OTE to proactively pursue a person-first approach to injury monitoring and return players to practice and play responsibly.
The Impact
Smartabase is helping improve OTE’s customer service to athletes and their parents by making it easier for coaches to find and apply the exact data they need and streamlining communication. Administrators can easily see which documents a player has submitted and which are incomplete. From a performance perspective, Smartabase has enabled OTE’s coaches to create a seamless practice plan workflow that takes the individual load of each player into account. Monitoring and collaborating on athletes’ rehab is easier with all injury and medical data readily accessible. An availability dashboard shows the real-time status of each player and their practice attendance, increasing accountability.