“Our ultimate goal is to try to help drive down the cost of sports and help organizers and volunteers put more time into actually enjoying and growing the game.”
Businesses and non-profit organizations regularly open and move in Saskatoon. Today the StarPhoenix talks to Jay Maharaj, who originally opened TeamLinkt in Saskatoon in 2017 to help sports teams and leagues manage and communicate. His company recently introduced an artificial intelligence assistant to save even more time and make its services easier to use.
The TeamLinkt app helps sports leagues with tasks like scheduling, registering players, developing websites and communicating with team members and parents. It saves significantly time that would otherwise have to be spent behind the scenes by staff or volunteers.
In September, TeamLinkt enhanced its operation with its AI-powered assistant, Emi, to make tasks even easier and more intuitive to complete. Sports organizers can simply chat with Emi to create reports and complete other administrative functions.
Q: What is TeamLinkt?
A: TeamLinkt is an all-in-one sports management platform. We help teams and organizations to simplify their season through our TeamLinkt app. Our ultimate goal is to try to help drive down the cost of sports and help organizers and volunteers put more time into actually enjoying and growing the game.
We typically work with youth sports, although we power adult rec and high schools and all sorts of sports leagues such as youth hockey, football, soccer, lacrosse and volleyball. Our tool will help organizations to quickly generate a website through AI, generate their schedule, their registration forms.
We’ve built AI rostering so they can generate rosters. This is just saving them all of those hours in Excel and whatnot to really expedite the setup. From there, the parent and player is able to access the schedule. If anything changes, they get instant updates.
And then TeamLinkt helps with internal team communication. The coach can see and the parents can mark if a kid is going to a game, so the coach knows who is showing up. They can share photos and run calls and videos and even things like live scoring. So if I’m not able to make it to a game, if someone on the team is updating the score in the app, I’m able to keep up on my kid’s game from anywhere.
Q: What does your AI assistant Emi allow sports organizations to do?
A: Instead of having to figure out how to do something, organizers can just chat with Emi and Emi can perform those actions for you just through conversation. It can retrieve data and deliver it in the ways you want. If you want to see a pie chart of male to female participation this year, or maybe a bar graph comparing last year to this year, you can just chat with Emi and it can generate new information in the way that you want it.
Obviously there’s built-in reporting, but Emi goes well beyond that because it’s able to answer questions and let you interact with that information.
Our goal as a company is to empower sports organizers. We want to automate the role of youth sports administration and give you an assistant. Imagine an assistant that had 20 years’ experience and you’re a volunteer and you get thrown into being a webmaster or registrar or whatever it may be. Emi could help you create an exceptional experience without the knowhow.
It can provide those insights to say, ‘Now may be a good time to do this.’ Or it will know if some teams haven’t sent scores yet, and ask you, ‘Would you like me to send them a reminder?’ We can do all those types of things.
Right now it’s for the organizer, and then we’ll be extending Emi access in the app for teams and parents soon.
Q: Which organizations use your app?
A: We work with organizations across Canada. Here locally, we power most of the sports world on our platform or in our app. And that holds true through more and more of Canada and the U.S.
We’ve generated over the last few years around 80 new sports organizations each month. We have 3,000-plus organizations on the platform. The app is used in 80 countries now. Our focus has been North America, but we get picked up all over the place. We have 30,000 to 40,000 users in Australia just organically.
We started here locally. We had some great support from early adapters like Saskatoon Minor Hockey and Saskatoon Minor Football and groups like that. And we expanded through Western Canada. We ended up partnering with provincial-level organizations which pushed into Eastern Canada.
We power Football Canada programs and membership nationally. And then things started taking off in the U.S. We work with groups like Under Armour Rise Flag Football and all over the place, all types of sports.
Q: How much does the app cost?
A: It’s a free tool. We monetize based on ads within the app. We have also introduced a premium TeamLinkt plus option that gives families a better experience in app with some features that are ad-free. And then we’ve been really driven to try to add value to relationships. We’ve been partnering with groups like Adidas and BioSteel and those types of groups that are now giving discounts to our audience and plus subscribers.
Q: Why did you start TeamLinkt in the first place?
A: I had a couple kids in sports. As a parent and a techie, you see some of the gaps. Some of the software that was out there was clunky, complex or costly. We felt we could bring a better solution to market in modern days, both at a youth sports organization level but also at a team level and make sure great technology was available.
We feel that we’re the best company to execute on this vision of automating the role of sports administration. A lot of times these organizations can’t grow because they lack volunteers at the organization and coaching level. If we can make those functions run smoothly without as many resources needing to be put in, hopefully we can have a true and real impact on growing sports in communities.
Q: Do you have future plans to improve your AI ability?
A: Where we are going is the ability for Emi in the future for coaches, managers and parents to be able to ask questions, execute actions and so forth right from the app itself. A lot of the information in sports organizations is often there, but it’s tucked away in PDFs or websites that people aren’t accessing regularly. We want to make the resources and everything easy.
Q: How many TeamLinkt app users do you have?
A: We have millions of users now. Typically monthly active users in our team app are pushing about 500,000. Outside of social media we would be the next most-used app on a parent’s phone when their kids are in sports. They’re sharing and connecting with their team. They are liking photos, commenting, doing all those sorts of things.
Q: Do you have an idea of how much time and money you can save sports organizations?
A: Our goal within the next year is to reduce that administrative burden by 50 per cent. From there we’ll keep pushing and we want to reduce 70 per cent, 80 per cent and continue down that path and get more versatile and powerful.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Business Name: TeamLinkt
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