Please introduce yourself briefly.
My name is Jason Eager, I'm the technical director at Northern Tigers FC. I've been in this position since October 2012.
How would you describe your club?
First and foremost our club is Inclusive: we have a strong male and female side of our club. We are Ambitious: we’re trying to perform at the highest level that we can for our players.
I think we are also Creative and Innovative, in the way that we try and do things. We’re a semi-professional club so we need to be clever with the way we use our resources.
Last but not least we’re a family club in the best sense of the word. We have a lot of players that move into coaching, we have a lot of siblings playing in different age groups across the club on both the boys and girls’ side.
What is the mission and vision of your youth academy?
Our vision is to develop better people and better players for tomorrow. That shows people we're looking ahead, not looking for right now.
Why did the club choose ProSoccerData as a management tool?
The club and the requirements of the club have grown exponentially over ten years, compared to when I started in 2012. Every offseason we always look for better ways to do things. What can we improve and what tools can we use to improve the club? Especially the last few years I've been looking for a solution for the vast amounts of information that we collect on various platforms. It was very difficult to manage all that information, I struggled to find something that could do everything.
One good thing during Covid lockdown, we had plenty of time to research even further and deeper and talk to various people and I came across ProSoccerData. We reached out to you guys and PSD was ticking all the boxes in terms of what we needed and it’s been great working with the platform.
How did you successfully implement PSD in your club?
The platform was only going to be as good as the information that is put into it and that relies on coaches, players, parents, and administrators to put all that information in there and continually update information. To be honest that's an ongoing challenge, it's been an education process from the start because we had several different platforms.
We had a few months to set up the system before our season started because of the lockdown. When we went live and parents, players and coaches started to use it, it was all set up and ready to go. Once people started to see the information flow in terms of player feedback, evaluations, the match reports, the data on training attendance and how useful it was, they started seeing the benefits.
How do you communicate with players and parents?
We've encouraged everybody to communicate exclusively club related things through PSD. A benefit of PSD is the fact that you can communicate not only through email but also through the messenger and very importantly you can set up customized groups.
If we are consistent with that from a club perspective and a coach perspective, then the parents are consistent with it as well.
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What achievement or aspect of the club are you most proud of?
There are probably three things. Our women's programme has developed and grown immensely over the last few years, not only in terms of the quantity of players but more the quality of our women's programme. We compete at the highest level within our state New South Wales and we’re very competitive in that space. We even have some New Zealand internationals, and Australian internationals playing for us.
The consistency of our men's programme, we’ve traditionally been very strong on the men's side and we continue to be, which is great. Probably the most important thing, that links back to our vision, is we're very proud when players progress to the next level so be it a junior national team here or a professional club, that's always very pleasing for us in terms of what we're trying to achieve.
What does the academy want to achieve in the next five to ten years?
We are always striving to be as professional as we can and provide the best environment for players so those players in our local area want to represent Northern Tigers FC. In the next five to ten years, we want to be a leading long term development club in Australia. We probably won't become a professional club, we will always be at the semi-professional level but we want to provide an environment that is professional so the players can move to the highest level.
Thank you for your time!