CSVA Report: LRS Sports Looks to Reinvent Reputation, Product Lineup

By Ken Kerschbaumer

Video-coaching and analysis-system provider LRS Sports hit the 2009 CSVA convention with a new guiding philosophy and new streamlined software offerings that it hopes will help it to reconnect with the college-sports video-coordinator community. “In the past three years, we’ve upset some of the video coordinators and did not always listen to the customers,” says Dan McCain, LRS Sports senior manager. “But now, we have sales reps that understand our customers and new software that backs up our action.”

The new software takes the previous nine different applications and combines them into three: Team Scout, serving the basketball community; Ultima, an editing system for football video coordinators; and Coaching Station, offering coaching tools.

The move to three applications (and eventually one) will make it easier for LRS Sports to solve software issues and for customers to buy a more complete feature set.

“We previously had seven applications to support and, if there were bugs, we had multiple applications we had to fix but a finite number of developers,” says McCain. “And after 10 years of development, we can’t continue down that path. So we now have three great products that are stable and run properly.”

Team Scout, for example, now provides a good drawing tool and a simplified video subsystem that allows quick access to video and data. “It can now be used live during the game,” says McCain. “And for Ultima, we consciously did not put in new features in the past 12 months and instead focused on quality assurance and fixed bugs.”

With the Southwestern Athletic Conference and Mideastern Athletic Conference onboard with the new system, LRS Sports is now turning its attention to other schools that it may have lost contact with over the years.

The HD transition and its potential to “reset” the marketplace means schools potentially find themselves in the position to reconsider new options.

Current customers will receive the new software as a normal upgrade, provided that they are paying for normal maintenance and support. The system runs under Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

“The HD transition is a huge opportunity for us,” says McCain. “One of the big things we need to address is storing HD content versus DV25 material. That impacts the video subsystem, multiple video servers, and the communication between the server and the desktop computer. Those are key issues we’re addressing.”

Chris Allen, LRS Sports solutions consultant, says the key to the new system is improved workflow. “The interface makes it by far the easiest system to use, as coordinators can create everything from cut-ups to play lists. And the power of search in our software makes it easy to find things without digging through different software products. We also no longer have multiple databases for defense, offense, etc.”