TeachHoops.com
UPLVL.com — the player evaluation app Joni and Mike built (Coach Bill also references it as "Get UpLvl" on the show)
CoachingYouthHoops.com
Show Notes
Coach Bill welcomes the first married couple in podcast history to the show: Joni and Mike Kazantzis, founders of UpLvl, an app that turns a fifteen second voice note into a full player evaluation. They met at an advertising agency in 2008, started a secret office romance in 2009, and UpLvl is now their second company together. Joni runs account management, operations, and strategy. Mike went to art school and handles creative and brand. They each coach one of their two daughters, on separate lacrosse teams.
Evaluations in youth sports happen twice: at tryouts, and at the end of the season. Then silence in between. And by the time you sit down in April to write them, you are working off the last three weeks because that is how memory works. The stuff from October is gone.
Meanwhile, a parent catches you after practice with the universal opener, "Hey coach, can I talk to you for a second?" You are picking up cones, thinking about dinner and backpacks, kids are running for the playground, and the honest answer you can give is "keep the stick in her hands, find a wall." Joni's point is that these parents are not being nosy. They want to be part of the development, and a mom who has never held a lacrosse stick needs something specific enough to actually use that night.
Mike frames the goal simply: every kid should leave practice knowing the one thing to work on next. He has twenty four girls on his team. He cannot go home and write twenty four evaluations every night.
The athlete needs one specific thing to hold onto. Not "play better." In lacrosse terms: get lower on your ground balls, bend your knees, have the stick down before you get into it.
The parent needs to see progress over time, and needs enough detail to help even if they never played the sport. UpLvl surfaces simple at home drills for that reason.
The coach needs it to be effortless. The alternative is what happens now: the kid gets in the car, mom asks what the coach said, and the kid says "I don't know, it was good." Repeat that for two weeks across twenty families and now every parent is asking the coach what is going on at practice.
Coach Bill calls this category "invisible tech" and says he has already written about it on LinkedIn. His long standing advice to clubs who want to stand out is to send one weekly email about what the team is working on. UpLvl is that idea, more often and with almost no coach effort.
Joni cites a George Washington University study that asked 142 kids what actually makes sports fun. Winning was not the answer. Positive coaching, trying hard, learning, and improving were. She points out what every coach has seen: tell a kid their throwing looks stronger and they stand a little taller.
Most of these kids will not play their sport forever. What carries forward is confidence, resilience, and a safe place to make mistakes and correct them.
Push record, talk for fifteen seconds about one player, save, and it advances to the next player. A twenty player roster takes about five minutes.
Behind that, the app writes a constructive session note from what you said, adjusts skill ratings based on your sentiment, and generates a parent report. Say a player's shooting was some of the best you have seen all season and her passing is getting solid, and shooting ticks up more than passing. Skills are grouped as technical, tactical, mental, and physical. Baselines come from the governing bodies of each sport, and for basketball that means dribbling, passing, footwork, game IQ, plus coachability and mindset. Every drill in the library carries a mindset rep, because the mental side rarely gets practice time.
Progress scales by milestone, foundational up to advanced. Younger players move in quarter point increments, older and higher level players in tenths, so growth gets appropriately harder. The app will never automatically lower a player's score. Only the coach can do that.
Parents click a link. No app to download, no signup, no payment. The profile lives with the coach and follows the player season after season, so a family can see career growth, not just this year's snapshot.
The fifteen second cap was deliberate. Early versions let coaches talk as long as they wanted, and Mike found that unnecessary. Fifteen seconds is enough.
Does it sugarcoat feedback? Coach Bill plays devil's advocate with the coach everyone has seen at tournaments, the yeller. What if he records something brutal? Mike says the app only produces constructive output. It will translate harsh input into development focused language. A coach can type anything they want manually, but the app will not generate it for them. Conversations about whether a kid should try a different sport belong face to face anyway.
Joni backs it with the research: when a kid is screamed at, the brain goes to fight or flight. They freeze and stop hearing you, whether they are seven or fourteen. Her line lands the point: sure, tell me I am horrible, but what do I do to become not horrible? That gap is exactly why they added the drill library, sourced from each sport's governing body rather than YouTube.
Development versus performance. Parents measure ROI in points. But Coach Bill has a point guard who threads passes nobody her age can make, and youth basketball does not track assists. Joni's answer: goalies, defenders, and facilitators are all recruited too, and their contributions never hit a stat sheet. A coach comment can capture what the box score cannot.
Bad days. Kids have them, and so do adults. Joni's take: give them the benefit of the doubt. They know it was a bad day, and so do their parents. The value is that the report is already in the parent's hands before the car ride home, so the conversation can be "let's get some ice cream and talk about your day" instead of "what did coach say?"
Practice or games? They encourage practice. Development happens on Tuesdays. Games are where it shows up.
Mike's daughter's team was down nine to one at halftime of their final tournament game. Their coach gave a pep talk he still cannot reconstruct, and they came out and clawed all the way back to a tie. They did not win. Weeks later, when asked about the whole tournament, his eleven year old did not talk about the games where she scored four goals. She talked about the tie, because she watched the development happen in real time and it felt like a win.
He is self conscious about pulling his phone out at practice, because he never wants a parent to think he is scrolling. So he told his parents up front what the tool is and that they would see him recording. Joni, who plays music from her phone at practice and lets the girls make videos, admits she had never thought about it.
He also appreciated what nobody said to him during the demo: "just have your assistant do it." Joni points out why that answer is nonsense at this level. Her lacrosse assistant is a state trooper with a full time job.
Coming from a world of desks and back to back calls, they had to build for a coach whose office is the front seat of a car, often with no signal. Making the app work offline mattered. And the single biggest improvement was adding the actionable piece: the drill library, so feedback comes with something to actually do.
Next up, they are gamifying it, not for players, but for coaches, who turned out to be more competitive with each other than anyone expected. As Joni puts it, coaches want positive feedback too. It is like getting a sticker as a grown up. Coach Bill's team already does that, with players handing stickers to each other after practice. Once in a while he gets one.
A young athlete knows they have a great coach when that coach... (Joni) makes them feel part of the team.
The biggest lie youth sports tells parents about player development is... (Mike) your kid is going to a D1 school.
The problem they set out to fixThe three sided problemThe research behind itHow the app actually worksThe harder questionsThe moment that proves the pointTwo things Coach Bill wanted to flagWhat surprised themRapid fire
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