Q&A With Schuylkill Valley Sports: Software That's Tailored For Team Sports

Schuylkill Valley Sports benefitted when Celerant brought the nation’s leading team sports software into the big leagues.

Recent growth at Schuylkill Valley Sports (SVS) has been fueled by the team sports business, which company President Jerry Williams says is outpacing retail sales. To gain a better understanding of the team sales business and the software that drives its success, we talked with Williams and Nick Rhoads, IT Manager at SVS.

Celerant: Where do traditional team business software packages fall short?

Williams: Comparisons are difficult because there’s not much out there that’s built specifically for team sales models like ours. We’ve tested a few retail systems and entertained offers from vendors who said they could meet our needs, but we never found anything that compared to the functionality we had in SportzPak, our legacy system.

Rhoads: Other vendors are coming to market, Software That’s Tailored For Team Sports Built On A Team Sales Pedigree but it’s a long development curve to accommodate the nuances of team sales. We had an established package for the team sales business. Until 2009, SportzPak was, as Jerry said, a “legacy” system; it was text-based, and while it was very functional, the interface wasn’t designed for modern retailing.

Celerant: How has the improvement resulted in a better experience for your customers?

Rhoads: The ability to do signature capture and accept debit puts us on par with the retail experience consumers expect from any big retailer. It’s a convenient and easy way to pay, and for us it’s less expensive than processing credit. Now we’re working on developing a CRM/loyalty program to further enhance the customer’s experience. We’ll also add couponing functionality in our next release.

Download the full Q&A below.