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Neil Anderson

SkillShark Software makes youth athlete evaluations easy. Instead of pen/paper, we allow evaluators and coaches of all sports to use their mobile devices or tablets to gather data and send report cards back to athletes and parents, making evaluations easier than ever before.

Tell us about yourself?

As an engineer from the UofS, I’ve spent 30 years focused on optimizing industrial processes in Saskatchewan like mines or manufacturing facilities…combine that with my love of playing or coaching competitive softball the majority of my life, that’s where I saw the need for SkillShark.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Don’t give up despite a global sports pandemic going on.

What problem does your business solve?

  1. We save sports organizations massive amounts of time by not having to do data entry twice (paper, then spreadsheet).
  2. We allow young athletes to finally receive professional feedback from their evaluations.
  3. Parents finally receive direction on what they need to work on with their child automatically.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

I took over the U18 Softball program in 2016 and saw the evaluation process was archaic and the way gathered data that was being used to decide team placement could be vastly improved.

What is your magic sauce?

  1. Deep experiential knowledge, having run countless evaluations and being intimate with all the problems involved.
  2. Our team’s velocity of development relative to the competition simply can’t be matched.
  3. Very grateful to be in Canada, where we get excellent support from provincial or federal programs.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

To focus on providing growing value for our customer base and to continue with our average growth rate of more than 70 per cent year over year.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

COVID-19. On March 15, having all sports globally come to a grinding halt forced us to look at alternate ways to keep afloat through such challenging times. We did that and have come out of COVID-19 much stronger as a result.

How can people get involved?

Go to our website www.skillshark.com and ‘Book Demo’ to learn how our software can make the work of your sports organization much easier with evaluations, providing feedback, drafting teams, and providing direction to parents.