Scott Yonce leads Dallas-area hockey club into world of online registration, communication
Webmaster of the Week: July 17-23
Name:
Scott Yonce
Site:
Keller High School Hockey
Position:
President
Use of platform:
Registration, Sitebuilder
Background:
Yonce was something of an action/adventure hero in his younger days, when skydiving, karate and scuba diving were among his activities and he worked in Army National Guard as a helicopter crew chief. “That was a lot of testosterone and many years ago,” said Yonce, who spent his early childhood in Mississippi before moving to the Houston area with his family when he was seven. Four years later another family move landed Yonce in the Dallas suburbs, and he graduated from Duncanville High School. He attended the University of Southern Mississippi where he received a degree is psychology, and now runs his mortgage company based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Yonce’s two boys, John and Chris, started skating when they were three and both play high school hockey (John is a senior, Chris is a sophomore) at Keller.
What he does:
Yonce joined the Keller High School Hockey board last year, and he immediately began shopping for a platform that could manage the club’s communication and registration, among other needs. “We weren’t using anything,” Yonce said, noting that when he saw paper registration forms and payments coming in by check, “I said, ‘There has to be a better way to do this.’ ” These days, a lot of the “tedious jobs” as described by Yonce have been eliminated, freeing up board members to focus on ways to improve the club. “We were chasing down USA Hockey numbers, chasing down payments, chasing down signatures that weren’t done right, ” he said. “We had contracts that were 16 pages.” Yonce said registration day for the Dallas/Fort Worth-area club, which typically fields three teams and has 50-plus players, required the involvement of the entire board. Now, it is all done online. Yonce said the club even used Registration to sell tickets for the club’s annual banquet. “We used to have to have three or four people collecting money at the door, chasing down checks,” Yonce said. “They weren’t able to enjoy the banquet. With everybody signed up in advance, it went from taking an hour to check everybody in to 10 or 15 minutes.”
Making his mark:
Yonce set up a pre-registration session for incoming players, who were asked questions such as, “Where did you play last yea?”, “Years of experience?”, “What grade are you in?” and “Have you played high school hockey previously?” “I did that this year to help us know going in on the day of registration about how many players would would have, and at what levels,” he said. “This way we aren’t making up our teams totally on the fly.”
Fun fact:
Keller High School hockey’s head coach, Craig Minard, captained the local minor league professional team, the Texas Brahamas, to the Central Hockey League’s Presidents Cup Championships in 2009.
