PLAYBuilder Q&A with New York Road Runners

The New York Road Runners contributed to the development of PLAYBuilder and were one of the earliest adopters of the tool. Sport for Life reached out to Manager of Youth Development Stephanie Herrick to learn how the platform has supported their unique programming. 

Sport for Life: What made you look for a solution like PLAYBuilder?

In 2016 we were redesigning our youth offerings to become one inclusive program for kids aged three and up. The youth program, Rising New York Road Runners, was founded on the concepts of physical literacy and Long-Term Development. We needed a way for the caring adult implementing our program to quickly access activities that were appropriate for their participants’ age and skill level. 

Through a collaboration with Sport for Life our collective needs were met and brought to life through the development of PLAYBuilder.

Sport for Life: Why did you choose PLAYBuilder?

We collaborated with Sport for Life to develop PLAYBuilder to house our youth program’s curriculum. It is where we direct our program leads to find activities, videos, and lesson plans that suit the needs of their participants, or to build their own. It also provides a go-to place for New York Road Runners staff to access activity ideas for training, program support, events, and communications.

Sport for Life: Did you intend to share full access to your members? If not, what were the reservations or limitations in sharing access to your members?

Full access was never a reservation for us as we wanted to support all educators enrolled in Rising New York Road Runners.  In fact, we will be expanding access even further to educators who aren’t ready to enroll in our full program. With the pandemic, we learned how valuable these resources are and wanted to promote more equity across communities in New York City and beyond.

Sport for Life: What organizational processes does this software enhance? How much does it reduce the cost and time to complete these particular processes?

PLAYBuilder allows all our content to live in one place. Everyone involved with Rising New York Road Runners has a central place to go to find everything they need for planning events, supporting enrolled sites, managing content, and selecting content for our communications. In addition, Our PLAYBuilder content managers can easily add new activities, videos, and lessons, and promote them in new content packs for users to easily access and explore.

Sport for Life: Would you recommend PLAYBuilder to your peers?

We would highly recommend PLAYBuilder to individuals or organizations.

Sport for Life: How has the pandemic affected your programming, and has our software been helpful in mobilizing innovation?  

The needs of the sites enrolled in our program dramatically shifted during the pandemic. Sites found themselves in a variety of different positions — their programming might have been cancelled or they were conducting either in-person sessions, virtual sessions, or a hybrid of in-person and remote, and they all had new safety guidelines to follow. We quickly created three new content packs, Rising at Home, Rising with Space, and Rising in Class to meet the needs of coaches, educators, and parents. PLAYBuilder has made it very easy for program leads to access this adapted content and videos to make it possible to keep kids moving in a meaningful way during the pandemic.