From Data to Diamond: Inside Domo's AI Baseball Coaching Platform

Mark: What's up everybody? Good morning. I am here today with Domo's principal solution consultant, Matthew Newsom. Matthew, how are we doing?

Matthew: Good. How are you?

Mark: I'm doing good. So, Matthew in his spare time does a little coaching of a baseball team. And so, I'm excited to show you a little bit today about what Matthew has built to help his baseball team that can apply very easily to every organization that's listening in today. Matthew, how true was that? How false was that?

Matthew: No, it's good. We had a lot of data and now it's time to be able to ask some deeper questions and use it.

Mark: I love it. Okay. Well, I just pulled up, I want to just dig right into this. Talk us through what you do with Firebase and how you use Domo and how we relate that to organizations.

Matthew: Yeah, great question. So, as a head coach, I go in to see how my team's doing. I mean, that's the big metric here: what are your wins and losses? But going deeper into that, how are my individual players doing? I want all of my players on my team to grow. We have access to the spreadsheets from each game that we have, but it's really tough to surface up insights and figure out, "Okay, hey, what's really going on with my players?"

So, I built this coaching app to really help me generate where I should focus and what I should reward my players for. You know, being able to call out different players when they've done something good that maybe I didn't see. Maybe their batting average has improved 200 points over the last two weeks and I didn't catch it. I want to be able to catch that stuff. I want to be able to reward the good and be able to help the players that may be struggling, seeing those trends before it becomes a real hitting slump.

Mark: So, Matthew, you've got a significant amount of parents, other coaches, and players that you're trying to keep up to date when you're coaching. You're trying to get the most out of them as possible. How does that relate to any business out there?

Matthew: Oh, goodness. I mean, a lot of companies have a ton of data. I work with enterprises all the time that are telling me, "Hey, we're still working with spreadsheets, but we're getting by." And they don't know if AI can help them. We have the data here in this baseball app, and I'm using AI to ask deeper questions. They may just be asking questions to just get by, but they could be asking questions that really accelerate what they're doing versus just getting by.

Mark: It feels like: don't just get by with the data that you already have. Enhance it, make it better, and actually drive business outcomes—or in your case, player performance. Fair?

Matthew: 100%. Yeah, the wins and losses for me are great, but really, I feel successful when these players improve. Like if they're struggling at hitting or fielding, being able to really find those places to dial in and help them out. That's really why I developed this. I had the data, but I wanted to make more of an impact in what I'm doing every day.

Mark: That's awesome, Matt. So, walk us through. What are we looking at? What do we have?

Matthew: Yeah, so at the top, this is just our coaching command center where I go to get some trends and figure out what's going on. Where I really like to see this in action is being able to go over here, see the different player profiles, quickly dial in and see where they're going, and see some development focus for my players. Again, all this data is available. I didn't have to invent this data; it's available in spreadsheets now. Being able to put it into a place where I can go and help is where it means the most.

One of the big wins here for me is that I'm able to get tournament intel and some insights. I mentioned before, like with project management, a lot of times folks have project management apps and they want to see how well they're doing and how successful they are in projects, but maybe they're burning folks out. Being able to use Domo and AI to call that out is important. When I'm working with enterprises, we'll talk about that.

In the baseball world, it may be that I'm using somebody's arm too much. I don't want anybody injured. So, being able to call out, "Hey, the workload for some of these pitchers may be too much." Then as a team—or in the business world, as a department—where can I go to help? You have the data. Where else can we go? How can we fix this?

So, in the baseball world, I have a practice plan. I can develop a practice plan based on what the data is seeing and the time constraints. If I start at 5:30 or 5:45 and I'm going with a three-hour practice, I'm able to lay out a practice plan to really help my team—or the department, in the business world—improve on the metrics that we're struggling with to continue to improve. Whether it's sales, safety, or being more efficient in project management.

These drills here for me, I can push out to my coaches. It's nice to say what we want to do, and then I give them links to YouTube videos so they can actually do it correctly. So it's not just, "Hey, do this." It's, "Hey, here's how you do it correctly."

Mark: So, Matt, I can see some people listening in saying, "Oh, yeah, I can already do that through my spreadsheet."

Matthew: You can. I mean, you can in the sense of, "Hey, I have the spreadsheets," but man, that would take a ton of time and you're going to miss stuff. Everybody has the KPIs in front of them, but it's asking the right questions, seeing the right insights, and doing it at the right time. That's where we struggle, and everybody's time is limited. Who wants to go digging through spreadsheets all the time?

Mark: Totally. You miss stuff. It's not possible to get through all of that. That's awesome. Okay, keep going.

Matthew: Yeah, so from the coaching perspective, that's great. Then it gets to where, hey, I'm also a parent, so I want to know how I can help improve my players. As a coach, I can push out player development insights to folks. I pulled up one here so Evan's family can come in here and see their stats.

A lot of the stats that are available to different families may be in apps that they have to pay for to get the specific stuff. So being able to open and unlock this data for them is huge. They may have no idea what Evan's batting average is.

Mark: Fantastic. We then help you take action on that data. So what you're seeing here is that action portion. We've created an app that can be used by Matt, by parents, by teammates, and by other coaches to be able to help develop.

The other piece that's really, really important is that we help distribute it. You talked about the fact that parents may have to go and pay for some additional app or whatever else to get access to all of this data. We push it out in a safe, secure, governed way that they know is safe, true, accurate, and somewhere where they can help their player develop. Fair?

Matthew: 100%. Yep.

Mark: Awesome. Keep going.

Matthew: Yeah, so from a parent perspective, they get that data. They're not seeing the other kids' data, so you're not really worrying about, "How is my kid comparing to another kid on the team?" and that type of stuff. There are always little things like that.

There's another level of this data, too. The team that I'm on is part of an organization that has other teams. So from an organizational perspective, and speaking from maybe a director level or a VP in the business world, they may want to see how their different departments or different locations are doing. So being able to see these Fire Baseball stats from all the different teams—you can see my name's here, but all this stuff is demoed for this—but being able to see how these teams are doing from a high level, seeing different standings, and how these teams are performing. You can filter out very quickly, get team profiles, and get an expansion if they want to see more about it.

Another thing about this, I mentioned it's really important for me to develop the kids. From an organizational perspective, we want to see employee development. Being able to see when our employees started, how long they've been here, the tenure, the expertise, that type of stuff.

Being able to drill down in here for the players, being able to see who may be D1 prospects that we want to introduce to college coaches, because my kid is going into high school. So, being able to start preparing them for college recruits that are coming out, and then allowing the different coaches and different organizations to use these metrics as they're talking to recruits or college coaches about their players so they can help take their players to the next level once they're done with travel ball.

Mark: Okay, Matt. So, let's make this very real. Now, for a business, let's say we're visiting one of my favorite establishments, Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A has hundreds and probably thousands of restaurants all over the place, and has massive amounts of employees. How does this very same thing that you created for Fire Baseball relate to someone like Chick-fil-A?

Matthew: Oh, man. They get data points all the time. My wife actually works at Chick-fil-A, and we use the mobile app a ton. So, being able to see how quickly orders are fulfilled, how accurate they are, and giving the follow-up question about, "Hey, how accurate was your order delivered?"—that type of stuff.

And being able to, from a high level, see how often the mobile app is actually being used. One, how accurate are my orders being filled? How quickly are they being filled? And then the size of the orders. You know, are they coming in for just a milkshake or are they coming in for the family? And being able to staff accordingly, being able to train and improve their training—that type of thing as they go.

Mark: I love it. Okay, Matt, wrap us up. Why on earth do you need Domo to be able to do something like this at enterprise scale?

Matthew: To be able to see the things, to ask the deeper questions. Everybody has to keep the lights on, and everybody's doing their day job. Being able to use the tools at your disposal, the data that you already have, and taking it to another level. There are other folks out there all the time that are trying to do more with their data. You've got to be able to use the tools that are available to you and use them powerfully to succeed.

Mark: This is such a fun example, everybody, of Matt using something that he spends a lot of time on with coaching and developing players, and making it easy with data. Just think of what you can do now for your business. Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola, E-Trade, Fidelity... the list goes on and on of people who could get real, true value out of doing something simple like what Matt has done to be able to run his baseball team.

With that, we are back again coming up here shortly, everyone. So we will see you soon. Check in, share these things with your company, with your friends, and we will see you again soon. Thanks, Matt.

Matthew: Thank you.

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