As Hurricane Irma bears down on the U.S. main land, authorities are issuing a mandatory evacuation for numerous counties throughout the state of Florida. For athletic departments, this means staff and student-athletes will likely be dispersed across the country as they wait out the storm.
In an effort to help departments keep track of their personnel, Teamworks is offering any school in the path of Hurricane Irma immediate access to their platform, and in particular, their new Locate feature free of charge.
“It began this morning,” says Teamworks Senior Enterprise Account Executive Brian Davis. “Jennifer Strawely, the SWA at Miami reached out simultaneously with Justin Wells, their Assistant Director of Football Operations. Their request was to see if we could make sure everybody was in the system and let Justin coordinate on their end to get information to people. Through the course of doing that we started talking internally about Locate, and what Zach Maurides, our CEO, wanted to do was reach out to everybody in Florida, clients or not, with any contacts we have and let them know that we will put them on the system if we can get their information on their student-athletes and staff.”
Teamworks will be able to quickly take contact information for an entire department and integrate it into their platform allowing rapid communication and coordination of evacuation efforts.
“We will build it into the system for them to use Teamworks for free as they go through this time,” said Davis.
“We also have a function called Locate, it’s in beta testing right now,” Davis continued. “What it does is, it allows you to ping somebody through the Locate solution. When you ping someone and they respond it lets us know where you were down to the building that you are located in. We’re offering that even though it hasn’t been part of the package with some of our existing clients…. We can turn on Locate so if they need to know where somebody is and find them they can do it through the system.”
We encourage all departments who do not have a similar system in place to reach out to Teamworks at http://www.teamworks.com/hurricane-emergency-plan/.
“We felt like it was something we should do to help out. We saw what happened in Houston, we know that Rice was on the road and stuck in LA and then stuck in Fort Worth, it’s just a tough time. Locate was developed because of suggestions from existing clients over the last year or two who were confronting certain things like inclement weather and tornadoes.”
“Anybody that needs a solution like Teamworks just to stay connected to people during this difficult time, we are giving them the opportunity to use it. This is something we think is the right thing to do, we know we have something to offer that can help people.”