If you know anything about softball, you know the name Sue Enquist. Sue is one of the most successful coaches in sports history at any level as she won 11 National Championships in her 27 years as the UCLA head softball coach. Think about that—it’s a title on average about every two to three years!

Since retiring in 2006, she’s all over the map, literally, and last week we caught up with her between speaking engagements at Duke and North Carolina to see what she’s up to these days. Here’s that interview…

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StudentSportsSoftball.com: We ran an article recently— “Who is the most influential person in softball today?”—and you came out at clear-cut No. 1 despite having retired from coaching seven years ago… you seem like you’re everywhere these days and people appreciate what you’re doing for softball…
Sue Enquist: I’m busier now than I probably have ever been. It was really easy coaching at UCLA because it allowed me an opportunity to be very myopic in my goals that everything I did outside of my family was to make UCLA better. Better for the student-athlete experience, better for the softball player technically, and hopefully to create strong, young women when they graduate.

When I retired I didn’t have a set exit strategy. I just knew I wanted to do more to help the sport become more organized and hopefully become more influential in the sport landscape. I believe softball is one of the greatest sports in this country, if not in the world. I am extremely proud to be a member of the softball community and if I can in my retirement bring the influencers together to share and organize information and allow the parent, the player, the youth coach, the college coach, the media, and sport manufacturers to work together we are going to make our sport better and everyone involved will have a better experience.

Really, that is my goal and what excites me every day is to help those that are trying to make our sport better.

 

SSS.com: Tell us about some of the key projects and businesses that you’re focused on right now.
SE: I’m quite busy working in the areas of a vision that I am calling the National Digital Dashboard, it is taking our softball community digital so that we can put accurate, objective, timely information for everybody to access no matter where they’re angling in from a parent, player, coach, or sport manufacturer perspective because I believe technology allows more objectivity.

Now we also have a step before that and that is to create a common language regarding recruit education, regarding principles in the technical side of our sport, to provide objective measurables in our sport where combines can be tools to further organize our student-athletes. It can be a snapshot for a college coach to aggregate talent. I am not proposing that it is a complete predictor to a great hitter, pitcher, or defender, but it is a start to help organizing our sport.

Wouldn’t it be great if a college coach can type in, “I need a 3.5 GPA, a player who runs home-to-first in 2.65?” We have the capability and the technology is there, we just need to work together for a common goal of bettering that experience for our softball community.

I strongly believe we can do that and we are doing that and have already started that process. That process is really specific—our softball community needed an objective recruiting education road map and we now have that.

 

SSS.com: You’re also active working with and representing the National Collegiate Scouting Association (NCSA)…
SE: The NFCA now has an official partnership with the National Collegiate Scouting Association and I laugh at myself because for 27 years I said, “Stay away from scouting services because they are a money grab!”

Where as this company is in the business of educating parents, players, and youth coaches, but they are doing it in a way that is integrity filled. They have an ‘A plus’ Better Business Bureau rating, they are the standard in football and more importantly the NFCA has combed through their company and has felt comfortable enough to partner with them.

They in turn have developed 10 full-time former softball players working in the company to serve softball specifically. They now have the technology and the greatest part about this partnership is it’s free to the parents, the athlete, the club coach, and the college coach. They are simply the customer service side of recruiting.

But lets take advantage of the technology out there and many people will ask, “How do they make money?” Well, think of it as a ‘freemium’ model. You get in for free— if you do not need any help, everything is free. Technology will match you with the colleges that have set their preferences. But there will be some people who need help and based on your level of help will dictate what your costs will be to subscribe.

What I love about it is they’re not a money grab. Less than 20% of the people that are interested in subscribing actually have the opportunity to become a member of NCSA as a paid subscriber because NCSA does not take in a family that they cannot connect to, some sort of financial aid or athletic scholarship. NCSA has over an 80% conversion rate to scholarship for those parents that subscribe to the services of NCSA.

They already have enough integrity within our space that NFCA has signed on with them and that allows us a wonderful digital community instantaneously that if I’m a college I’ll set my preferences on one side, if I’m an athlete I’m going to go ahead and put in all of my measurables on the other side and technology will put them together, but the nice part is there’s a person, there’s a service and company there that will help you regarding the recruiting process, regarding the NCAA rules, regarding how you navigate that space.

 

SSS.com: You also feel the National Digital Dashboard will help college coaches do better in recruiting, correct?
SE: Definitely. The nice thing is to come into this digital network, it is all free and I love that. Everyone has an equal opportunity and technology will equal the playing field. I can’t emphasize enough that this is just the start. It’s going to be building a foundation, but I see an overall National Digital Dashboard that’s also going to help our college coaches organize their tournament experience and organize their combine experiences so that we can get all of these combine measuarables going into one massive database so that the college coach’s life is more organized.

And although people may say “the colleges have it so easy,” it’s pretty amazing to try and manage hundreds and hundreds of people that are sending in information that is not standardized and so I think we have an exciting time ahead of us to be able to say that in 2014, 2015, 2016, led by the voice of the NFCA, we are asking the softball community to put your information standardized into a digital databank so that you have an equal opportunity for exposure so that when it comes to the coach going out to specific tournaments they’re going to be even more organized in that process.

On top of that we’re going to be partnering with companies that have geo-tagging so that college coach can go into those tournaments and know exactly where those athletes are. But more importantly for a college coach to scour the country through this digital dashboard to pick up athletes that they may never see because there are simply too many tournaments within too many weekends and they can’t possibly cover the landscape.

SSS.com: What excites you about the future of softball?
SE: I’m extremely excited about the idea of measuring the drivers behind the mental profiling of an athlete and we now have the science to measure, not your personality trait, but the drivers that enable high performers to be successful.

So think of a world where your daughter, if she plays softball, can take a mental profile and she will be able to identify what her strengths are. Her innate non-physical traits that make her great. More importantly we can now quantify culture. A team now can take an online exam and they get a score. That technology is coming around the corner and I am excited that the NFCA is taking a look at that as a possible option for student-athletes to take so college coaches know what the strengths are of student-athletes when they come into their university.

Once again, we’re analyzing the swing, analyzing the pitching; we need to analyze their mental aptitude. And then we have the total athlete. Once we start to measure and quantify culture, the student-athlete is going to have a better experience because the coach is going to become more literate regarding leadership and how you treat, coach, and train student-athletes.

SSS.com: When not focusing on business, what do you do to get away from it all?
SE: I have a great life. Every single day I spend with my family. When my father passed away in 2008 I had an opportunity to move in and take care of my mother. I love that; I feel it is a gift every day.

I’m in the water every day so that allows me great balance and I am just lucky to be in a position where I can be with my family every day, be in the ocean every day, and hopefully make our softball sport better when I eventually do leave this sport I’ll be able to say I helped maybe make it a little bit better.

As my father always said—he was a military guy, two-time Purple Heart World War II veteran: “Make sure that you always leave your space better than when you found it,” and that is my goal every day.