The IHSAA has been the most dominant high school athletics organization throughout it’s 110+ year existence, serving as the benchmark of success for similar organizations throughout the country.

Their latest innovation, the IHSAA Champions Network, is truly the first of its kind. Leveraging their deep network of broadcasters, we helped the IHSAA roll out a game-changing vehicle for spectatorship, allowing users to watch any game, at any time, at any place*.

* Due to the current technical limitations of time, we are unable to stream content from the future.

Three Sixty Group handled a lot of the heavy lifting early with regards to how the project would roll out and how it should look and feel. We came in as a creative technical partner to poke holes in the user experience and make sure we had all our bases covered and that we could make a compelling and engaging digital product that was fun, accessible, and fast. We worked to create interesting micro-interactions, a solid mobile UX, and several content management workflows that will scale with their thousands and thousands of pieces of content that come internally and from dozens of unaffiliated sources across the state.

On any given night there are dozens of concurrent broadcasts, each with their own level of hype and expected viewership. We created a custom Production Control Room for the IHSAA Champions Network to use to manage these broadcasts. Its rich feature set allows them to create multiple views on their homepage and switch between them at a moment’s notice. The context of big game nights changes rapidly, so we gave their broadcasting engineer the flexibility and complete autonomy to manage the display of each broadcast from any location or device, so long as there is Internet.

The reach and influence of the IHSAA has created uncharted demand resulting in traffic as high as 35,000 users per hour. That’s more than 500 new users per minute streaming HD video and audio from the website. Our implementation is highly performance-optimized to create a stable, reliable experience for fans.

We admire and appreciate every one of our strategic partners and clients who are willing to trust us to help them achieve their goals. Three Sixty Group is perhaps the oldest such organization in the state of Indiana, and they’ve been working directly with the IHSAA for a staggering forty years.

All of us on the project were in an ethereal plane of non-existence when this professional relationship started. To be trusted by both of these industry veterans to accomplish something truly revolutionary is an amazing opportunity that we don’t take lightly. We are excited about the next chapter of the IHSAA Champions Network and partnering with Three Sixty Group to propel their great vision to national acclaim.

While the idea, functionality, and reach have made for tremendous early success, the IHSAA Champions Network has only just begun asserting itself as a high school sports media juggernaut for all to follow.

The long term vision of this product features more robust and holistic sports coverage. Being the big fans of iteration that we are, we designed and implemented a content marketing framework that will allow them to explore many publishing options as they hone in on a sustainable content strategy beyond broadcasts. As the IHSAA Champions Network grows, we expect to see them grow into the tools we created for them and push them to their limits.

Iteration is an important part of any startup, so we made sure it was simple to iterate on this product. As opportunities arise, we’ll be there to meet them.