For nearly two decades, RinkNet has been proud to deliver the most indispensable administrative tool for elite hockey leagues, teams, General Managers, coaches, and scouts. We’ve provided users with the ability to quickly rank, analyze, and obtain the personal stats, information, and playing schedules of over a quarter-million players in a single platform.
We’ve had a great product, but now it’s time to evolve.
RinkNet takes great pride in being the largest and most-accurate hockey-related database in the world. Yet, despite our size and our reach, now is no time to rest on our laurels and admire what we’ve accomplished.
The Stanley Cup is awarded anew every year, and no one wins it back-to-back without re-earning it.
At HockeyTech, we understand the input that made RinkNet the world’s leading hockey data repository in the first place: you, the scouts. It’s with your needs, your input, and the growth of your tireless role that have always served as the impetus for the creation and innovation of our platform.
Just prior to last season, HockeyTech first embarked on the challenge of reshaping RinkNet to best fit the needs of the modern road warriors that we have proudly served in their travels across North America and beyond. While we understood that this would be quite the endeavor, we did not immediately recognize the magnitude of such an initiative. Rest assured, this is not because of a lack of effort on our part – we’ve simply chosen not to shortcut the breadth and depth of the RinkNet application to ensure that all of the upgrades are done the absolute right way.
Today, our Agile development team is preparing to launch the first generation of a world-class revision to the RinkNet platform. Thanks to your feedback and requests, we’ve made some really great enhancements to the platform, adding in additional features and functionality, improving sync-times for offline use, and broadening our dataset. This new platform, a world-class upgrade worthy of carrying our organization’s name in its title, will be rebranded and released as the HockeyTech Ops platform.
Since 1998, RinkNet has delivered a single source of truth for player information and evaluations to better serve teams, leagues, agents, coaches, and more – but there’s no time like the present to put our own output under evaluation and understand how we can better perform for the people that rely on us.
In the coming weeks, you will see increased communication on our Beta system and future evolutions of the RinkNet/HockeyTech Ops product. This approach, when compared to a ‘big-bang’ delivery, simply makes the most sense given the intricacies that have been built into our product to best serve the individual needs of each of our partners.
Much like the hard work put in by dedicated hockey players and information professionals, what you’re not seeing is what’s happening tirelessly in the background: from networking to servers to databases to application code to APIs, we continue to erect the infrastructure and architecture to support the HockeyTech Ops application. Thousands of hours of design, development, testing, and delivery have already taken place to ensure that all of your feedback and requests are taken into account for delivering a product that you find as indispensable in the next twenty years as you have these past twenty.
When HockeyTech Ops launches, what you get will be simply incredible: an online extension of the RinkNet application with a slick, new, easy-to-use interface, a companion iOS mobile app, and all of it in sync with your existing RinkNet database. It won’t be without pain – change never is – but what comes out the other side will enhance the user experience forever.
Much like any great hockey organization, we’ve chosen to reject complacency and strive for improvement.
Thank you for pushing us to innovate.
Written by Marc Ruskin, HockeyTech President