Travis Miller
Athletic Director · York Comprehensive High School, SC
Kat McCreery
Director of Athletics · Mundelein High School, IL
Athletic departments and schools don’t switch athletic management software platforms because it sounds like fun. You switch because something is broken or costing you time you don’t have.
The tipping point is different for everyone. The anxiety that follows is not.
Travis Miller and Kat McCreery are both in the middle of that move right now. Both schools decided to move to Arbiter—looking for one system where registration, scheduling, and communication could actually work together. Neither of them has a finished success story to tell yet. What they have is something more useful: a clear look at what the experience actually feels like while you’re in it.
Travis is in his third year as Athletic Director at York Comprehensive High School in South Carolina, managing roughly 600 athletes through a registration process that had become a daily grind.
Kat stepped into the Director of Athletics role at Mundelein High School outside Chicago and inherited a migration from a platform her conference had used for fifteen years.
They’re still in it—figuring things out, asking questions, and seeing what actually changes day to day.
Before You Start, The Fear Is Real
When most athletic directors make the decision to switch athletic management software, there are two main concerns that come up immediately: what it will do to day-to-day operations and how families will handle the change.
Travis runs a 4A school with around 1,500 students. Registration season means processing approvals for 600 athletes. His previous system required clicking through five or six screens per athlete. Each one slow, adding seconds that turned into hours.
He’d been doing it long enough to know that switching systems mid-stride, with families already used to one way of doing things, was a real risk.
A lot of the anxiety is gone… I think once we get into it, it’s going to be a lot easier than we think.
— Travis Miller |Athletic Director, York Comprehensive HS, SC
For Kat, the anxiety was less about process—and more about history. Mundelein’s conference had used the same platform for over 15 years. The school had been building toward a full suite of tools in one place. Switching meant pulling up roots that ran deep.
Change is painful when you’ve used any system for a long time and have familiarity. But we’ve always been looking for that one-stop shop where everything is housed.
— Kat McCreery |Athletic Director, Mundelein HS, IL
Neither of them ignored that concern.
Both had arrived at the same conclusion: what they were working toward—one platform, one account, information that updates once and carries across everything else—was worth the discomfort of getting there.
The Middle Is Where You’re Hopeful – and Not Fully Sure
The transition itself is where things get real. Both Travis and Kat were candid about what that looked like—and neither version was seamless.
Travis had been through onboarding. He’d taken notes. It all had made sense, until he tried to apply it. He knew what to do. He just wasn’t always sure he was doing it right.
What helped wasn’t a document or a help article. It was a person. His Arbiter rep didn’t just answer questions—they translated. What he already knew started to connect to what he was seeing.
The answers went above and beyond… they didn’t just answer my question, they helped me understand the next step too.
— Travis Miller |Athletic Director, York Comprehensive HS, SC
For Kat, the early phase felt familiar in a different way. She described it the same way many ADs describe moving houses: disorienting, more work than expected upfront—but clarifying.
I’m OK starting from scratch… it’s kind of like moving houses — you go through everything, see what you need, and build it how you want.
— Kat McCreery |Athletic Director, Mundelein HS, IL
The instinct is to rebuild what you had before—same structure, same setup, same logic.
Kat took a different approach. She used the transition as a chance to ask what the program actually needed—not just what it had always done.
What Gets Easier On the Other Side
Travis and Kat are at different points in their platform journeys, but both are starting to see the same thing: systems that fit how their programs actually run—instead of systems they have to work around.
Kat has already completed a full registration cycle. The rollout last fall went smoothly enough that Mundelein is expanding Arbiter Registration to all summer camps
Coaches can access what they need from their phones. Communication that once ran through the office has started to resolve itself. And with seven of eight schools in her conference now using Arbiter for scheduling, coordination across programs is becoming simpler by default.
After a lot of upfront work, she’s starting to feel the momentum.
The rollout with student registration was so good that I feel confident we’re going to get there with the other platforms. That’s why we’re sticking with Arbiter.
— Kat McCreery |Athletic Director, Mundelein HS, IL
For Travis, still approaching his first full cycle, the biggest shift is already visible.
The workflow is simple: one continuous page. Scroll instead of click. When you’re approving 600 athletes, that difference adds up fast.
Before we had to click on like five or six different pages… now it’s just one long page. You scroll instead of clicking. When you’ve got 600 athletes to approve, that’s a whole lot less time.
— Travis Miller |Athletic Director, York Comprehensive HS, SC
What They’d Do Differently
Having gone through it, both Travis and Kat are clear on what they’d tell someone just getting started.
Travis would bring his admin assistant into every onboarding session from day one. He did—and he’d do it again. Two people understanding the system from the start is very different than one trying to explain it later.
He’d also say: don’t assume you’ve seen everything the platform can do yet. Travis discovered that Arbiter’s scheduling integrates directly with GoFan—game results he was already entering didn’t need to be entered again elsewhere.
Kat’s advice is simpler. Find your person early—a specific person who understands your setup, your conference, and how your program actually runs. That person matters more than any feature in the first six months.
She’d also say: don’t try to rebuild what you had. Use the transition as a chance to ask what you actually need—not what you’ve always had. It’s more work upfront, but you end up with something that actually fits.
Your Program. Your Timing.
Switching doesn’t feel simple at the start. It’s unfamiliar. It takes work. And for a while, you’re not sure if it’s going to feel easier—or just different.
But then small things start to shift. Fewer clicks. Fewer workarounds. Fewer places where things can fall out of sync.
You don’t have to have everything figured out before you start.
If you’re at the point where staying feels harder than changing—you’re not alone.
Thinking about making a change?
We can walk you through what switching to Arbiter actually looks like—step by step, based on schools like yours.
