According to our tracking tool, we released 134 features and fixed 24 issues in the WrestlingIQ product in 2023!

Jeff and I both added new little ones to our families, so we presumably forgot to write down at least another twenty features that we accomplished in the newborn fugue state.

But first, the podcast!

In case you missed it, Jeff launched a podcast called The Business of Wrestling this year. Our first three guests were phenomenal—special thanks to Emma Randall, Jacque Davis, and Mike Powell for sharing their expertise. All three episodes are worth a listen:

• Emma Randall on coaching youth wrestling, LTAD, and using periodization to ensure your team doesn’t fall behind.
• Building your wrestling program: How to recruit non-wrestlers to join your team with Jacque Davis.
• Taking a team from struggling to national champions. Program Building with Mike Powell.

We've also started recording and producing videos that we think will be useful for all wrestling coaches, regardless of whether they use WrestlingIQ, and posting them to the WrestlingIQ Academy. Our most recent video is all about how to run summer camps to increase club revenue. If you have a topic you want us to dive into, please reach out!

2023's most impactful features

Am I going to subject you to a list of 150+ things? Absolutely not, although I considered it 😄 

Here's the list of features I think you'll find useful, in case you missed it last year:

• Roster tags. If you do nothing else, check this one out.
• WrestlingIQ Payment Processing. This fall we introduced our own payment processing system. With our own processing system, we have more control over the customer support experience and wrestling specific features, such as allowing teams to offer cancellation insurance to their customers—protecting club revenue—if you want to.
• Private properties for wrestler records. The most common use case so far has been for tracking gear checked out that must be returned to the team, but the possibilities are endless.
• Freestyle scoring is available on both the web and iOS app.
• Our public calendar UI got an overhaul in early 2023. Learn best practices for using the WIQ calendar here.
• Parents, coaches, and wrestlers can mute specific message threads. Available through the WIQ app or website.
• Admins can restrict access to viewing sensitive registration question responses to admins only, if they need to.
• Better management capabilities for recurring subscriptions as an admin, including the ability to apply scholarship codes, pause/unpause subscriptions, and change existing subscriptions to new billing plans. 
• Expiring subscription renewal automations. If you offer expiring subscriptions, WrestlingIQ now has an automation sequence that allows parents to 1-click renew their subscription for another contract term.
• Paused memberships, with expiring plans, now keep track of time remaining and automatically extend the expiration date when unpaused. 
• Attendance improvements - attendance summary now shows on wrestler records. The Last Practice Attended Report is another coach favorite to understand potential member churn.
• A brand new Payment Dashboard, to give you an easy view into your your club's finances. Includes fancy charts and graphs!
• Improved roster report - you can now add custom columns to this report for easier data analysis.
• Practice plan templates!
• We migrated our video hosting to a new host and passed on the cost savings to our teams. Teams can now have up to 1,000 match videos, up from 600 match videos before.
• Contributors can now leave a comment on your fundraiser's Wall of Support to help boost your fundraiser's social credibility. See an example here.
• Sending photos in WIQ messaging is available in the iOS and Android app. 
• Safesport messaging mode is now available. 
• Coaches can give individual people permission to send messages to a group (e.g. a key parent organizer who is not a coach/admin, but does need to message a specific  message group). 
• We helped two teams with their online gear store this year, look for more updates here in 2024. 
• Coaches can now create coach-only notes on wrestler records and mention each other in those notes.

What's ahead in 2024?

Our focus for 2024 is on making WrestlingIQ better for existing customers. That focus will likely be split into three areas:

1. Improving the Android and iOS app. This has always been a delicate balance—we want to create a streamlined app to make it incredibly easy to use for parents, while still powerful enough that coaches don't really need to use the web version of WIQ for day to day team operations. The Android app in particular needs some love this year. We kicked off 2024 by launching updates to both the iOS and Android apps that allow users to respond, view, and receive notifications about event invites in the app.
2. Payments. There are still a few areas where WrestlingIQ's payment features aren't quite powerful enough. In particular, we are looking at private lesson scheduling/billing, gear stores, and the ability for teams to offer insurance to their registrants.
3. Curriculum improvements. We've historically been focused around team operations that often is not visible to parents or wrestlers at all. We believe there is an opportunity for WIQ to provide coaches the tools to curate their coaching system to help their wrestlers/parents improve. While we are still in early days of exploring this, we expect it will take the form of internal team video playlists (think here are the moves we focused on this week), an improved practice planner that can handle inline video playback, and potentially a rethink of how documents work.

Thank you

As usual, thank you. WrestlingIQ is a small business built to serve, improve, and contribute to the wrestling community. We wouldn't be here without you. 

To an excellent 2024!