Pioneering AI-First Experiences in High School Basketball
I worked with PlaySmart’s founders and engineering team to design core product workflows that bring modern tools to an underserved space, from athlete training logs to team game analysis. While powered by emerging AI capabilities, every design decision was grounded in coach and athlete needs, ensuring usability and trust came first.
Role
Product Designer (UX/UI)
team
1 Designer (me), 1 PM, 3 Devs
timeline
Feb 2025 to Present
Tools
Figma, Jira, Slack
THE PROBLEM
High school coaches still rely on pen, paper, and guesswork.
No single place to capture game, opponent, and training data.
Tedious manual entry leading to mistakes and incomplete records.
Few (if any) tools built for high school. Most tech is pro-level or non-existent.
THE RESEARCH
Coaches need tools that are simple, trustworthy, and valuable.
We conducted interviews with high school basketball coaches to understand how they might use AI in their workflow. From these conversations, three design requirements became clear.
1
Approachability. Non-technical coaches need interfaces that feel as simple as pen and paper.
2
Trust. Design must be transparent and reliable to overcome adoption hesitancy.
3
Immediate value. Insights must surface instantly, not be hidden in complexity.
"It needs to feel straightforward. Everything visible upfront. This would be a gamechanger for college athletes."
"A 63-year-old coach who has coached the same way for a million years would maybe not trust this or be hesitant."
THE SOLUTIONS
Surfacing what matters.
High school coaches told us they don’t have time to dig through every stat. My design process focused on finding the right balance between clarity and depth: surfacing the most impactful insights using AI recommendations, while still letting coaches save their favorite stats they want to see again and again.
Early sketches explored “Top 3 Impact Stats” and a “Last Game Snapshot.”
Turned stats into interactive cards that reveal graphs/details to reduce information overload.
Combined snapshot + watchlist stats, expanded AI Insights for more personalized storytelling.
THE SOLUTIONS
Guiding exploration.
Even with good dashboards, coaches often weren’t sure what questions to ask or where to look next. I designed flows where AI could guide exploration by suggesting relevant angles, like shooting trends, fatigue patterns, or player comparisons, turning raw numbers into clear stories.
Explored ways AI could prompt coaches with trends and key questions.
Built flows that highlighted suggestions without overwhelming the interface.
Delivered an AI-driven chat interface mockup with coach-friendly suggested queries for v2 implementation.
MY Impact
90% faster design velocity.
Since stepping in as the sole designer at PlaySmart in May, I’ve completed 14 design stories in four months, compared to 10 by a four-person team in the previous six. I achieved this by restructuring our process: rewrote Jira tickets with clearer design criteria, added weekly design & dev syncs, and moved low-risk features from sketch straight to dev to accelerate MVP delivery.
Reflection
Designing AI for high school sports taught me three lessons.
1
Adaptability is a design skill.
I learned how to adapt design when technical constraints shifted: instead of workflows built around hard-coded analyses, I reframed the product around AI-generated insights that could scale with every game and season.
2
AI enhances, it doesn’t replace.
I learned to frame AI as a tool that simplifies complexity: surfacing patterns and connections that would be impractical to hard-code, while leaving judgment and context in the coach’s hands.
3
User-centered design anchors the work.
Even with advanced AI, adoption depends on clarity, trust, and immediate value. Keeping coaches’ needs at the center ensured AI became invisible infrastructure, not a flashy feature.
See More
I also designed PlaySmart’s landing page. The goal was to position the brand like a premium consumer product instead of another piece of clunky sports software. The page tells PlaySmart’s story in a way that’s clear, inviting, and designed to get coaches, parents, and athletes excited to join.
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