Building Community and Connection in Business with Craig Moody

Technology that builds community rather than replacing it is the whole design principle at Shoot 360, and Craig Moody states it in one line: people come for the tech, they stay because of the people. Craig is Founder and President of Shoot 360, the high tech basketball training, competition, and entertainment platform he started in Beaverton, Oregon in 2012 and has since grown into an international franchise. He has been a business owner, an entrepreneur, and a head basketball coach and administrator at both the high school and collegiate levels. He joined hosts Stephen Sakach and Mike Liwski.

In this episode we explore:

• The single question that decides whether a piece of technology stays

• What machine vision actually measures on a basketball shot

• Why the five minute conversation matters more than the data

• The car ride home, and how parents build or erode a kid’s confidence

• Holding a standard across locations without running on fear

• Bringing adults who stopped playing back onto the floor

He starts with environment. There is an old saying that a person’s name is the sweetest thing they will hear, and Craig builds facilities around that: big hellos, members treated as part of the team, and a standing instruction that staff spend five to ten minutes with every player who walks in. Some of that is shooting mechanics. Some of it is asking how school went.

The technology underneath is genuinely serious. Machine vision tracks the ball across shooting, passing, and ball handling, and on a shot it measures arc, depth, and left right alignment. Craig can name the targets: 45 degrees of arc, 11 inches of depth past the front of the rim, dead straight, with a working range around each. Land inside all three, what they call the splash zone, and you shoot 98 percent or better. Guided practice compresses a decade of becoming an elite shooter into roughly two years.

His filter for all of it came from one breakfast with George Raveling, widely regarded as the godfather of basketball coaches. Asked what mattered as Shoot 360 scaled, Raveling told him it was simple: whatever you do has to transfer onto the court five on five. That lens has kept the platform from drifting into impressive features that do not survive a real game.

On scale, Craig is candid that Shoot 360 is an emerging franchise still building its systems, now with a COO and a CMO hired out of the franchise world, franchise business consultants who visit and coach on the environment, and a standard his COO repeats: clean, friendly, and maintained. He is equally clear that the ideas flow the other way too. They studied their top performing locations, asked with no ego what those operators were doing differently, and rebuilt the marketing stack around the answers. As he puts it, the answers are in the field. That is what building love into scalable systems looks like in practice.

Key Takeaways

• (4:01) The design rule in one sentence: “people come for the tech, they stay because of the people.” Environment is treated as being as important as what happens in the facility, starting with using someone’s name.

• (8:11) What the machine actually measures: arc, depth, and left right. Perfect is 45 degrees, 11 inches deep, dead straight, with a usable range around each. Inside all three, the splash zone, you shoot 98 percent or better, and ten years of development compresses to about two.

• (14:03) The car ride home: a kid whose role is to rebound does the job, hears the coach say so, then gets asked all the way home why he isn’t scoring. Craig’s alternative is to affirm the role first, then resource the next one. “You’re helping them paint that vision.”

• (22:30) Where the good ideas live: they took their top locations in each revenue category and asked, with no ego and no expectation, what those operators were doing. “The answers are in the field.”

• (24:35) The filter, from George Raveling: “whatever you do can transfer onto the court five on five.” It is the test every new feature has to pass, and it is why the innovation has not drifted into novelty.

• (28:36) The market nobody is serving: roughly 175 million basketball enthusiasts in the US and only about 25 million still playing, because people retire from the game between 25 and 30. Three Ball, their shooting league format, is built to bring them back.

• (31:09) The origin: after surviving the 2008 crash, he walked in on his son and his teammates choosing video games over a court on a sunny day, and thought, build a gym that feels like a video game. “The definition of luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

• (41:24) Standards without fear: flip the conditioning so the hardest workers earn more of it, and build a culture of encouragement. You can be honest with people once there is trust, and “you can’t build trust until you build a relationship.”

FAQ

Can technology build community instead of replacing it?
Craig Moody of Shoot 360 says yes, if it is judged by whether it deepens the human interaction. His facilities pair real time shot data with a standing rule that staff spend five to ten minutes with every player, much of it about school and life rather than mechanics.

What is the splash zone in basketball shooting?
It is the range where arc, depth, and left right alignment all land in their optimal windows: around 45 degrees of arc, about 11 inches of depth past the front of the rim, and straight on. Shots inside that zone go in roughly 98 percent of the time.

How should parents talk to a young athlete after a game?
Affirm the role the child actually played first. Craig Moody has watched talented kids leave sport because the coach praised the job they did and the car ride home asked why they were not scoring. If the child wants a bigger role, resource it rather than demand it.

How do you keep culture consistent as a franchise grows?
With systems that are audited rather than assumed. Shoot 360 uses franchise business consultants who visit locations and coach on the environment, a stated standard of clean, friendly, and maintained, and advisory councils that carry ideas from the field back into the brand.

The tech gets people through the door once. Being known by name is what brings them back. Hear the full conversation with Craig Moody, watch it on the video page, hear Jamie Eslinger, Shoot 360’s CMO, on marketing with purpose, and find more on the Bliss Businesses series.