It's been a long time in coming, but the SMART scholarship system, collected and disbursed by USBC has gone online in a big way. For those without youth bowlers in the family, bowling is big bucks in the form of scholarships. USBC created SMART (Scholarship Management and Reporting for Tenpins) as a centralized place for a variety of organizations--youth leagues, tournament clubs, associations, and the like--to send the scholarship dollars and allow the recipients to request the scholarships. First mentioned roughly two years ago, the online portion of the program finally went live early this spring.
I became acquainted with SMART very soon after becoming a youth coordinator. A local center was going out of business and was having a scholarship tournament to disburse their final funds. My son won his first scholarship that day--in 6th grade. Soon after I started having some scholarships awarded out of my own center.
Which brings me to last Friday evening. I wanted to make a few disbursements to some bowlers as youth leagues had ended that week in my center. I pulled up the SMART webpage, entered my account and password, and up comes the website. In literally less than five minutes, I was able to award over $600 to more than half a dozen recipients. Since I was using previously unused funds in my SMART account, had any of those bowlers wanted to request their scholarships that night, they were available. Gone is filling out the paperwork and needing to look in one file cabinet for addresses and another drawer for their bowler ID numbers. I hit print to receive a confirmation print out, so no more wasting half a tree in paper making copies, and no more trips to the post office with an envelope as thick as a telephone book. SMART had the most up-to-date addresses of the bowlers that I know had moved during the season, so USBC is keeping up with the postal changes. I can now do my work on my time from home.
SMART handles all of this without charging a fee to the programs it works with. SMART earns interest on its deposits, and pays its expenses from that income including salaries for those implementing the program. Any additional interest earnings are returned to the programs to use at their discretion as well. I don't need a checking account and I don't need to pay for checks. Coming from a chain center, the hassles for requesting a check from the corporate office are even worse.
As a parent of a scholarship recipient, it couldn't be any easier, either. My son is now in high school, but he takes courses at the local community college. What used to take an email or a phone call to find out the balance and then request funds is even simpler now. At any time of the day or night, we can find out how much my son has left in his account. Currently, my son has scholarships in at least four different places with at least four different requirements for eligibility, and worse, four different rules on when the scholarships expire. And I'm sure there are bowlers with scholarships from six or eight different organizations. Only the scholarships in SMART are available online like this.
By August, SMART is going to become more familiar to a lot of families, as USBC has voted to require the use of the SMART system. While there are some issues for larger tournament clubs regarding the interest that SMART receives, having a one-stop shopping approach for families will be a big help. In addition, the consistency with the terms of the scholarships and the expiration dates will help families use more scholarships and have fewer accidentally expire. I'm fortunate to be pretty involved and presume I know what's going on, but this will be a huge bonus to families that don't spend every waking moment in the bowling community.
Posted by Angel Zobel-Rodriguez at May 23, 2006 10:58 AM