Austin FC Scores Big with Data: A Strategic Play with Prefect

Playing its first season in 2021, Austin FC has quickly established itself with vibrant community support inside the growing world of American soccer. As a progressive, forward-thinking organization, Austin FC has always been keen to harness the power of data. From athlete performance to recruitment strategies, data plays a significant role in shaping the club's decisions and ensuring its competitive edge.

Austin FC’s Athlete Management System (AMS) is a testament to their commitment to data-driven decision-making. The AMS, hosted within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, built on Oracle APEX & powered by Prefect, is a lifeline for the club's Sporting Department, offering insights into player performance, training reports, opposition scouting, and more.

Before Prefect, managing the AMS was no walk in the park. Austin FC was running over 50 data aggregation scripts locally every day, a task both time-consuming and challenging to manage reliably.

Enter Prefect: with its seamless development into production, Prefect offered an easy-to-use, reliable platform that brought flexibility and observability to the club's workflows. The built-in retry logic and error handling, coupled with fantastic community support, made Prefect the perfect match for Austin FC’s needs.

Prefect's impact is tangible. For example, Kyle Voigt, Sport Scientist, highlighted how Prefect had significantly reduced manual data management tasks, allowing more time for research, analysis, and innovation that leads to better athlete care and player recruitment.

Furthermore, Prefect has freed up considerable time for the club's practitioners. On a busy day, with multiple training sessions and matches, Prefect saves hours, ensuring data is readily available when needed. The ease of diagnosing failure and deploying new pipelines has also been a game-changer.

Spencer Smallwood, Systems Administrator, particularly enjoyed the transition from Prefect 1.0 to 2.0. He found the updated syntax easier to understand, write, and deploy. In his words,

"Starting from nothing is incredibly user-friendly & easy to build at scale, quickly with Prefect."

But the journey with Prefect wasn't just about the tool itself. The ‘Book a Rubber Duck’ option and ability to get support live from Prefect’s Product Advocates proved invaluable for Austin FC. Their expert guidance translated complex technicalities into actionable suggestions, facilitating a smoother implementation of pipelines.

In summary, Prefect's implementation at Austin FC has been a resounding success. It has brought efficiency, reliability, and improved outcomes to the club's data management and decision-making processes. For any developer or future Prefect user, Austin FC's story is a testament to Prefect's potential and the transformative power of well-managed data flow in any organization.