Results · American Volleyball Coaches Association
Curious at 2:51.
Answered by 3:09.
One afternoon in July, AVCA’s Chief Growth and Membership Officer asked A2 Atlas ten questions. Nine of them took seconds. The tenth took her nearly seven minutes to think of — and it found a segment of her membership that no report could see.
30 July 2026 · 2:51 – 3:09 PM
The session
The holes are the story.
Each bar is one question, and its height is how long Atlas worked on it. Eight of the ten come back in under forty seconds. The gold stretch carries no bars at all — because nothing was running. That was Kate.
Ten turns, 2:51 to 3:09 PM
What happened
5 beats in 17 minutes.
She asks a simple question. The answer is zero.
How many active and expired high school coach memberships are there? Atlas ran thirteen queries over seventy-six seconds before answering anything — then said: zero active. Three hundred and twenty-seven records, every one of them terminated, last join in 2013.
It did not stop at the number. Unprompted, it explained what the number meant, warned her not to be misled by it elsewhere, and offered the obvious next move — which is exactly what she asked for next.
Six questions, seven minutes, pinning as she goes.
Active coaches by discipline. New joins in thirty days. Split by member type. Broken down by discipline. Narrowed to coaching types only. Each answer arrives with the caveat that matters — that a join-date count isn’t a current-member count, that institution records are organizations rather than people.
Then it hits a wall, and says so.
She circles back to high school. This time Atlas has nothing to give her — and rather than approximate, it explains precisely why, names what would need to change, and offers to file it.
And then nothing happened.
Somewhere in those six minutes and fifty seconds she had an idea.
Her idea: don’t ask about the coach. Ask about where they work.
Atlas still can’t tell which coaches work in high schools — nothing in the data says so. But it knows which organization each coach belongs to, and it knows what kind of organization that is. Follow those two links — coach, then employer, then employer type — and the high-school segment appears.
No report had ever made that connection, because nobody had ever needed it to.
She stayed another eighteen minutes. She moved on to revenue, asked for a fiscal year that had not happened yet, and left at 3:27 with a chart that fills itself in as each month closes — and an offer, which she had not asked for, to email it to her the moment each month does.
Why it matters
A tier retired in 2013 was still shaping her numbers.
Every association has one of these — a code nobody retired cleanly, a field that stopped being filled in, a segment that quietly moved somewhere else. They do not announce themselves. They just make a report slightly wrong, for years.
Analytics that hands back a confident chart will never surface it. The reason Kate found hers in seventeen minutes is that Atlas would not give her a plausible answer when it did not have a true one.
The point
Forty per cent of her session was spent thinking. That is the only part that was ever supposed to be slow.
“A sentence from Kate, in her own words, about what changed.”
Kate Topley · Chief Growth and Membership Officer · American Volleyball Coaches AssociationWhat would you ask in seventeen minutes?
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