How Georgia Southern Cut Academic Admin Work in Half
October 5, 2026 · Read Time: 4 mins
Insights From
Ryan Gilbert
Associate Athletics Director
Georgia Southern
Products Featured
Hub
Compliance
Academics
When Georgia Southern University's campus academic system contract came up for renewal, the athletics department faced a strategic decision. They could continue managing academic support through a separate system, or they could consolidate into a unified platform that their coaches and athletes already used. They chose the latter, and it's reshaping how they support student-athlete success.
For years, the Student-Athlete Services team operated appointment scheduling, study hall check-ins, and faculty communications through their campus system. Simultaneously, coaches and athletes used Teamworks Hub for all day-to-day sport operations. This created a familiar challenge: managing student-athlete information across two systems and duplicating appointments so athletes could work from a single app.
"We operated our day-to-day in our campus system, but would duplicate all appointments into Teamworks Hub so that our student athletes could operate in one platform," says Ryan Gilbert, Associate Athletics Director at Georgia Southern. When the contract renewal approached, Ryan recognized an opportunity. What if academic support could consolidate into the Teamworks ecosystem that coaches and athletes already relied on daily?
One Platform, One Solution
When Teamworks Academics launched, Ryan saw the fit immediately. Here was a product built specifically for academic departments, integrated with Hub, and designed to consolidate the manual work consuming his team's time.
Teamworks Academics helps athletic academic departments manage the full scope of student-athlete support: appointment scheduling, tutor management, study hall tracking, and faculty communication. The platform integrates with campus SIS systems for real-time student data, automates appointment reminders, manages academic tasks tied to course deadlines, and provides reporting on academic touchpoints and resource usage. The distinguishing factor is its connection to the broader Teamworks ecosystem. Since most collegiate programs already use Teamworks Hub, or Compliance + Recruiting, adding Academics creates one unified environment where student-athletes access sport schedules, compliance requirements, academic appointments, and assignment deadlines from a single app. For academic staff, that integration means shared profiles, aligned calendars, and data that flows between systems without manual re-entry.
The connection of Hub and Academics is what makes Academics valuable to us. When thinking of new software, switching cost is always the main thing to think about because it requires training, onboarding, and trial and error. With Academics, we were able to activate it a week before school started, and be fully operational within a week. Our student-athletes can see how much more seamless this allows us to operate, and we've seen dividends already.
Ryan Gilbert
Georgia Southern / Associate Athletics Director
By fall semester, the entire Student-Athlete Services team was managing appointments, study hall, task management, and faculty communication in one system. The integration eliminated friction. Student-athletes didn't face learning curves or app fatigue. Tasks, calendars, and appointment requests were already embedded in an app they used daily.
Impact and Results
With operations unified, Ryan's team redirected focus from administrative work to higher-impact activities, enabling Georgia Southern to operate more efficiently across the entire department.
"Moving over to Academics allows us to operate in the same platform as the rest of the Athletics Department, while still fulfilling our Student Success initiatives with exports and reports from Teamworks into our new CRM, without any duplication of efforts from our SAS staff," Ryan explains.
The Task Manager proved particularly valuable for this unified approach. Because assignment due dates vary across syllabi, the AI Syllabus Importer eliminates the manual extraction work, automatically pulling due dates and key details. Advisors can then build assignment plans for entire course sections at once, giving students clarity while reducing advisor overhead.
The integration delivered value beyond daily operations. Georgia Southern's Student-Athlete Services reports to the campus Student Success department, making documentation and visibility critical. Their campus CRM needed real-time insight into academic support activities. Previously, that required manual exports and re-entry.
"The ability to export what we do in Teamworks Academics into our Student Success CRM on campus was crucial for me," Ryan explains. "Recently, after a few weeks of data, we were able to successfully upload that data into our campus CRM, without any advisors needing to do anything."
Within weeks, the data validated the transition. Ryan notes that advisors are now documenting over 300 academic touchpoints per week before adding tutoring appointments, providing concrete visibility into where Student-Athlete Services is making an impact. "The ease at which an advisor can enter a note, coupled with the ability to export and upload to our campus CRM, gives me great confidence we will continue with Academics while meeting our campus partners' visibility needs," Ryan says.
Academic support teams operate under constant resource constraints. Georgia Southern's experience reflects a broader shift in collegiate athletics: when the right systems are in place, departments accomplish more with their existing resources. Advisors redirect time from data entry to student relationships. Athletes gain clarity on their academic responsibilities. Institutions gain measurable insight into the scope and impact of their support.
The Eagles didn't just switch platforms. They fundamentally restructured how their Student-Athlete Services team operates, discovering that efficiency gains often matter more than additional headcount.
To learn more about Teamworks Academics, visit https://teamworks.com/academics/.