EagleWorks AI built and manages four website chatbots for Albion Hurricanes FC in Houston, one for each program site, trained from a single shared knowledge base. In their first five months the bots handled more than 1,300 parent conversations, 43% of them outside office hours, and flagged 418 of them as families ready to register, try out, or join.
1,300+ conversations in 5 months · 43% outside office hours · 418 high-intent conversations · 2% asked for a human
The problem
Tryout season buries Albion Hurricanes FC every year. Offer emails go out, and parents flood the phones and inboxes with the same questions: which campus, which age group, what to bring, how to register a second kid.
The club runs four programs (Albion Hurricanes FC youth soccer, AHFC Royals competitive soccer, Albion Field Hockey, and Albion Lacrosse) with more than 2,500 players and about 50 coaches, all supported by a six-person operations team. The heaviest question load lands exactly when that team is already saturated, and a lot of it arrives at night, long after the office closes.
This spring the club was also launching a new website and moving to a new registration platform in the same window. Hiring through the rush was never a real option. They needed a tool to help offload the flood of questions that come with registration and throughout the year.
What we built
Four website chatbots, one per program site, each trained on the club's policies, procedures, and FAQs from a shared knowledge base. Roary (Albion's Chatbot) greets families on the soccer site; each of the other programs has its own. We manage them end to end.
Build It. Kickoff to live on the club's main site in 30 days, timed to land in the back half of tryout season. The other three program sites followed as each new website launched. Embedded on the club's new sites with prompted questions on open (tryouts, fees, schedules, team contacts). English and Spanish worked from day one with no extra configuration.
Support It. Weekly check-ins and same-day retraining whenever club content or staff changed, plus a live analytics dashboard the Albion team reads on its own: every conversation classified by topic and outcome, volume by day and hour, and a review queue of the chats worth a human look.
Improve It. The dashboard ranks every question parents ask and flags the ones the bots couldn't fully answer. That list is the club's content to-do list, at this point just a handful of items that have come up in the first few months. Team-naming terminology, the single most-asked topic during tryouts, was something staff knew by instinct and had never written down. It's written down now. A staff-facing version, Coach, trained on the employee handbook, coaching guidelines, and SafeSport materials, is live on the club's internal portal for their administrative staff and coaches.
What a night looks like now
It's 10 p.m. on a weeknight in tryout season. A Spanish-speaking parent opens the Albion site, asks in Spanish which age group her son falls into and what the registration deadline is, and gets both answers in Spanish, in seconds.
Another parent is stuck registering a second child. Roary walks him through it the same evening. Before, that registration would have sat in a queue until morning, or they would have spent half an hour with staff trying to walk them through it on the phone.
On the final day of tryouts, the busiest single day, the bots handled 34 conversations. Meanwhile, Albion staff spent that day working with the actual players during the tryouts.
The result
The first 21 days, tryout season:
320 conversations, about 15 a day
Half outside business hours
34 conversations on the final day of tryouts
Spanish and French handled automatically, with no translation step
The first five months:
More than 1,300 conversations, still averaging 7 to 8 a day with tryouts long over
43% outside the office's 8-to-6 day, 35% after 6 PM, 23% on weekends when admin staff is unavailable
63% answered outright by the bot, another 26% routed by design to the right staff contact, 11% flagged as content gaps for staff to fill
418 conversations, one in three, flagged as high-intent: a parent asking how to register, try out, or join
29 conversations, about 2%, asked for a person
The launch plan set a target of 100 conversations in the first 30 days. The bots passed 300 in 21.
No new hires. No after-hours coverage. The questions that used to pile up overnight got answered while the office was dark, and Albion got two things it never had: a ranked list of what its websites were missing, and a running count of families ready to sign up.
"Tryouts used to mean the phones didn't stop. This year a lot of those questions got answered before they ever reached us, and a lot of them came in at night when nobody was here to pick up anyway. It let the staff stay focused on the kids on the field."
Susan Green, Director of Operations, Albion Hurricanes FC
Can an AI chatbot answer questions after business hours?
Yes. During tryout season, half of Albion's chatbot conversations happened outside office hours. Across five months, 43% did, and more than a third came in after 6 PM. All were answered in real time with no staff on shift.
Do parents actually use it, or do they just ask for a person?
They use it. Of more than 1,300 conversations, only 2% asked for a human. They asked about programs, registration, tryouts, fees, locations, and schedules, and most got what they came for.
Does it handle more than one language?
Yes. Albion's chatbots answered Spanish and French questions automatically, with no separate setup or translation step.
What happens when it doesn't know the answer?
It says so and points the parent to the right person or form instead of guessing. Those conversations land in a review queue on the club's dashboard, and every gap becomes new training content.
How long does it take to get live?
Albion's first bot went live on the club's main site in 30 days, with the other three sites following as each launched. Timelines depend on how much of your content already exists. A business with solid FAQs and written policies can be live in a few days to a few weeks.
Does a chatbot replace staff?
No. It absorbs the repetitive, after-hours question load so your team spends its time on the work that needs a person. For Albion, that meant running tryouts instead of answering the phone about them.
Which questions does your team answer fifty times a season? Book a call and we'll find out in 30 minutes.