Today, we’re excited to announce that Retain has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Teamworks, an enterprise SaaS company serving collegiate and professional sports organizations globally. Retain joins Teamworks' comprehensive product portfolio, now comprised of nine best-in-class products. As part of this centralized technology ecosystem, customers can consolidate and integrate with various technologies to deliver a streamlined athlete experience.

"Our acquisition strategy is to identify and acquire industry leaders," said Zach Maurides, Founder and CEO of Teamworks. "With Retain, Teamworks gains the most comprehensive academics and athlete development technology, as well as a new product offering with Pulse. These additions allow us to better serve our customers by consolidating their tech stacks and digitizing the athlete lifecycle.” 

So, how did this all begin? Let me share my journey of how Retain came to be. Over ten years ago, due to the human error of pen and paper, I found myself seemingly short on my required study hall hours. Knowing there was an opportunity for a more efficient and accurate process, I set out to develop a solution to meet the needs of academic advisors managing their study hall process. What initially started as purpose-built software to solve a specific need quickly became a passion for developing a platform that would enable support staff to be more efficient in their student success efforts.

I’m proud that Retain has delivered on our promise to increase student success through technology. Universities, Colleges, and Athletic Departments of all sizes rely on Retain daily to coordinate and monitor their academic support services, scheduling, attendance, notes, and graduation rates. Additionally, the platform evolved through the needs of our end users to provide visibility and interactions to other staff within the department that need access to a student’s schedule or academic information.

In late 2021, we launched our second product, Omnia, which aimed at creating a comprehensive student development database and experience to allow professionals to quantify their work and provide students with a co-curricular portfolio that reflects their collegiate experience in a meaningful way. This year, we launched Pulse, an integrated offering that allows departments to proactively survey their end users and receive anonymous feedback in real-time.

Through these interactions, one thing remained evident: An entire ecosystem of software, people, and processes surrounding students and athletes remains. For our products to be as successful as possible, it requires integration with the daily operations of the end user. I believe our partnership with Teamworks will change the industry. Together, our impact creates an easy-to-use, unified technology platform to support athletes at every stage. Looking ahead, we can not wait to leverage Teamworks’ global footprint to deploy our solutions to international leagues, professional sports, academies, and governing bodies.

While this is not the end of the story, it is the closing of a chapter, and I want to thank all Retain users (past and present) who helped us reach this milestone.

I understand this is a big change, especially for a platform you rely on daily. So, I want to elaborate more on our plans for how this acquisition will work operationally and why I believe this is a partnership that will ultimately benefit you and the Retain platform.

1. There is a huge opportunity for us to accelerate the growth and innovation of the Retain platform with access to Teamworks’ technology, expertise, and resources. For example, we will be able to integrate additional calendars, messages, and rosters within the Retain platform. 
2. Teamworks is deeply committed to keeping Retain as the complete solution for student-athlete success. Current Teamworks Academics customers will be transitioned to the Retain platform.
3. We will now have access to a world-class customer support and collegiate success team. This will increase our response times in interacting with our customers and allow us to communicate more effectively on product updates.

It is an incredible opportunity and honor to help Teamworks build the Operating System for Sports™. Especially at a time when the collegiate athletics landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, this opportunity is also a huge responsibility. I can speak on behalf of the entire Retain team, we collectively look forward to the years ahead as we continue to develop solutions support staff can efficiently and effectively implement to perform their jobs better while driving success for the students they serve.

With great excitement,

Kevin Collignon, Founder, and CEO of Retain

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