Founded in 2000 by Mike Karr and Trace Pickering, WinningPrograms, Inc. is a firm dedicated to improving the efficiency
and effectiveness of athletic and academic programs and institutions, non-profits, and businesses. As lifelong friends,
Mike and Trace watched their fathers grow their businesses using simple but effective principles:
- Go beyond simply providing products and services by knowing and serving each customer like the name implies:
each in a "custom" way.
- Prospects and customers deserve respect and honesty.
- "Service beyond the sale" is the best long-term strategy a business can have.
Mike and Trace recognized they shared the same values and interests and WinningPrograms was born to serve underserved
markets in athletics, education, and the non-profit sector. WinningPrograms clients have included:
- One of the nation's leading providers of college recruiting and fund-raising services, RuffaloCODY,
sought out WinningPrograms to design and deliver a comprehensive e-newsletter product designed to deliver
information directly to students interested in attending a particular school and alumni interested in continuing
or beginning to support their college or university.
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- Athletic booster clubs interested in providing a comprehensive website and in creating another income stream
through advertising and sales of promotional items.
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- Nationally-respected educational consultant, Dr. Susan Leddick, utilized WinningPrograms' understanding of
education and the educational market to create a web presence that enhances the services she provides her
clients.
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- Rotary clubs from across the nation utilize WinningPrograms' ClubWeb™ website product to create and maintain a
web presence in their communities. ClubWeb™ allows local, volunteer-run organizations to have a professional and
comprehensive web presence designed specifically for their needs at a price they can afford.
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- Recruiting Hawk™ is the ultimate vision of WinningPrograms providing college athletic recruiters with the tools
and technology that their recruiting counterparts in the admissions office have had for years. Utilizing our
extensive technical, athletic and educational experience and knowledge, Recruiting Hawk™ is quite simply the best,
most comprehensive, most user-friendly product ever designed for the athletic recruiter. Not only was Recruiting Hawk™
built by coaches for coaches, it is supported by a company led by seasoned business people.
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Mike Karr
Mike serves as President of WinningPrograms, Inc. and is the lead designer of Recruiting Hawk. Mike has been involved in
coaching for over 16 years at both the high school and college levels and before taking over Recruting Hawk was an Adminstrative Assistant for the
University of Northern Iowa men's basketball program.
Prior to joining the UNI staff, Mike served as assistant women's basketball coach at
Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, IA and both assistant men's basketball and
assistant football coach at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. Mike was also head boys' basketball coach at Vinton-Shellsburg
High School in Vinton, IA from 1995-2003 where he compiled a 128-63 career record. The 128 wins are the most in school history. |
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Trace Pickering
Trace serves as Vice-President of WinningPrograms, Inc. Trace is a lifelong educator, coach and businessperson. He has served as a high school basketball coach, English instructor, principal, college instructor, and intermediate agency administrator. Trace designs the training programs for all WinningPrograms products and services and runs the day-to-day operations. His first company, founded in 1997, went from a $400 investment by four partners to sales in excess of $3 million in two years. Trace served day-to-day as the COO. He sold his stake in the business in 2000 prior to join forces with his current partner, Mike Karr, in founding WinningPrograms.
Trace has extensive training and experience in the systems theory and design. His work in social system design utilizing quality tools and processes add a dimension to the Recruiting Hawk™ system not easily found in other products.
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Erika Pepmeyer
Erika Pepmeyer serves as Coordinator of Educational Support for Recruiting Hawk. She spends most of her time working directly with users to enhance their knowledge and understanding of the capabilities of their Recruiting Hawk system. Erika prides her self on her willingness to be available 24-7-365. "I know many great coaches work 24-7-365, so my job is to make sure they know where to always find answers."
Erika's background in education and coaching include an all-conference career and degree in Secondary Physical Education from Cornell College (IA). Aftering graduating, she served as a Graduate Assistant for Mayville State University's (ND) Women's Basketball progam while pursuing a master's degree in Sport Pedagogy. She then pursued teaching physical education and coaching for two years in northern Arizona. Erika comes to Recruiting Hawk with both collegiate and high school coaching experience and a sincere desire to help coaches find a better way to recruit quality student-athletes. |
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Afan Ottenheimer
Afan serves as the lead programmer for Recruiting Hawk™ and has been CEO of JEO.NET, a company that specializes in
database-driven web application development, since April 1995. His
languages and technologies include: C, PHP, Perl, SQL, JavaScript and shell
scripting (Unix flavors and Windows). He has been a UNIX administrator
for over 20 years, the last 10 working in large enterprise as well as
small business Windows environments. Afan has created Web databases
with MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Paradox, on Windows and
UNIX. Clients have included Fortune 100 companies and supporting 2.5
million users with low-bandwidth multi-site synchronization.
Afan created many core PHP library classes and published the
open source graphing class "phplot", which became the sixth most
popular download from sourceforge.net in 2002. "Phplot" was widely
regarded as a standard for graphing in PHP and it has been used in many
popular open source applications including "snort", software for intrusion detection.
Afan also has over fifteen years of professional teaching experience.
He currently teaches the beginning through advanced PHP, MySQL, and
Apache courses for Learning Tree International. He is consistently
rated by students as their best instructor in those classes.
Afan was awarded a Masters in Computational Plasma Physics and passed
his PhD comprehensive exams at the University of Iowa in 1995.
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