SAMEER AHUJA – PRESIDENT OF GAMECHANGER – EPISODE 890

Website – https://gc.com/

Email – sameer.d.ahuja@gmail.com

Twitter – @RealSameerAhuja

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Sameer Ahuja is the President of GameChanger, a DICK’S Sporting Goods sports technology company. GameChanger’s mission is to help families elevate the next generation through sports. GameChanger’s beloved mobile apps are used in all 50 states by millions of youth sports coaches, fans, and athletes to score, stream, and watch youth sports. More games are covered in two months on GameChanger than in the history of all American professional sports combined.

In March of 2023, Sameer was the inaugural recipient of the Executive Of The Year by Sports Business Journal at their Sports Business Awards: Tech. In April 2023, GameChanger was named the #2 Most Innovative Company in sports by FastCompany.

Sameer is a long-time entrepreneur with 20 years of experience as a Founder, CEO or COO of high-growth technology businesses from startup to late-stage in multiple industries. He co-founded an interactive sports attraction, founded a quant hedge fund, and built a fintech company.

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Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Sameer Ahuja, President of GameChanger.

What We Discuss with Sameer Ahuja

• Helping kids and families stay connected, have positive experiences, and have really good mental and physical health through sports
• Immigrating from India at 8 years old
• The power of sports to bring people together despite their differences
• His background starting companies
• The three traits that have made him a successful entrepreneur
• “It’s nearly impossible to get anything amazing done by yourself.”
• Getting the opportunity to join GameChanger
• “Our primary product is happiness. We connect parents and grandparents to their kids and grandkids around one of the most important activities that kids, especially in the US, are engaged in, which is sports.”
• “By our calculations, 20 percent of kids, 6 through 18 who play sports in the U S are connected to GameChanger.”
• The two tiered approach GameChanger uses for memebers
• How GameChanger has begun to utilize AI
• Creating player profiles on GameChanger
• Documenting and recording games that were previously lost to history
• “There’s this connectivity all the way from kids starting out in kindergarten through the pros.”
• “Every two months, we have more games than have been played by all the pro leagues in the US combined.”

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THANKS, SAMEER AHUJA

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TRANSCRIPT FOR SAMEER AHUJA – PRESIDENT OF GAMECHANGER – EPISODE 890

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host Jason Sunkle this morning, but I am pleased to be joined by Sameer Ahuja, the president at GameChanger, also senior vice president at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Sameer, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:16] Sameer Ahuja: Mike, thanks for having me here.  Really excited to be here to talk hoops and youth sports and where we see the future going.

[00:00:26] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. We’re thrilled to be able to have you on. I’m always excited to have somebody on whose product I have used and enjoyed. And we’ll get into that as we, as we talk a little bit more throughout the conversation.

But I wanted to start by giving You Sameer, a chance to just share your background, kind of how you got to this point, how you got involved with GameChanger, and then we’ll dive into some of the nitty gritty of the details of what it’s all about.

[00:00:51] Sameer Ahuja: Sure. Absolutely. Well, so I’ve been for the last 20 years, an entrepreneur, I’ve developed a passion for building businesses and building organizations and the stuff I’ve done in the past was primarily in the sports industry and also in fintech and finance.

And what I found is that there are few other places where you have more passion than actually kind of people and thinking about their money and then thinking about sports and sports in particular is such an amazing way for people to come together. The opportunity to do GameChanger and work here, which came about almost seven years ago, was such an amazing thing because it allowed me to kind of continue my passion in sports.

What’s made GameChanger so unique though now is that we are in every community in the country and our mission is to elevate the next generation through sports. And we’re really doing that. We’re really helping kids and helping families stay connected, have positive experiences, have really good mental, physical health through sports.

And it’s the most rewarding work I’ve ever done as of a couple months ago was the longest work job I’ve ever had. And I think we’re just getting started looking forward to being here for many years.

[00:02:06] Mike Klinzing: All right, so first of all, where did your passion from sports come from?

[00:02:08] Sameer Ahuja: So actually I’m an immigrant, I moved here when I was eight years old, I was born in India, I lived in other parts of the world, and because my dad’s work ended up here, and I had a very seamless kind of academic transition and all of that because I had actually attended American schools overseas.

But the social interaction eight year old, you’re in elementary school what was harder just cause I hadn’t lived here. Didn’t know much about like pop culture and all that. And sports was actually the entree and the connection for me with other kids in school. Started playing baseball, just like rec baseball, basketball, and other sports.

And then growing up here in New York became kind of a…in the eighties, mid eighties, mid late eighties, a big fan of the Mets. They were really big at the time, became a huge Knicks fan. They had drafted Ewing. And then of course had that somewhat disappointing run in the early nineties.

But that was the language that I connected with other boys my age, and just kind of got into the flow of the like social stuff and since that day, I kind of felt, even if it was subconscious, kind of a power, the power of sports to bring people together, for whatever reason you’re new in a place, you come from a different background, different socioeconomic status, skin color, all of these things.

And in the world we live in today with so much tension and sort of disagreement and also just negativity something like sports can bring people together all over the world. So whether it’s a family or two cultures, I want to be part of that process of bringing people together.

[00:03:40] Mike Klinzing: I’m going to give you a book recommendation right now. Have you ever read the book “How basketball can save the world” by Dave Hollander. He’s a professor at NYU. You would love that book.

[00:03:51] Sameer Ahuja: It’s now on my list for the holiday reading. I love it. Thank you.

[00:03:54] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, you would love that book. Again, there’s just a, Dave goes through, he was a guest and he goes through just 13 different principles that all relate to world events and the current state of affairs and a lot of those little things that you just touched on when you were talking about your background are things that Dave talks about in his book. So yeah, you want to get on that. And for listeners out there, if you haven’t heard me talk about how basketball can save the world, get out there and read that. So that’s your background, your passion for sports. How about your passion for business?  Where did that come from?

[00:04:25] Sameer Ahuja: So similarly related passion for business originally probably came from my dad. He worked in business. He worked in at a bank and just came from very, very extremely modest as an overstatement background and worked his way up sort of the classic success story.

And that was always an inspiration, always looked up to him and then actually got the entrepreneurial bug while I was in business school, just saw the opportunity, especially in the U. S. versus somewhere else, to be able to build something, there’s so much opportunity, there’s so much capital, there’s so many good ideas.

And I just felt like a really strong belief in some of the things that I wanted to do and felt like the best way to do that was to kind of build things. So GameChanger is my fourth consecutive startup that I’ve worked on. And two were my own, brand new from the beginning. And two were sort of jumping on and helping other people and getting a chance to run the organization.

And I just think as a society right now, even beyond sports, we need more and more people kind of building the future, improving everything from our government to social services to companies. There’s a really significant need to improve technology. Technology is amazing. We’re talking here on this platform.

There’s definitely concerns, whether it’s with kids or adults that some parts of tech, some elements of social media are not very helpful impacting things like mental health. I’m of the belief, I agree with a lot of that. I’m of the belief that problems caused by new technologies that we’ve just recently started using can be solved by better technology, not by shutting them down and things like that.

So I look to kind of my peers in tech, other entrepreneurs, people who work with us, our own company, our own team. To really be at the vanguard of good technology. I’m biased, but I certainly think GameChanger is kind of part of that. We think it’s very positive, but I want to be part of that industry wide move across the country, just looking at where we could do better with tech.

[00:06:18] Mike Klinzing: What do you think is your number one trait that has allowed you to succeed as an entrepreneur? If you could pin it down to one or maybe two things that you think have helped you to have the success in your career that you’ve had?

[00:06:28] Sameer Ahuja: Yeah, I’ll say one and then there’s second.  The first one, and there’s many words for this is resilience. I am literally, unwilling to ever give up. I do not have that gene. And I will crawl through the mud for something I believe in. And I think that’s the thing that sets people apart in terms of an entrepreneurial journey. The other thing, and I, again, second, but also important there’s a lot of day to day work you have to do.

You have to just like get stuff done, but I don’t think you can be an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur without dreaming. You have to dream. I’m fond of saying of a future so much better than the present that it feels like magic and that doesn’t always translate to reality, but you have to start there.

I guess if I was just to put it in threes, the third thing is you then have to execute every single day, step by step. You cannot just sit around and pontificate and dream. You have to take that dream and just get stuff done, which it’s amazing how sometimes people fall down on that part of it.

[00:07:27] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. So how do you balance those things? I know that anybody, right, who is successful, and especially if you have a small business, there’s always that temptation, right, of you’re just kind of working the day to day stuff that has to get done. And sometimes that vision, it’s the working in your business versus working on your business.

How have you balanced that? How have you thought about that part of it throughout your career?  

[00:07:49] Sameer Ahuja: I think the key thing is the people you surround yourself with, and even if it’s small, so you start something. I think the not always, but I think the best things that are started are started by two or three people, not necessarily by one person.

The most successful of my experiences with my startups have been. where there’s a core group at the very beginning or whenever I join. And the one that was particularly not successful, we kind of, I didn’t have like that right group of people around me. And I learned a lot from that.

And so you can have and should seek out an individual in your group who can kind of be the dreamer and then someone who can make sure you’re disciplined on execution. We’re a bit larger now as a company. We have a couple hundred people. We have that nice mix. I do a lot of the strategy and vision setting and kind of long term thinking, but then I’m able to deep dive, but I also have an incredible team, whether it’s our leadership team or other people who execute and who also bring different skills to the table.

I spend a very significant amount of my time finding people that would be great to join our company and getting them excited about joining and then coaching them and helping them with their work, which primarily means giving them the platform to kind of go and do what they need to and get out of their way, but you just, it’s nearly impossible to just get anything amazing done by yourself.

[00:09:05] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I can agree with that. There’s no question. You mentioned that in your different ventures, that at some point you were the founder, you were the startup, you were the idea. And with GameChanger, you came in after it had already gotten started. So at what point in that process did you jump in?  And then I guess the next part of that question is why?

[00:09:26] Sameer Ahuja: Sure. Well, so I’ve been here about seven years and I got the opportunity to lead the company two years in. I was part of the leadership team for those first two years. And honestly, and I say this to everyone, when I first started, it was a bit of an experiment.

It was a big experiment. It’s your work, but the company was doing well. We had just come together with Dick’s Sporting Goods and there was still, it was still very, very early in its evolution. I was motivated by the mission. I had actually, before even hearing of GameChanger, had been coaching my older daughter’s rec softball team for a few years.

Kindergarten, first, second grade. Got a lot out of that. It was the best day of the week on Saturdays to go and do that. And so I felt the mission, but as a career move and a business, I didn’t Nowhere to go. What became really clear to me was the, I’d rarely seen first kind of on the emotional side, kind of a love of a product.

And you see it with some of these really big time things. A lot of people love their iPhone or something like that. That kind of love at a smaller scale was what we saw with customer reviews, with people using the product, talking about it. On the more hardcore business side there’s a notion of like product market fit tech, which is, does your product meet the market that you’re in and when that happens, people sell your product for you in the sense that you’ll tell the next person and it’s all this word of mouth, organic adoption, like just spreading. And that’s exactly what was happening here. And so I saw that those two foundational things were there. And then the clincher for me.

Which can always be complex when your company is acquired by someone else, and now we have this parent company, Dick’s Sporting Goods. The relationship there, I thought, was one of the most unique, high potential, positive relationships out there. Largest sports retailer in the country, huge platform, very, very long term thinkers, very stable sophisticated.

And kind of big picture mindset for the long run, and that fit really well with the GameChanger mission and our goals to kind of become the ubiquitous provider of our software and youth sports. So those three things just, I started to think this is, there isn’t going to be another opportunity like this.

And if I’m given the chance. I want to really take it and elevate it and so thankful that I got the chance to do it. And, in large part because of early efforts of our entire team, we’ve had just some dramatic success kind of getting out to more and more users. We’ve probably 5x the company in every metric over the last four or five years, which has just been, I’m so proud of what we’ve done.

[00:11:56] Mike Klinzing: So for people out there who maybe aren’t familiar with the product, what problem Does GameChangers solve for those of us who are involved in youth sports? What does it do? How does it do it better than what’s been out there in the past and what other products are out there on the market today?

[00:12:11] Sameer Ahuja: Yeah, I’m fond of saying our primary product is happiness. We connect parents and grandparents to their kids and grandkids around one of the most important activities that kids, especially in the US, are engaged in, which is sports. And we do that through an app that allows coaches and parents who are at the game to capture the stats, the scores and the video streams like you’d watch pro or collegiate sports and send you the parent, the grandparent, that content.

And your kid could be in Wichita and you could be in New York on a business trip. Grandparents who live in California, the kids could live in Florida. It doesn’t matter. We connect you. And it feels like magic because before there was no way to capture this content. There are 35 or 40 million games in the United States in youth sports.

And we now capture about 20 percent of them making us the largest. Those games were never captured. It’s like a tree falling in a forest and no one heard it. It never happened. So they get that moment where the kid hit a home run or even had a bad thing happen to them. You know, they lost championship.

The parent, for reasons that are probably out of their control, work, whatnot, weren’t there. The grandparent wasn’t there. So they couldn’t experience that moment. And we put those moments in the palm of your hand, because everyone has one of these phones, you can, of course, watch it on a tablet and smart TV and all that.

But primarily it’s with you all the time. And because we use a mobile device to capture this, these stats and scores, it can happen at any field, any court, anywhere in the country. Right now, the product is free to use for coaches and teams. So you could, again, everyone’s got the phone. So, and it’s Android or iOS, you just download it, start using it.

And a big chunk of our service is free for parents as well. And then we have some stuff that we upsell on cause we have business to run. And it’s turned into this massive thing by our calculations, 20 percent of kids, six through 18 who play sports in the U S are connected to GameChanger. And I mean, that’s a big number.

We’re so proud of it, but I’d love for it to be 40, 60, 70 percent because we believe we have the best product. Like you asked, it’s free. It’s on your phone. We have the best user experience. We spend so much time talking to our customers about what they want. We have and it’s evidenced in the reviews we have on the app store, we have more reviews than a little bit of an unfair comparison, but we have more reviews on the app store than like the Facebook app does.

Like it’s just a massive amount of positive expression about what we’re doing.

[00:14:40] Mike Klinzing: Passion for youth sports. Let’s put it that way. There are people who are very involved in sports, they’re kids sports. And from a coaching standpoint, from a parent standpoint, parent standpoint, from a player standpoint, obviously there is a tremendous amount of passion for the game.

And so it doesn’t surprise me at all that people are responding to it in that way. You mentioned, before I get to my experience with it, you mentioned from a business standpoint, how you run it. And obviously it’s not a charity, it’s a business. So what’s the business model for GameChanger? How do you look at that part of it?

[00:15:16] Sameer Ahuja: So we ask parents to subscribe, consume the content that’s being produced. Stats, scores, recaps, live streaming, live stats during the game are part of our free tier. But if you want to consume the content later on, you want to look at your entire season, like a season recap, season stats, career stats, we have an athlete profile for each kid, captures everything they’ve done.

Let’s say they played six or seven years. If you want to get highlight clips, as opposed to just the live video, all of that is paid. We have two tiers. It’s not, I mean, it’s not nothing, but we think in the context of other apps and of youth sports spending, we are very passionate about one, having the free tier to ensure a lot of accessibility and then keep it at a reasonable price.

So it’s either $7.99 a month or 12.99 a month. You can subscribe for your season on a monthly subscription. Like you might have some other app on your phone. You can subscribe annually. And you know, we have in total between a free and paid, I mean, we have nearly 10 million parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, coaches on the platform.

That’s just it’s a, it’s a really incredible community and it’s a community that’s engaged. We have a Facebook group with now like 30,000 members on it where they’re just every day their parents, coaches are helping each other get better at using the app asking, answering questions.  It’s an unbelievably engaged community.

[00:16:41] Mike Klinzing: Which sport do you have the most market penetration with at this point?

[00:16:45] Sameer Ahuja: Sure. Right now it’s baseball and softball. Like many companies and ideas, you start with sort of a spark. One of the two co-founders had a long family and personal history in baseball, played minor league baseball, went into business.

And so that was the origin. And then we focused there because typically focusing on one market and startup is a great idea and kind of establishing yourself and then moving to other markets. A couple of years ago, we got very excited about making that move and looked at other sports and landed next on basketball.

There was a lot of overlap. Some of its seasonality of the time of year with our baseball softball audience. We saw that there was I think the largest team sport in youth in the country, a lot of fragmentation, not a lot of other products in use like this. We had just gone from just scoring and stats to video streaming.

And it’s a very video visual centric game and obviously has a lot of speed to it versus baseball and softball and got really excited about it. We also have made a lot of progress in volleyball, which is just exploding in popularity and in flag and youth football also kind of particularly in the flag side, there’s a ton of growth.

And then of course we’re looking in the future to soccer and lacrosse and others, but currently have a significant portion of our entire company focused on basketball. And of course continuing to drive more adoption and all that in our core diamond sports. But basketball is about as exciting a moment as we’ve ever had.

[00:18:16] Mike Klinzing: From a tech and coding standpoint, was there any difference in creating the product for the particular sport, or was it more just kind of adapting what you’d already created in baseball and softball as you move into a, into a new sport? If that question makes any sense, was there one that was more challenging of the ones you’ve done so far?

[00:18:36] Sameer Ahuja: It absolutely makes sense. A crucial question for us. And a few elements to it. One was the user experience, customer experience, of just trying to keeping score and stats and all that. Basketball moves super fast. Baseball doesn’t. So we had to make pretty significant adjustments to the interface and actually rationalize certain things.

Okay, maybe not tracking all of these things is a good idea. But what’s really exciting is we’ve launched our first set of artificial intelligence AI features to capture action on the game automatically. Now we’ve rolled out our first version of that. We call it auto stream. It allows the phone camera, not physically, but just in the camera to move pan side to side, to keep up with the action.

We’re going to have player tracking, ball tracking. We’re going to automate a lot of things because in these faster sports, you just don’t have time to keep do all of that by yourself. And we keep getting these requests, like, get rid of my paper score book. Give me something I can use, but it has to be somewhat accurate.

And we think our technology can do that. And once that’s captured, the experience for mom and dad, grandma and grandpa is going to be very similar. Maybe they’re a little more interested in the highlights versus stats, depending on the sport. A sport like volleyball doesn’t have the voluminous number of stats that baseball does.

So it’s just a little bit different. Our core AI features now obviously that’s like a very timely thing. A lot of people are talking about it. We’re not on this wave because it’s very buzzy and exciting and kind of like of the moment. We truly think this will transform the youth sports experience and we don’t like to be on the bleeding edge.

We want to be doing technology and building things that are, are, are relevant and usable. We feel great cause we’re kind of leading the charge here in youth sports in this area. And I just feel like it’s just part of our mission to just keep having the best product and for our customers.

[00:20:27] Mike Klinzing: I can totally see where this thing is heading from an AI and sort of an automaticity type perspective that eventually you’re going to get where, boom, you set the camera up and the camera does all the work that currently somebody who’s scoring the game using the app is now doing manually. So I’ll tell you a little bit about my experience with GameChanger. And so my son, who’s a senior in high school this year, last spring and summer, his AAU team, his coach, got us onto GameChanger. And so obviously the video part of it comes with it, which is nice because I’m here in Cleveland.

My parents live in Florida. So they could tune in and see games. My wife and I, we have two other kids with activities and things going on. And so sometimes one of us is at the tournament and obviously one of us is not. So the person that is away, that’s at home can jump on and be able to see that. So obviously that’s just a huge benefit.

Again, if you’d have told me that five years ago that that was going to be possible, I would have told you that you were crazy. And then thinking back even further to when I was, when I was a player 35 years ago and my dad hauling the giant VCR camera around to try to film games, obviously a totally, totally different world when you start talking about how video is used in sports.

And so that was the video piece of it. And then I remember the first game that we used the app. We had two dads. I was not one of them. So two of the dads on the team were getting to know the app, right? And so one guy was the spotter and then the other guy was running the app. And so the guy who was the spotter is yelling out, Hey, Derek made that shot.

Or, Hey, Jason missed that one or whatever. And then being able to record it. I remember sitting there. One of the things as a parent that I’m sure you’ve seen, you’ve heard, you’ve gotten feedback on is no parent likes to be the person that I shouldn’t say no person. There are some people who do like to do the score and run the scoreboard because they like to be involved.

But most parents, when they come in to watch their kid, they just want to be able to watch the game. They don’t want to have to do these extra things. And so I remember watching the other two parents doing that and going, wow, that looks like, man, that’s a lot. Like they’re. They’re typing away and they’re hitting that one guy’s yelling stuff out as they’re watching the game.

I’m like, man, I think I’d rather just sit there and watch the game than do that. And then there was a game where those two parents were not there. Our coach said, Hey Mike, can you do the GameChanger today? And I’m like, all right, I guess I can do it. And it took me, honestly, Sameer, it took me maybe five minutes of feeling like, Hey, how’s this work?

Where is it going to go? What do I have to do? How do I have to hit it? And after five minutes, I was completely sold and hooked. And from that point on, I was like, Hey, I’ll do the GameChanger. And because one, it forced me to pay even more attention to the game. And then I also felt like I had a feel as a parent for kind of what was going on, like, Hey, this kid’s hot, or, Hey, this kid has X amount of points, or, Hey, this is what’s happening.

And for anybody who hasn’t used it, it really is honestly an amazing tool that Like I said, if you’d have told me 2, 3, 4 years ago that on an app, on your phone, that you could collect and gather all the statistics that we were able to collect and gather just from one person, being able to do that, and then also, I think you talked to a lot of parents that if they have to sit down and do a physical scorebook with a pencil and paper or even the other thing that you often get to do as a parent or have to do or asked to do is to run the scoreboard, which is even worse because then you’re a public figure as you’re the scoreboard and every scoreboard is obviously different. And it’s like people are yelling at you all this kind of stuff. Yeah. So to do those two things are always, those are not fun. Parents don’t want to do them. And honestly, doing GameChanger for me, I felt like it was kind of fun, and B, it also just allowed me, like I said, to be involved in the game in a way that I wasn’t previously.

Like, parents would come over to me and say, Hey, how many points does my kid have? Or what was this? How many fouls do we have? How many timeouts do we have left? All things that previously Parents probably would have just been guessing, especially in an AAU setting. And I just felt like using it to me was fun, tremendously useful and completely intuitive.

And honestly, like I said, when I watched those two guys do it, I was like, Oh, I don’t know if I want to do that. It’s going to be super complicated. And then as soon as I did it, and I mean, they figured it out very quickly after the first game, they only needed one person to be able to do it. And just jumping on, it was just super easy.

So you guys have created something that I don’t see why there would be anyone who wouldn’t utilize this with their team. It just works so well.

[00:25:40] Sameer Ahuja: Thank you. And I mean, I just loved hearing everything you said. A few things stood out. One, whether it was you or those other dads.

If they didn’t have to do that work or part of that work, like you said, they could watch the game. Maybe they’re also helping coach, right? Depending on the team and give, give those people more time to coach, to help the kids work with the kids as opposed to doing some of this administrative stuff. So we take that off your plate.

The more and more we get to fully automation, fully automated there, the more time you’re going to have. And we love that. And by the way, I want to say, I mean, you are the prototypical, like amazing all star GameChanger, parent coach. You teach kids, you coach them, you’re doing all this stuff as a parent.

You are, and I’m not just saying this because we’re on the show, you are why we get up in the morning every day, right? Kids but the effort that you’re putting in to help your kids, help other people’s kids, help your community is evident. I mean that, we talk about this stuff at the office all the time.

We have a good number of people who didn’t play sports growing up, aren’t super passionate, but they’re passionate about the community, which could be your family community, could be your broader community. And you’re living that every day. So thank you for everything you do. It really is what inspires us and what’s going to keep us going to build more cool things for everyone.

[00:27:09] Mike Klinzing: So beyond the AI piece, which I know, again, I think anybody who looks out. across the landscape and looks into the future. I don’t think there’s any doubt that eventually it’s going to get to the point where the technology is going to allow you, like I said earlier, to just set up the camera and it’s going to be able to collect all those statistics automatically.

When you guys get to that point, who knows, but I definitely can see where that’s coming. What are some other things that you guys are looking at thinking about as you go ahead in the future? I don’t want you to give away all your trade secrets, but just what are you guys thinking about here as you move forward?

[00:27:39] Sameer Ahuja: We’re really excited to mention a few minutes ago, this athlete profile, call it like your resume. We see these kids and it isn’t for some of them, look, it’s going to be, maybe they want to get recruited, get a scholarship. We’re going to be able to put in one place. We already are in one place, all your highlight clips, all your stats for all of your seasons.

And maybe that sounds simple and we can build software around it. But what we’ve heard from parents, from families is the amount of time they’re spending doing that offline. So we’re taking a lot of burden off of them. They’re spending hours and hours. And in some cases, a lot of money, like you said, maybe there’s someone coming in and videotaping and you’re paying them a lot of money.

That all goes away with this profile. And using our product. And by the way, we build everything for everyone, not just for like an elite player or elite group of players. We’re hearing from families that younger kids, maybe kids who aren’t ever going to be you know, playing college or something that are really excited about their profile, it’s no different than maybe a report card or some other thing that you get, and it’s a way to showcase and feel proud of what you’ve done.

And it could be a kid that just wants to play a sport cause they never did. And they’re not looking to do something that’s going to make it into the headlines. They just want to get better fit improve physically, improve mentally. You still want them to celebrate with their family, with their friends, what they’ve accomplished.

And we can do that with this profile. That’s really, really exciting for us. And then the other thing, like I said, is just deep deepening our functionality and in other sports after we feel like we’ve really made a huge step forward in basketball. And again, I’m very excited about volleyball, very excited about flag football.

We get requests all the time to do stuff in other sports, and then even the more individual type sport, the racket sports, running, swimming, there’s probably something to be done there down the road.

[00:29:38] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, probably. I think what’s interesting with the profile is two things stood out to me about what you said.

One is, when you think about all the youth sports, you think about the youth sports that you played, or you think about the youth sports that I played. And again, obviously a different era. People when we were kids were not carrying around a camera in their pocket to be able to film things the way that parents do, even if they’re not using GameChanger or some other app.

Their parents are still pulling out those phones and videotaping and Being able to see their kids far more than you or I ever saw ourselves on video. But at the same time, I think a lot of youth sports, it does disappear into the ether. That game is over and there isn’t a record of the statistics from that game.

There isn’t a record of who won or lost. There isn’t a video capture of that kid playing it. And so to me, I think there’s tremendous value for parents to be able to have that. And then I think even as an adult, looking back, I’m like, man, I wish I had some video of me when I was playing. I have some video of me when I was in high school.

I have some video of me when I was in college, but I don’t have any video of me playing when I was in fourth grade or fifth grade or sixth grade. I think it’d be funny to go back and watch that with my own kids when they were that age. And again, all that stuff disappears when you don’t have something like GameShader.

So to me, I like the idea of that profile of, Hey, I’ve got some statistics. I’ve got this video that I can then look back and reflect on those memories. That’s, I think an important part of it. And then you talked a little bit about the resume for colleges, for a player who eventually might want to be able to play in college.

And I know there’s some companies out there that are working on that same thing with different grassroots AAU organizations to collect that data and then to be able to share that with colleges or even go so far as to share that with professional teams of like, hey, here’s how this player is performing in these tournaments against other top players and that kind of thing. And so I think there’s a value there obviously for the player, but then there’s also a value for a college to be able to have access to that data. And so I’m sure that’s something from a business standpoint that you guys are thinking about. How can you take all the data that you’re collecting, which obviously that’s one of the things that the app allows you to do.

And then how can you turn that around and be able to, who wants that data? How can you make sure that you’re getting it to people that would want it, need it, and then also obviously getting it to the people who are the end users of your product, the parents and players and grandparents, all the people that you’ve already talked about.

[00:32:11] Sameer Ahuja: There’s no question there’s that interest on the baseball side. Obviously, we’re bigger there. We established a really exciting landmark partnership with Major League Baseball around kind of co marketing and growing the game. There’s so much interest. The 50 top MLB prospects in the MLB draft this year, all were on teams on GameChanger.

And so there’s this connectivity all the way from kids starting out in kindergarten through the pros, whether you’re going to be a fan or in very, very few cases a professional player it’s an ecosystem, it’s a world. We’re looking to kind of build that similar ecosystem in basketball and in other sports eventually.

[00:32:51] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Now you’ve got to build the algorithm that tells people who to draft. Then you really got something. Now you’ve set up the dream right there. That’s

[00:32:59] Sameer Ahuja: That’s right. Well it’s actually kind of doable, right? You can do a lot of predictive stuff with this data.

[00:33:07] Mike Klinzing: It is kind of crazy when you think about it. And I know obviously ever since the history of professional sports, drafting players has clearly been one of the most challenging aspects of running a professional sports team. You can have players in every sport that you think, Hey, this guy is a can’t miss prospect He misses.

And conversely, you can have guys that nobody saw coming that end up making it. And sometimes when you start thinking about the data and you just think about how analytical we all are about everything. And the fact that we haven’t completely cracked that, obviously it tells you that there’s a lot of human factors involved that maybe are not at this point.

In the technology are not measurable, but I would guess that as this technology continues to progress and you guys and other people continue to work on this problem that we’re going to become more and more accurate in our ability to predict again, as you collect more data, you think about you have what, probably five, six, seven years of data at this point and five, six, seven years from now, the amount, the amount of data points that you’re going to have then to be able to pinpoint these things.

I can just see the value in that moving forward.

[00:34:19] Sameer Ahuja: There’s no question. I mean, we think we already have more video of sporting events than we have video streams of maybe 4 million games. That’s more than I think anyone else. I mean, every month, like in the spring, almost 300,000 games or more are on our platform.

And that’s more games than have been played in the history of major league baseball, or every two months, we have more games than have been played by all the pro leagues in the US combined. So that the scale now youth and pro is different level of skill, of course, and experience, but the scale of data that we have, video, stats. It’s just staggering.

[00:35:00] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I can only imagine. All right, Sameer, before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share how people can find out more about GameChanger, how they can connect with you, connect with the app, just give us all the lowdown about where people can find it. And then after you do that, I will jump back in and wrap things up.

[00:35:16] Sameer Ahuja: Absolutely. So you can find out a lot more about GameChanger on our website. It’s really easy, GC.com. You can go to the app store, Android Play Store and download the app. As I said, you can download it now. It’s free to use. You can do baseball, softball, you can do basketball, check out our new features.

And I always say this and I mean it if you’re passionate about what we’re doing you’re interested in what you’re doing, whether you might want to use the product, maybe you want to talk about working with us, reach out to me directly. I respond to everyone. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Just reach out and give us your thoughts. If you have a product, you’re using the product, you have feedback. I would absolutely love to hear it directly. I just want us to all to be able to take all of the amazing things about youth sports and what we do for kids forward as a group.

[00:36:09] Mike Klinzing: It’s well said. I can honestly say that anybody out there in our audience who is coaching a team in any sport that GameChanger is involved in, but obviously particularly for us basketball, you should get on it. You should use it. Get your team on it. Like I said, my experience with it this past AAU season was honestly incredible, like I’ve said a couple of times here on the pod, if you’d told me two or three years ago that I’d have been able to do the things that we were able to do on the app with video, with statistics, all doing that in real time. I would have told you you were crazy. So again, kudos to you and your team, Sameer. You guys are doing a fantastic job. To everyone out there, go out and  get the app, get GameChanger. And we appreciate you listening and we will catch you on our next episode.  Thanks.

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