ZACK ODELL – FOUNDER OF XCIV.ai – EPISODE 1312

Website –  https://xciv.ai/

Email – [email protected]

Twitter/X – @XCIVAI

Zack Odell is the Founder of XCIV.ai  A tool built for high school, middle school, and AAU coaches.  Using XCIV coaches upload film, box scores, or play diagrams. XCIV.AI builds your scouting reports, game plans, and practice schedules.

On this episode Mike & Zack discuss how XCIV.ai can help basketball coaches organize stats, scouting, and player development. Zack shares how keeping box scores and notes for his daughter inspired him to build a tool that turns game data and film observations into searchable scouting insights. He explains how coaches can use those insights to identify opponent tendencies, plan practices, and assign targeted training, such as a four-week free-throw program. The discussion also highlights the importance of coach feedback and human review so recommendations fit each team’s philosophy rather than replacing coaching judgment. Zack’s broader goal is to make practical coaching support more accessible, especially for smaller programs with limited staff and resources.

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Be sure to grab pen and paper as you listen to this episode with Zack Odell, Founder of XCIV.ai

What We Discuss with Zack Odell

10 Key Takeaways for Basketball Coaches

1. Keep a searchable record of what your team and opponents do.

Scouting notes are much more useful when they can be revisited later. In the episode, Zack describes wanting to look up what an opponent did on a baseline out-of-bounds play in a previous season, especially when the same players and tendencies remain. Build a season-to-season archive instead of leaving notes in scattered folders.

2. Turn film observations into specific, usable tendencies.

Don’t stop at “they’re a good team.” Record actionable details: for example, whether a player on the left block tends to turn right or left, or what an opponent runs on a baseline out-of-bounds play. Zack describes tagging tendencies while watching film so they become part of a team’s ongoing scouting record.

3. Use statistics to sharpen what your eyes are telling you.

The episode’s example of reviewing box scores after playing the same team multiple times shows how numbers can help frame a game plan. Look at turnovers, plus-minus, player efficiency, shooting, and foul patterns, but treat them as evidence to investigate, not as automatic answers.

4. Scout your own team as deliberately as you scout opponents.

Zack describes using team data to identify who is shooting free throws well, who is consistently in foul trouble, and how a player’s efficiency has changed over the last five games or the season. These patterns can guide lineup decisions, individual feedback, and practice priorities.

5. Connect a measured weakness to a focused development plan.

If a player is struggling from the line, make the next step concrete: Zack gives the example of assigning a four-week free-throw program, then checking whether the player’s percentage improved, declined, or stayed the same. Track the intervention and the result so development is more than a vague instruction to “get better.”

6. Make practice plans respond to the team’s needs and constraints.

Practice should reflect what the team needs to work on and the time available. In the episode, Zack explains that a coach can request a one-hour practice before a big game, choose drills such as rebounding or free throws, and remove or replace suggestions. The takeaway: plan with a purpose, then adapt the plan to the day.

7. Keep the coach in control of recommendations.

Technology can help organize data and propose plans, but it should not replace a coach’s judgment. Zack emphasizes reviewing AI-generated practice plans and editing anything that does not fit. Apply the same discipline to any scouting or analytics recommendation: check it against your film, your players, and your coaching philosophy.

8. Make scouting easier to share, and safer to manage.

The episode describes a coach’s concern that printed reports or play diagrams could be left behind. A digital workflow can let staff share information with players and revoke access later. Whether you use paper or digital tools, think about who needs the scouting information, how they’ll use it, and how to avoid losing control of it.

9. Start collecting useful data in the format you already have.

Don’t wait for perfectly organized statistics. Zack says the system can process sources such as a photo of a box score, a spreadsheet, a document, or a game-stat export, with the coach reviewing the parsed information. For your own program, begin with the records you can reliably collect and verify them before using them to make decisions.

10. Build feedback and review into the process.

A scouting report or training plan should be tested against what actually happens. Zack describes asking coaches for candid feedback and revising features based on how they use them. Coaches can apply that same cycle: try a plan, observe the outcome, ask players and staff what worked, and adjust the next practice or game plan.

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THANKS, ZACK ODELL

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TRANSCRIPT FOR ZACK ODELL – FOUNDER OF XCIV.ai – EPISODE 1312

[00:00:00] Narrator: The Hoop Heads Podcast is presented by Head Start Basketball.

[00:00:20] Zack Odell: How do I get my individuality into this application? So we created a coaching style survey that says, “This is what I want in a pressure situation. If we’re down two, up two, this is what I want. We want to pressure the ball. We don’t want to pressure the ball. We want to foul. We don’t want to foul.” How long are your practices?

What are the segments? What does it look like? You go through that, you click okay, and then everything is kind of tailored around your individual style.

[00:00:47] Mike Klinzing: Zack Odell is the founder of XCIV.ai, a tool built for high school, middle school, and AAU coaches. Using 94Feet, coaches upload film, box scores, or play diagrams.

XCIV.ai builds your scouting reports, game plans, and practice schedules. Ever since I founded Head Start Basketball in 1993, we’ve helped young players develop their skills, confidence, and love for the game. Now we’re partnering with coaches and athletic programs to bring the Head Start Basketball camp experience to new communities.

Our camps run for five days, three hours per day, and serve boys and girls in grades one through six. You or someone on your staff directs the on-court portion of the camp while Head Start Basketball manages registration, promotion, parent communication, T-shirts, trophies, website setup, and administration.

There are no upfront camp planning headaches, and the profits are divided 50/50 between your program and Head Start Basketball. If you want to reach more families or strengthen your youth basketball pipeline or just create additional revenue for your program, visit headstartbasketball.com to explore hosting a camp.

[00:01:53] Pascal Meurs: Hi, this is Coach Pascal Meurs from Belgium, and you’re listening to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

[00:02:01] Mike Klinzing: Be sure to grab pen and paper as you listen to this episode with Zack Odell, founder of XCIV.ai Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here tonight without my co-host Jason Sunkle, but I am pleased to welcome in Zack Odell, the founder of XCIV.ai.

I had to do a little translation. Zack and I had to figure it out. We got some Roman numerals going. Great name, Zack. I have to say, congratulations on the creativity for that. Give us the layout of how you get to the idea of putting this whole thing together, and welcome.

[00:02:39] Zack Odell: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, t- first off thanks for having me, and I certainly appreciate putting this together, just taking a look at all of the things you guys have done.

It’s it’s fantastic. I’ll just give you a little origin story. Everybody likes the the origin story, and how it started all for me and where I landed up is simply XCIV, 94 Feet. Everything happens within a basketball court 94 feet. And a long time ago I was playing bitty basketball, 1981.

Everybody can say throwing it old school all the way to 1992, and my career ended. My basketball the game of competitive basketball where people actually keep score and records ended. And I wanted to do everything I could to stay connected, pickup hoops coaching my kids basketball even going so far as to become certified to ref basketball.

And obviously in every different phase, you’re a player, you can do no wrong you’re a coach, and then now you’re trying to lead and mentor and do things to help develop players. And then certainly as a referee, it’s a different level of scrutiny maybe not by your coach, but by, everybody in the stands.

And as things progress, my family gets bigger and my family gets busier. I can’t ref. And so I’m looking for ways to stay connected to the game and my my youngest daughter, who’s a junior in high school, has been playing basketball for, several years. And we have a tradition.

I inherited this from my grandparents. They kept box scores. They kept programs from every game that I was ever in. I have I actually have the, my senior handout from when I graduated- That’s good stuff … high school. And bottom line is they gave this to me at the end of every season.

They gave me a little packet, and they g- had little notes and little stories, and you did good here, and should’ve used your left there or whatever. And so I wanted to continue that with my daughter, and we started building this spreadsheet, is really what it was. I was keeping box scores, and I used Excel to create a graph.

And we talked about the end of the season, and we built a little bit more the next season. And last year I was needing to finish the end of year, her end of her sophomore year, and she looked at me, and she’s like, “There– It seems like there should be something more. Maybe there’s something else out here.”

So I did a little bit of programming. I do have some– a little bit of background in, in programming and computers. That’s… My formal degree is in computer science and did a little bit of research and started building something that wasn’t just a spreadsheet. And through a couple of revisions and a couple of ooh, maybe I should talk to her coach and talk to her coach and visit with what would be helpful for you.

And a couple of other conversations with some state association Indiana and Missouri and talking about what would be valuable for their coaches and Getting to a point where we launched XCIV, which again, ninety-four feet on basically April 1. But I like to kind of say it’s April the 7th.

That was my fifty-second birthday, and I said, “You know what? I’m going to go public,” because who doesn’t want that accountability? Like I want… You want people to hold you accountable, whether it’s to whatever goal. Whatever goal you set in life, you want people to hold you accountable to that goal. And so that’s what I was doing on my fifty-second birthday, is announcing that this guy who has been involved with sports, basketball specifically for, the better part of his entire life can’t play it anymore because my knees won’t take it, or my hips won’t take it, or I’ll dislocate my shoulder or blow my ACL or whatever.

I wanted to stay as connected as possible to the game and as a byproduct of that, thinking about the things that my daughter’s coach would talk about or that I would hear, I don’t have the money. We don’t have the resources for five people. We o- we have m- the head coach and another teacher who’s an assistant and then maybe a student manager, and they don’t have the resources.

Hudl works great for video recording and those types of things, but they were just struggling with struggling with what to do after they watched the film. They would take notes, pa- packets of notes and type ’em up and then print ’em off and hand ’em out and share ’em out. But at the end of the season, what did you do with it?

You put ’em in a folder, and then you would have to go back and look at it. And we’re like what if we just kept a repository where you could search up? I want to see what we did against Goodland two years ago,” because they have the same players. There’s not a lot of player transition here, right?

You start as a freshman. Generally speaking, unless you move, you’re going to graduate, and you’re going to have the same tendencies, so the scouting is all the same as you go through freshman to sophomore to junior to senior. And so what would it look like if you had this repository to be able to go like, “What does Goodland do on a baseline out of bounds down two?”

And you could have that in this AI brain to query and go like, “I’m going to game plan about that. How do I build a defense? How do I… Am I– Should I be in zone out of bounds? Man to man? What’s it look like?” So we build all of this stuff, and we launch it, and I was just like, I had a goal But before the start of the school year, I wanted 25 customers, and the response was absolutely ridiculous, and I had to reassess my goal and said, “Okay, what’s the new goal?” And the new goal was more than that and we blew that out through summer ball and, at least here in Kansas when I went to school, we didn’t have a such thing as summer ball.

We went to the park and we played. Now you get out of track, you get a couple weeks off, summer ball starts, basketball, volleyball, you pick it, and, these, these coaches are wanting to assess what their team’s going to look like in the fall. And we launched that. We have a very large tournament here in Colby called the Oasis Shootout, and they bring in about 36 teams from Colorado, Nebraska Kansas obviously.

As far away as I think we had a team from South Dakota here this year, and they’re just doing circuits, right? Travel. And so I was able to visit with coaches during that time and every time I set a goal, which is a good thing I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response of “Oh my gosh, there’s really something here.”

And been able to kind of iterate the product, which is all about innovation is iteration. You can’t be satisfied because, it’s like, what did you do for me yesterday? It’s like, what did the app do today? And so we’ve done a lot of revisions and additions to the application over, geez, what’s really from let’s just go April 7th to October 7th, so six months, we’ve gone through several revisions.

So that’s how we landed here, which is a lot of words and a lot of me talking.

[00:09:09] Mike Klinzing: No, it’s perfect ’cause it gives me a sense of kind of what the process was. So I want to dive into it a little bit deeper. So-

[00:09:16] Zack Odell: Sure …

[00:09:16] Mike Klinzing: first thing you hold up is your old basically statistics book- Yeah … right? That you got handed.

Yeah. I have one that looks very similar. My high school was green, so mine had a green, a light green paper. I still can picture. We were the Mustangs. There’s a Mustang on it. It’s somewhere in a box, I think in my house somewhere.

[00:09:36] Zack Odell: Yeah.

[00:09:36] Mike Klinzing: But it has all those same statistics that I’m sure yours has.

Yeah. So that’s the first iteration. Yep. Then you being a tech guy, you put together for your daughter, you’re building the spreadsheet, you’ve got tracking her over years. Yep. So now you’ve got this one set of data, right? It’s pretty limited, but you have a set of data. So how do you go from those two things?

Obviously, with your tech background, you have some idea of what’s happening, and people out there who have used AI know to some degree the capability that it has. Every time I do something with any form of AI, Zack, I’m always… It comes back, I’m like, “Oh my God this is unbelievable. I can’t believe that it can do whatever it is that I ask it to do.”

So how do you take it from I have this data from my daughter or maybe even- Yeah … my daughter’s team to-

[00:10:28] Zack Odell: Yeah …

[00:10:28] Mike Klinzing: I can extrapolate that into something bigger using AI. I- Talk to me about the mental process of going, going-

[00:10:34] Zack Odell: Absolutely. I will give you the exact… I can paint this picture because it is as clear as the day is long.

We played a team this year 25 into 26 season. We played a team three times. Twice in the regular season and once to kind of continue the season in regionals to get to sub-state. And the first time we played the team we got boat raced. The– it did not work out well. And the second time we played them it was a little bit better, and we were getting ready to play them again to go on to the next, to sub-state.

And I thought, I have all of the box scores,” or she does. Because Hudl does a really good job of taking the video and, putting it into the stats. I was able to review those stats, and I said, “Okay, if I was the coach, what would I do with this information?” And so I literally took the stat-statistics, the box scores, the plus, minus, the turnovers, player efficiency rating, all of those things, and I said, “I watched these games.”

The m- the, the XCIV doesn’t do video. It is a… We like to say that is, it is a Hudl is video and XCIV is the coaching intelligence, the coaching AI piece of it. And so literally I sat there and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to put all of this stuff in a spreadsheet, and then I’m going to put it into OpenAI.”

And I literally posted it. I’m like, “Create me a game plan for this.” And it spit out a pretty good thing. I’m like, “Wait a second.” And that was, like, the moment that I’m like, “Whoa, wait. What if I had all of the season What if I had all of their season? What if I had everything from two years ago? Because we played them, I think six times, seven times in two years.

I’m like, “What if you had all of that?” And I was like, “Oh, there’s something there.” And I’m like just continually thinking if you had this information, what could you do with it? And clearly, a coach could conceivably go to ChatGPT, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, whatever it is, and start typing and typing, and they’d have to keep that record, and they’d have to store that data, and they’d have to do something with it.

They could do that, but I put a front end on the… I put a front end to it and said, “Okay, let’s make it easy for the coach.” We don’t want complexity, we want simplicity. And so how can we make it easy for the coach or the assistant or the student manager or whomever to crank through the video and do the video scouting, and then while they’re doing it, go in and go to the opponent and say, “Number twenty-two, when they’re in the post on the left block, they’re going to go right or they’re going to go left.”

And you can… it’s all filled out. You just start clicking buttons. You’re watching the film. And then at the end, you click Save, and then you have that for the entire season. And so that’s how we ended up with the very first true version. And then talking with coaches, they’re like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be better if we could do this?”

And I’m like, “Yeah. You know what? You’re right.” So I’m like, “Okay, get back to coding, get back to coding, get back to coding. What do you think about this?” “That looks great.” “What about that?” I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” So really the coaches Played a really integral part in the evolution of the digital piece of this.

So you’re right. All the way back from the Mustangs, we were the Chieftains. We had– I’ve got the black and gold things for four years. It went from there to spreadsheets, from spreadsheets to graphs, from graphs to, a, a simple what would I do if I was the coach type situation to this, and this is where we’re at today.

[00:14:13] Mike Klinzing: All right. So tell me, maybe I’m not smart enough to figure this out, but how are you scraping all that data? Is that something that is being done by- So- … your system? Explain to me how you g- how you’re getting the data for each team as a coach is going through their huddle film. How do you go grab that data?

[00:14:32] Zack Odell: So that’s a really great question, and each state is slightly different. In Kansas, the, the Kansas State High School Athletics Association, w- the… I don’t, KH or KS, I can’t exactly count on if it’s Kansas High School or Kansas State High School. But bottom line is they don’t require they don’t require coaches to upload anything into like MaxPreps or anything along those lines.

Or I think there’s other states like maybe Indiana or Iowa, they use Bound or something to that degree where they are required to upload these statistics. So in those particular cases, those statistics exist and coaches all they have to do is screenshot it, print it off, and then drop it in the system.

So we don’t have the ability to go do that because of copyright information, but the coach can do whatever they want with their own information. For Kansas specifically and like I said, I’m not exactly sure how Ohio does theirs. But in Kansas the coach essentially exports their Hudl information, and they import it.

I, I have a a little dialogue where you can upload a JPEG. If you’re at a ball game and you just take a picture of the box score, you can upload that. You can take the Hudl export. You can take an Excel document. You can take a Word document. You can take any type of document, upload it, and then the AI parses that information for, y- number, name, position, ties it to a program, those types of things, and then it just marries that data.

And then the coach says, this is… It says 100% accurate, 99% accurate, review and accept, and then it’s uploaded and part of the record.

[00:16:14] Mike Klinzing: Got it. Makes sense. And again, that helps to clarify for me, if I’m a coach trying to understand what’s the process for how do I go from, “Hey, I want to use the service,” to, “Okay, where does the data come from?”

That helps me to understand that, which is very clear. Let me ask

[00:16:29] Zack Odell: you this- Yeah, I would love nothing more for all state associations to require the high schools to upload their data. Speaking very personally I’ve been… I mentioned my daughter playing sports and volleyball.

I would love to see where she stacks up in the state against blocks. I c- I can’t see that because it’s, there’s no requirement. I can see what other schools report, but not specifically. So I would love for all of them to standardize because it would make my job easier. It would make the coach’s job easier, to be honest.

Yeah. But I think if they h- if– I think if they feel like they can hold a little back, they’ve got a little edge. But they know, right? Like they, they got their informal scouting network, right? They know a guy who knows a guy who knows a girl So they get their scouting report somehow, some way. So yeah, I would love for it to be standardized.

[00:17:19] Mike Klinzing: That’s funny. I was having a conversation with my son today who’s a junior in college, and we were somehow just talking about statistics or whatever, and he was telling me that at some point he remembers when he was first enrolling as a freshman and meeting his roommate for the first time, who also was a basketball player, and they were talking about…

His roommate was telling him, “Yeah, I averaged such and such points a game, and I was this, and I had this record.” And then my son was like, “Yeah, our team, we didn’t really keep stats. We never saw anything in four years. Like of- we, we had nothing.” Yeah. So he’s like, “I couldn’t tell him, I, I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t tell him anything.”

So- … to think about this and just being able to have access to it, again, tremendous value. So tell me the feedback initially from the very first iteration of the product. Once you put it in front of coaches, what were the aspects of it that they liked? What didn’t they like, and what did they want to have added?

[00:18:15] Zack Odell: Yeah. I’ll s- I’ll start with the most concerning feedback. The– I, I was on the phone with w- a coach in the Midwest and he had, We’ll just say he had a lot of experience and m- maybe very comfortable in his current process. And h- the, the response was how dare you do this and take coaches’ jobs?”

I’m like no. No. I– Look, I’m not… I don’t want to replace a coach. This is not to replace a coach. This is not going to be on the court. Like I promise you that there’s no way that what I’m doing is going to… Like it’s meant to get you on the court more quickly. Like that’s what it’s designed to do.”

So I did have some init- a coup- one or two coaches that were like, “Nah, this isn’t for me,” and I respect that. I absolutely respect that just like any other thing out there, right? Like there’s still people out there that are like, “You know what? Cell- the smartphones, not for me. Give me the flip phone. Give me the Motorola StarTAC.

I want to be that guy,” right? Cool. That’s fine. I don’t want to force this on anybody. So there, there was some initial feedback of absolutely not, cool. But the positive comments of so I had a coach who would say that they would watch the film, they would write stuff down in a notebook, and then they would take the notebook, and then they would type it up, and then they would print it off, and then they would hand it out to their team.

And they were, they were fearful that the scouting report or the, the play diagrams would be left behind, and so the other team would get a copy of it. I think did- didn’t we see something with Colorado University and Deion Sanders- Yes … and something being left at a, at a- Yeah … hotel, at a hotel or something?

I, we don’t… I don’t know the specifics behind it, but you can imagine. And he’s like it would be fantastic if I could watch the film and scout it while I was watching the film. Never have to print anything out. I could literally share it from the application to the players and then revoke it, and then you would never have a physical copy laying around.”

That’s fantastic. I love that idea. Let’s incorporate it. Now we still have the print option Fine. That’s cool. And the had another conversation with a coach who had a, a little bit larger of a staff, a little bit larger of a program. I think it was a 5A school, so I think he had head coach, JV coach C team, and a a freshman team, but I think C team and ninth graders or freshmen maybe are interchangeable a lot.

But he’s like, “I want to be able to have these guys and gals have access to it.” So I’m like what if we created a staff plan where we would– you could create the entire program and then bifurcate your individual teams off of that?” Fantastic idea. So we create that ability to do that. So a larger school who has four teams, we can do that, and you can say we have varsity information with bo- varsity rosters, varsity training programs, varsity records.

JV same way, C team same way, freshmen same way. And so it just was a ground swell as you… Again, I think you don’t know what you don’t know, and so you really didn’t know until I pressed go and honestly, my, my daughter’s coach was the first person I shared this with. I’m like, “Hey, I would love for to get your feedback,” and he’s it took him a while, and I was like, I know my, my initial reaction was, and he gave me some really great feedback. He said, “I would love to see tendencies.” Okay, so let’s build that in. “I would love to be able to do this.” Okay, let’s build this in. And some of those early conversations was more like, “Oh my God, why didn’t I think of that?”

I was in my bubble, right? And then there’s some things that I’ve built that don’t get a lot of use. I have a feature called Chalkboard. ‘Cause I was like, oh, what if, what if players were able to actually watch the play develop in real time? Say you, let’s just, you say you’re running a motion offense, five out, whatever, and you see the ball and you got the players moving around and everything else.

Wouldn’t that be cool? I’m like, “Yeah, that would be really cool.” And so I build it and I’m like, everybody’s like I don’t know. I don’t really like-” That took a lot of time to do it. I was like, it felt like a gut punch, and I’m like, “But it’s cool, man. It’s cool.” And they’re like, “Eh.” So there are things that I’ve spent time on that is just it’s like a wet towel just hitting the floor, and you’re like, “Oh that didn’t work like I thought it would.”

But by and large, the feedback that I’ve received from the coaches have been great. They I think one of the greatest things was as you finish the season, it’s like almost gamification. You’re going to close that season, you get a reward, you’ve closed the season, and you’re ready to roll in.

You still have all of that historical information from your freshman year all the way to your senior year. And one of the things I really want to do is to be able to take these products for the kids, for the players, and should they want to, try to play at the next level, whether that’s JUCO, D3, D2, D1, what– NAIA, you pick it, that they have a almost a pre-built statistic thing to hand over to that, that coach and say, “This is what I did.

Th-this was what I was able to accomplish over a four-year period.” And the– one of the things that we’ve done is allow… we allow our coaches to be able to assign specific training programs. If someone is struggling at the free throw line, we say “Hey you’re shooting thirty-seven percent from the free throw line.

We need you to get better. We’re going to give you a four-week training program,” and it assigns it to the kid. The kid accepts it and says, “Okay, cool.” And then the coach can say on, October the seventh, “I assigned this free throw training program for four weeks. Let’s watch the progress. Did it get better?

Did it get worse? Did it stay the same?” And then you can say “I did this training program, cool, and here are the results.” And you can turn that over as part of your, like your packet, for lack of a better word.

[00:24:12] Mike Klinzing: So tell me how that player development piece, where does that come from? So if somebody wants a free throw program- Yeah

where does that come from? Or if I have a player who is going to work on ball handling, where do those drill– where’s the bank of drills? Where does that come from? S-

[00:24:27] Zack Odell: yeah. So I went and scraped through several hundred YouTube videos and put a repository, a database of certain things, whether it’s ball handling, whether it’s free throw, whether it’s form shooting blocking out pr- how to handle pressure, how to take a charge, how not to take a charge , whatever, like all of those things.

And so I went through and looked on, on, on YouTube. And so what happens is when we say the coach says, “You need to work on free throws for the next however long,” we go out and we scrape through all of those free throw videos, and we put together a plan, deliver it to the player and it…

You can– The player can literally, if the coach isn’t available, the player can literally go and click a into the training program, click a link, and watch a YouTube video on this particular thing. Now, what I– my advice to every coach is you should probably look through this yourself because you may not agree with some of these things.

And that’s one of, I think, one of the things that I heard from a, a coach in Iowa. She was telling me that, “How do I get my individuality into this application?” So we created a coaching style survey that says “This is what I want in a pressure situation. If we’re down two, up two, this is what I want.

We want to pressure the ball. We don’t want to pressure the ball. We want to foul. We don’t want to foul.” How long are your practices? What are the segments? What does it look like? You go through that, you click OK, and then everything is kind of tailored around your individual style.

[00:25:52] Mike Klinzing: So in other words, the player development side, which you just described in terms of pulling out video, pulling out drills, pulling out ideas.

When you talk about a practice plan for the player, which is one of the- … for the team, which is one of the things that your service provides, and it’s broken out in segments. So I got 15 minutes of this drill, 20 minutes of this drill, whatever. Yeah. And obviously those are probably based upon the tendencies that- Sure

Within games. But again, those… Explain to me how those drills get to, from in your database to, “Hey, that’s what this team should be working on.” And then when a coach goes in there and looks at it, what can they see as they’re pulling that practice plan out?

[00:26:33] Zack Odell: Yeah. Without getting too terribly deep in the weeds, to be able to do that, you do have to rely on some very what they call large language models to be able to contextualize what you’re typing in there.

You go out and you’re querying through the software you’re querying a large language model that says, “These are the things that I want in practice.” It’s going through and looking at thousands of records of what coaches have done in the past and being able to come in and say, “This is what the game– or this is what the practice plan should look like.”

Coach has 100% control of that. I want this. I don’t want this. Substitute this for that, and it’s iterative a little bit. I f- what I’ve found is once they kind of get into a rhythm, they know what they’re looking for. They know that they want to run, y- a three-man weave or a five-man weave, or they want to run, rebounding drills, or they want to run free throw shooting.

They want to run lines and then go to free throw shooting. They know what they want. And so you really get to mix and match and say “No, I don’t want this. Delete this,” and it, and you get an option to pull something back in or delete it altogether. We only want an hour practice ’cause we got a big game tomorrow.

You get to tell the software kind of what it is, and then it just goes out and starts pulling all of this information in. Coach reviews it always. You– Kind of the philosophy, you always want a human in the loop. That’s like an AI situation where you’re not just blindly trusting. You want a coach in the loop.

You want them to review it. You want them to say, “This makes sense. Accept. Nope, I don’t like this. We’re going to delete this and pull this in.” And so you always have that, that iterative process. And again, what I’ve found is, in just looking at kind of the software and the usage statistics, is once a coach is in there for, I don’t know two, three, four days with, with some fair amount of usage the amount of AI calls gets lower and lower because they’re getting more familiar with the software.

It’s just like anything else. Once you get the feel for it, you know what you’re going to be asking for and what you should be looking for. So it really boils down to the coach being able to say in plain words, this is what I’m looking for, and then that soft– it, it kicks it off to a large language model that says, okay, we’re going to pull all of this stuff in.

We’ve trained a little bit of data to say this is where we want to look at and try to incorporate. We’re not going to try to bring in international stuff to, to the American, Americanized basketball versus international basketball type stuff, so I don’t know if that answers your question directly, but- It

[00:29:01] Mike Klinzing: does.

No, it does. It, it certainly does. And I think what– when I again, looked at what you sent me, both from the scouting report standpoint- Sure … the practice plans- Yep … getting to see all that, and what I’m trying to understand in my mind as I’m going through and I’m looking at that is some of the questions that I’ve already asked you, which is how do you take this raw data, and then how does that become a scouting report on an opponent?

Or how is that becoming a scouting report on my own team, of what they need to work on- Yeah … and what they need to improve on from a player development standpoint. And then you talk about the practice plans. So the next question is when coaches first see it, right? And again, we’re all… When we get something new everybody’s always a little bit nervous “Ugh, I, I-” Yeah, I’m going to break

[00:29:46] Zack Odell: something.

I’m going to, I’m going to

[00:29:47] Mike Klinzing: break it. Am I– is this going to be exactly what I think it’s going to be? How accurate is it going to be, or how much is it going to be like what my eye tells me? It’s the, it’s kind of the analytics debate of you have the old school scout who- A-absolutely … “i see with my eyes, this is what I see,” but then over here, the analytics is telling me something different.

So as you’ve talked to coaches, and you don’t have to give me specifics, but- Yeah … as you’ve talked to coaches and you’re getting that feedback, what are you hearing in terms of, I don’t want to say accuracy, but in terms of them feeling like, “Hey, this feels like it was created by a coach who watched the film,” as opposed to it was created by an algorithm in an AI program, if that makes any sense.

[00:30:31] Zack Odell: It does. And to be, brutally honest with you I don’t know exactly what we’re going to see because fall ball, the major adoption, the major usage is really, 20, 30 days away. Somewhere around what I hope the first week or two in practice I might have a better answer for you.

But thinking about it from, your analytics perspective, small ball, Oakland Athletics, you hear f- you just have to watch a football game, and man, there’s more people going for it on fourth and two or fourth and three because analytics say, “Don’t kick the field goal.

Go for it,” ’cause somebody sitting back is making some really depending on your perspective, whether you made the first down or not some, some people are making some really wicked decisions on that. So I think the kind of the proof is, several weeks away. Some of the coaches that I’ve spoken to did feel like it was more rigid in, in the beginning, and that’s the introduction for the coaching style.

I thought about would you c– I almost did a true/false. Would you consider yourself more like Roy Williams, or would you consider yourself more like Bill Self, or would you consider yourself more Oh my gosh I lost Dean Smith. Who would you consider yourself like?

And then it can go query its, all of these things. But I’m like, no, l-let’s just go back to who they are and how they think and those types of things. You’re always going to have maybe 25 cent words in there, I guess we could call them, and you’re like, “Okay, maybe those things you’re like, “Okay, maybe we could do without that,” or the over, over analytics or the over-analysation of things.

Maybe we could do away with some of that. But I just don’t really have a good sense on did the coach implement the plan, or did they see the plan and they went I’m done. I think the proof will be in the pudding here in, in, in two or three weeks when fall, the fall season really kicks off.

We’ve had a couple of junior colleges recently, within 10 days or so, they’re starting to… they’re in- they’re practicing now and I’m lucky enough to have a community college here in, in the town that I live in, and I’ve been trying to convince the coaches both the, the men’s and the women’s coach to “Hey, let’s have a conversation.”

But haven’t cracked that nut yet. But I’m not giving up either. It’ll work. So I would love to and my my daughter has has informed me that I probably don’t… “Please don’t talk to my coach anymore. You’re embarrassing me enough as it is.” So like I’ve been persona non grata with the, with her team.

But the folks that I have spoke to and had conversation with, a couple in Indiana one here, one here in, in Kansas that think some of the, some of the… When you talk about scouting your own team, we created a combine that says “Okay, at the first day of practice, let’s get vertical, let’s get cone, let’s get shuffle, let’s get these types of things.”

And so we can have multiple check-ins throughout the year to say, “Are we getting better? Are we getting worse?” Scout your own team. Who’s, whatever. And as you’re uploading your own stats, you’re going to say, “Who’s most… Who’s shooting the best free throw?” It’s all sitting right there to be able who’s, who’s constantly in foul trouble.

In, in what situations are they in? Here’s the player, efficiency rating over the last five games. Here’s what it looks like over the last season. Here’s what it looks like for the entire season, or whatever it happens to be. Scouting your own team and knowing your own team is one thing, but to be able to digitize it and to be able to query it and to be able to look at it and report on it, that’s a little bit different too.

[00:33:54] Mike Klinzing: So when you’re having a team that signs up, let’s say you have a team right now that signs up for the service. They’re heading into the ’26, ’27 season. Do they immediately or do you immediately recommend to them, “Hey, go back and upload as much of your data from previous seasons- Abso- “… as you can.”

Is that part of the process?

[00:34:12] Zack Odell: Absolutely. Especially I had some AAU stuff this, this summer that we were working with. There was a a a, I would say a fairly small group of folks in Minnesota Minnesota Kings. Th- their schedule… aAU schedule or in Kansas MAYB for us in Kansas it’s a little bit different because your players change, your opponents change, the opponent’s players change.

So A- the summer stuff was a little bit- harder to kind of wrap my head around. But here recently, I was working with a– I’m trying to think of the state. Oh, yeah, it’s Morro M-O-R-R-O, Morro, Georgia. And I said, “Hey, look, if you give me last year’s stats and you give me this year’s team,” and w-w-obviously the folks who graduated, that’s not what we’re talking about.

“But, give me the stats, give me your team, and give me your first opponent, and do you have any information on those folks?” And this, this coach sent me what they had. I uploaded it, and I shared out, if you were to play them again with your current roster. Now, again, you’re making some assumptions ’cause we don’t really know the, what the current roster’s going to look like.

Are freshmen going to, take a spot? Don’t know. But here’s based on your last year’s stats, based on your last interaction with this team, here’s what the system would recommend. So putting all of that in and then sharing it out with this coach, the the coach was like immediately “Oh my gosh, this is fantastic.

W-I, I w- I want this, the staff plan, and I want to sign up, eh, as soon as the season starts.” So I’m trying… Of course, my job is to get them to sign up a little bit earlier, so that way we can lock that in. But bottom line is once they see the product, they can see the value in it, especially if their scouting is Hudl, which again, Hudl, I’m not here to, I’m not here to compete against Hudl, I’m not here to knock Hudl because they do a lot of great things.

But if you’re using it for video and you’re watching and you’re ta- you’re taking notes on your PC or you’re writing it down on a loose-leaf notebook, what are you doing with it afterwards? Why not just use it immediately? We have a voice scout where you can actually have a headphone in, and you can be almost given play-by-play.

It uploads that information, and it parses that audio and then says, “Is this what you meant?” And you’re like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant.” So once they see the work product, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is fantastic.” So I do really encourage coaches to do that, and I’ve offered, at least early on, “Let’s have 15 minutes, and I’ll get you set up.”

And it literally is like a 15 or 20-minute they send me the data, or we do a VC or a Loom or something like that, and it’s just once they see that product, they’re like, “Oh my gosh.” And the good thing is like you said, a new technology, people freak out a little bit. “Oh my God, I’m going to break it.

I’m going to break it.” Eh, it’s prob-probably a little bit of forgiving here. You’re not going to blow the system up. We might have to go back one step. That’s okay. We can figure that out. But yeah, once they get their hands on it and they get a feel for it, there, they, there’s a lot of, I’d say at least 40 to 50% that are like fish to water and there’s others that are a little bit more reluctant.

I would envision those guys never coming off of like a free plan. The free plan is the free plan. You get it, you don’t have to give a credit card you get to kick the tires, and, I would love everybody to convert. That’s not real life, and I, I’m just here to hope that there’s more that convert to a plan that don’t, and that’s the goal.

[00:37:41] Mike Klinzing: There… It’s amazing to me. I think the part that blows my mind more than anything about this is the fact that I can take that data in so many different forms- … and you can collect it, whether it’s audio, whether it’s a Word doc, whether it’s a JPEG- Yeah … whether it’s whatever, a, an Excel spreadsheet, and that you can take all those different formats and still be able to scrape the data cleanly from them and then create…

So again, that’s obviously very technical, but to me that’s an amazing piece of f-

I’ll give you- ‘Cause you think about it in the past, it’s always like- Yeah … it’s have to be in this exact perfect

[00:38:18] Zack Odell: form or it won’t. Yeah, dude, it’s like the box score, it- Yeah, … the columns have to be, and the rows- Yep

or yeah, the rows and the columns. I can’t remember if I was horizontal or vertical. But let me blow your mind on on that in, in kind of that vein. Sure. The first is I had a coach from Arkansas took a picture of a, It was, it’s like a crumpled up eight and a half by 11, and he’s like, “Can you do something with this?”

I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I mean- … let me try.” And so it took a little bit of manipulation, and it, the error rate was higher than I would’ve liked, but it was like three quarters, 75, 77% accurate. So the coach would be able to go in and goes, “It’s not S-M-T-H-I, it’s S-M-I-T-H. It’s not seven points, it’s eight,” or whatever it is.

[00:39:02] Mike Klinzing: Yeah.

[00:39:02] Zack Odell: And so there was some error correction that needed to be done, and so I was really impressed that the s- the AI was able to parse that and be able to go like, “Oh, you got pretty dang good,” to be honest with you. The other part that is really fantastic and I I neg- neglected to mention this when we spoke the other day, but I created an app called Courtside which is just a electronic stat tracker.

It allows you to be at the game taking the stats electronically, and then at the end if you’re a subscriber to XCIV, you hit submit and it literally pushes all of that data right to the system 25, 30 seconds as long as you got a good internet connection. So as long as- Yeah … you have the app and you’re scouting that- Now, or excuse me, statting that, not scouting, statting that, you’re going to get the box scores 25 seconds after the game ends.

That’s pretty cool, I thought. I’ve asked parents to be like, “Hey, can– what if we just a- what if we just open source stat tracking? What would that look like? What if every parent,” not every, ’cause that’s ridiculous, “but what if five parents in the stands used this app and they scored a game? How would we know what was right?”

There would have to be some sort of sanity check, but man, wouldn’t it be cool if every state you had a, a ground swell of students or coaches or student managers or parents taking stats, and then you just had this repository of stats where, to your point, how do you get the data? The, the fans and the students and everybody else is stat tracking it.

So I did create that app, and it’s designed to feed directly into it for up from a school to their XCID account. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.

[00:40:38] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it’s very cool. Think back to, again, who are the people that created your yellow stat book, right? It was- Yeah … mostly, at least for us, I remember we would have, when I played in high school, there would be Four or five kids that were our managers sitting behind- Yeah

the bench, and they were keeping the stats. One guy had field goal attempts and field goals made and points. Another guy had assists, and another guy had rebounds or whatever. And then, you’d get your little check marks, and then you’d go after the- Yeah … after the game. The coaches would add them up and whatever, and it seems like that would be a pretty simple thing.

Again, so intuitive to be able to do that on your phone, right? And just makes it- Abs- … so much simpler, and then boom- Yeah … a one button push.

[00:41:21] Zack Odell: And who doesn’t have a cellphone, right?

Like-

[00:41:23] Mike Klinzing: Yeah …

[00:41:23] Zack Odell: for me, I tr- I did this over the summer, like when w- we were in summer ball here in O- we had we had two games on, on the first night.

I’m like I’m going to try it. I’m just going to try it. I’m going to try it.” And I think maybe a more mellow person than myself would probably be really good. But I, there’s a line from The Sopranos. It’s like, “Hey you’re… i’m going to sit here, and I’m going to say some bad words, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

I get way too wrapped up in watching the game. But if my job as a student manager was, “Look, y- you’re going to have this app on your phone,” and you’re, y- you know every student, every kid in the world, you know man, they’re just like bam all with their thumbs. You know they’re, you know they’re able to, keep track of that.

And the cool thing is you get, you get shot attempts. You get heat maps. You get all of these things. And if and if you, if that’s all you ever use it for, cool. Doesn’t cost you a dime. But if you want to integrate that, you just push export, get an option to export it to…

Maybe you send it to your buddy, through iMessage or something like that. That’s cool. Maybe you export it to XCID because you want to keep that as a repository. That’s even better. But no, no subscription required. It’s just literally a service that I was trying to build in connection with c- almost like a funnel, right?

Like almost like a funnel- Yeah … to, you like this, how about this? So yeah.

[00:42:37] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I found keeping stats on the phone kept me connected to the game as a fan, like when I’m watching my kids’ games. So my son’s AU team, I would keep score sometimes on the phone. Yeah. And when somebody initially approached me and said, “Do you want to do that?”

I was like I don’t want to do that. That’s going to– I’m not going to be paying attention. I don’t want to have to be looking. And it’s so intuitive that- Yeah … just doing it helped me pay attention and have a better feel for what was going on in the court because I’m like, “Oh, Joey’s one for eight,” or, “Maybe Joey- Yeah

should stop shooting,” or, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. That you just pick up on these quick little insights that maybe weren’t there before. So I can see where if you could combine those two things where, again, it’s a simple interface to be able to keep those statistics- Yeah … as the game is going on, and now, boom, you just send those off.

Man, to be able to integrate that so quickly, it, I’m sure is huge.

[00:43:37] Zack Odell: I had a coach who asked me could you ha- y- could you have it on an iPad, and at halftime you could look at that information, who was killing you from the corner, who wasn’t?” And I’m like, “I– look I don’t know. Do you have rules that you can’t have this stuff at halftime?”

Like if you watch enough sports, you know that at the end of quarters they get stat sheets and ev- you know, they’re looking at this- … and whatever else. So hey, I, I– that’s not for me to decide. That’s for you to decide. But yeah I did. I’m like, what would it look like if?

And for me, I started out Three or four or five years ago using Easy Stats, and that was the, the, the app on my phone, and I’m like, “Oh, okay. That’s pretty cool.” And I thought, “I could export that.” And then I thought, “Oh, wait a second here. I can export that. What if I did something different and did it this way?”

And so that was really the genesis behind thinking about holy crap there’s like a feeder funnel of data-

[00:44:27] Mike Klinzing: Yeah …

[00:44:28] Zack Odell: that you can, that you have access to. But all things, all things start humble, all things start slow, and, we’d seen… I’ve seen better adoption on the paid app XCIV than Courtside, which is free, but I’ve seen better adoption on that.

And the… One of the reasons is there’s a million… not a million. There’s probably hundreds of stat trackers, and so it’s kind of hard to crack into that. There’s not very many of these types of things that are integrating practice and scouting and game planning and all of those types of things out there.

[00:45:01] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, and when you pay for it, you also get a little bit more invested in it too, right? So- That’s

[00:45:05] Zack Odell: also true …

[00:45:05] Mike Klinzing: you want to take advantage of it and be able to use it. So as you’re thinking about all these pieces that kind of work together, and I think this goes without saying, but I think it’s worth talking about at this point, one of the things that’s going to continue to make your product better is, as you get more teams involved, now you have more data- Yeah

which then allows you to become even more accurate in what you’re doing with the scouting reports, with the player development, with the practice plans. So just talk a little bit about that, how you see the product improve- Yeah … as you get more teams onto the platform.

[00:45:37] Zack Odell: W- to be very clear the one program and the one data doesn’t know that the other program and the other data exists, so the ability for the, the software to learn based on volume that’s not there.

But what is there is feedback from coaches. I… Every coach that signs up, they get, the automated thanks for signing up and that type of deal, and then, sometime in the next, day I look I’m still in that phase where I’m looking every single solitary day who signed up, where’s the traffic coming from?

I’m still… i’m still doing that, right? And so every single solitary day I look, and I see where’s this coach at, where’d they sign up, what state are they in, what type of program, all of that stuff. And then I send them a quick little, it’s maybe it’s three minutes, I don’t know.

But a quick little three-minute email and I’m like: “Look I really do want feedback. The good, the bad, and the ugly. If you see something out there that is like, ‘Why would you do this?'” It– Tell me. I-You don’t know what you don’t know, and it doesn’t mean that I can fix it. It just means that now I know what I don’t know.

[00:46:39] Mike Klinzing: Wait.

[00:46:40] Zack Odell: Yeah. I know… Yeah. I don’t know what. I know something that I didn’t know before. I may not be able to fix it. And the, the bottom line is from, for me, product development is all about feedback from the users. I have a, a newsletter that goes out on a monthly basis.

Every, every time it’s like, “We– I want your feedback. I desire feedback.” And be brutally honest. I’m old enough to know if you want to hurt my feelings, go back to nineteen eighty-four when my grandpa was yelling at me because I didn’t know how to set a corner post.

That hurt my feelings. Not the fact that this, oh, I misspelled a word. Okay, my bad. I’m sorry. I, I– That’s my fault. Or the software’s not working this way. You can tell me whatever you want. “Oh, this is the dumbest thing ever.” That’s cool. I get it. So the feedback and the product development really comes from…

I think there’s two things. Feedback from coach is probably the most important. But as AI models get smarter you hear words like frontier model. I think OpenAI released something like a version six. Anthropic has a Opus Five point five. As these frontier models become more advanced, and you get into some of this really agentic functionality of these models, that’s some things that might be interesting.

I don’t know how impactful it will be, but I’m really anxious to see because if you think about this, this, this innovation curve of AI, you have to think we’re in the early days o-of this. Like some of these AI companies that are like, oh my gosh, where’d they come from? We’re going to be talking about AI companies that we haven’t ever heard of in a couple of years.

And so I’m really anxious to, keep abreast of those types of things. And that’s the ma– I, we talked about the marrying of passions I’m a, I’m a technical person by nature. Technology’s my hobby. I have a passion for sports. I have a love of basketball.

And so I’m marrying all of these things together, and I think that it’s a really interesting fusion, a blend of, you got the passion over here, you have love over here, and you’re trying to put this all together, and somehow, some way it turned into a product. And somehow, some way I have my kids helping me.

My daughter helps me with social media. My son helps me with some of the technical stuff. I wish that… I wish I had a son who was a big salesperson. I don’t. It’s a lot of a lot of social media and a lot of word of mouth, and that’s what I hope spreads.

[00:49:07] Mike Klinzing: What’s been the biggest obstacle that you’ve had to overcome in getting this thing to the point where it is now?

So from the original idea to where you sit today, what’s been the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome, either from a technical or a business standpoint?

[00:49:23] Zack Odell: First is probably just time. I’m a one-man shop. If you count my kids, I’m a 1.5 man shop I have a full-time job. As I mentioned earlier I chase my kid everywhere for sports, volleyball, and as soon as that’s over, basketball.

As soon as that’s over, track. As soon as track’s over, it’s basketball again and volleyball. And then… so it’s literally y- I think I measured it up. I think we get six weeks where there’s, like we have a dead period. So there’s a lot of time that I would never trade. I would shut this product down if I had to choose, right?

I think every parent who is invested in their kid in the way in which, you know… I had the advantage of my grandparents doing it from 1981 to 1994. They missed a handful of games in 14 years, 12 with me and two extra with my brother. And so I would shut this down immediately if it meant sacrificing one.

So time is probably the biggest blocker. I do have a full-time job. I do my best to schedule these types of things, whether it be, a, a conversation with a coach, maybe over the lunch hour. Sometimes it’s after practice or before practice or something like that.

I’m not able to go to a lot of trade shows because I do have a, an 8:00 to 5:00. So I think the biggest blocker, to be honest with you, Mike, is the fact that, it is a very, It is a passion project. That’s how I labeled it to my employer. I have a passion project. I’d like to pursue it.

They were very kind and very generous in, in, in in understanding. But at some point, I would love to be able to say “Oh my gosh, this thing’s– like this thing can support me. It’s time for me to, take that leap of faith.” I think from a technical perspective not… I would– I’m not going to say too many things because it feels like that’s more in my wheelhouse.

But there’s just a lot general- genuinely, there is a lot of new changes. In the state of Kansas, the s- the state passed a law, kids can’t have their cell phone. Coaches can only… Like coaches aren’t supposed to have communication outside a certain medium. In Kansas, they use something called Rooms. I think other states are going to come quickly behind that, where they’re banning kids having cell phones and communication with coaches.

So I think the landscape of some of the legal aspects of, how coaches interact with players, how coaches interact with students, the data protection that everybody deserves making sure that we stay on top of that. And again, the good thing is that’s my background.

I kind of can lean into that a little bit. But I think those are some of the biggest challenges that I’ve experienced to date. We did have one thing that happened that was the eye-opening moment. We were I had a conversation with the Indiana Basketball Associat- Coaches Association, and they were having their I– we’ll call it their summer clinic, and I was really hammering to get an agreement where I– we could do a corporate sponsorship And the gentleman in charge he’s like, h- w- would it be okay if you gave me a, a trial license?

I’d like to kick the tires.” I’m like, “Absolutely.” And so it was the day of this meeting that was kicking off and he was, using the software, using the system, and I woke up at, I don’t know, 6:30 in the morning, and it was already 7:30 in Indianapolis, and he had a couple of emails to me, and I was like, we have a user, we have a user issue at 7:30 my time, or 6:30 my time, 7:30 his time. His clinic’s going to start in 30 minutes.” Luckily, it was an easy thing to fix, and so those are things that I always kind of keep in the back of my mind. I’ve created some triage systems in place that, if I get an email at 3:00 in the morning I have some AI systems that I built that does some triage.

They have FAQs. They’ve got some support documents that they can automatically reply back. And then I get a, a nudge when I get up at 6:30 in the morning, “Hey, you have two tickets,” or, “You have two emails you want to take a look at.” I hope at some point my son, when he graduates college, he will be doing some of that.

You know-

[00:53:24] Mike Klinzing: There you go …

[00:53:25] Zack Odell: for experience, of course.

[00:53:26] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely.

[00:53:27] Zack Odell: Yeah.

[00:53:29] Mike Klinzing: Have you done anything on the player side of it where you might be creating a player profile- Yeah … that a player could potentially use to market them to colleges if you’re talking about a high school player? I don’t know if you’ve walked down that road at all.

[00:53:47] Zack Odell: We have some sketches out there of what that would look like. And the, the question is who owns the data while they’re in high school, and how easily can that be shared once they graduate? Because obviously, if you’re going to try to be recruited, you’re going to start that, early your junior year, maybe even late your sophomore year.

So who owns that data? And that’s that’s one of those things where if the school owns your data and they have laws that prevent you from accessing that, then it becomes problematic. I haven’t gone… Now, what I’ve thought about doing is abstracting out some of the player development stuff as a standalone app that the parents own, that the student owns.

But still, the core problem is how does the data go from here that’s owned by the school to the student without violating some of those data protection laws? And that’s something that we’re working through. It really is one thing that I’d love to be able to do is help Again, for me, m-my coach said, “Here’s all your VHS tapes.

Good luck.” And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t… What are you– Are you kidding me?” What am I doing with this? I, I– There was no help. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. Now you can… Now there’s services out there, right? You could pay these people, and they’ll go out and do that. And so long story short, I’d love to get into that.

Just right now, it– this is focused for, coaches and player development, not necessarily the next step. I’d always be open to feedback, though.

[00:55:13] Mike Klinzing: All right, so that leads to my next question. Okay. When you envision this thing a year or two down the road, three years down the road- … if you could invent it to look like anything, from what the technology could do, the idealized version of what this would look like, what are some things that you might think about or that you might see that, hey, down the road, we’re not here yet, but we’d like to get there?

What are… Don’t give away all your trade secrets- … ’cause I don’t want you to give it all away- No, I was going to say- … but gi-gimme something.

[00:55:42] Zack Odell: You’re asking to be, you’re asking him, you’re asking for me to be a futurist, right? Yeah, I… to be honest with you some of the things that would be very interesting to me is there’s…

They’ve got some almost real time vide- where you can real time take your iPhone. I’ve s- I’ve seen some, some demos where you can take your iPhone, and you can be sitting there recording the game, and it’s literally analyzing all of the tendencies in real time, and the coach is looking at an iPad, or the assistant is looking at an iPad and getting that information in real time with all of the data that exists.

So it’s more like what probably exists for the NBA. That, that stuff probably exists today. But to scale it down to our school’s a three A school. We have about You know, let’s just say three hundred kids in the entire school, the athletic department budget would not support something like that.

So really what it is like taking those things that are D1 stuff in, professional level stuff, and being able to get it to a price point where, it becomes a line item on a budget, not an entire CapEx budget. There was, there was a time where, you didn’t see everybody with iPads at games, yeah, with their huddle app up, right?

You finally got to a point where that’s more commonplace than anything. Like what i- what’s the Wi-Fi passcode? How are we uploading this? Where’s the power? What’s all… You didn’t use to see that type of stuff, and so now you see it more commonplace. So I think just scaling that and making that more widely available.

Ideally, I would love, from a personal perspective, less of a product perspective, but long-term for me is get to a point where I can, make that leap of faith and then run this with my family, my kids, and do this and travel around talking to coaches and again, staying connected to the game, man.

It’s the game I grew up loving. It’s the game that has given me the most life lessons. Sometimes you miss the free throw and you lose the game. Doesn’t mean you don’t lace them up the next day, right? Like- Yeah. Those are hard lessons to learn when you’re sixteen, fifteen, seventeen. Hell, I those are lessons I don’t really take well to when I’m fifty-two.

And taking those life lessons and and teaching my kids how to do things that I’ve, taught myself or learned through, formal education or through, through business and so I think more personally, it’s get to a point Let’s run this company and see where it goes.

That, that’s kind of my, that’s kind of my vision. As far as product goes, man, I don’t know. There’s so much cool stuff out there. I went to CES a few years ago, which is a consumer electronics, I don’t know, show. CES.

[00:58:16] Mike Klinzing: Yep. Yep.

[00:58:16] Zack Odell: And I was blown away on some of the stuff. I’m like, “That’s never going to happen,” and three years later I’m like, “Holy crap, that happened.”

Yes. And I think if I was to make a prediction, someone would listen to this podcast two years from now and they go, “What’s this guy talking about,” right? Like- … of course we’re going to be able to do that. So I’m reluctant to t- I’m r- reluctant to draw a line in the sand of saying what it might be.

So

[00:58:37] Mike Klinzing: anyway. No, that’s very cool. All right. I want to give people an opportunity, I want to give you a chance to share how people can connect with you, how people can get the service. Before you do that, I don’t know if there’s anything that we missed, that we didn’t hit on. If you want to make a final point, go ahead and do that.

If not, go ahead and jump in to share the website, share the app- Absolutely … share the contact information, how people can find you, get connected with you, get signed up for it.

[00:59:01] Zack Odell: Go. It’s time to be a salesman, Mike. It’s time to be a salesman. That’s right. You’re up. That’s what you’re saying. Hey, look- You’re up

bottom line, the e- the easiest way is you just go to the website xciv.ai. Xciv.ai. Email address is Zack, Z-A-C-K, @xciv.ai. You can find me on j- all the socials. You can find me on Twitter X, excuse me. You can find me on X, you can find me on Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok that my daughter runs.

Don’t judge me. Don’t judge me on the content. I turn that all over to her. This is meant for coaches without a lot of without a lot of resource. That’s what I built it for, the 1A school, the 2A school, and the 3A school. I love it when I hear success stories from larger schools, 6A, 5A, even some of the JUCOs that are coming in and saying “Oh, this is pretty interesting.”

It’s meant for smaller programs that don’t have a lot of resources, and it’s a force multiplier. That’s really what it is. And so I’m humbled that I’ve been able s- we talked for a little over an hour. Feels like 10 minutes to me, but I’m humbled and I’m very appreciative of the time you’ve given me.

Check it out. I, I do generally mean it. I answer every s- I read and answer every single solitary email that comes to me. I try to do it as quickly as possible. But man, I appreciate the time for sure.

[01:00:15] Mike Klinzing: Zack, first of all, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to jump on and join us and be a part of it.

And I can honestly say that when I look at what you’ve built, I look at my own very, very limited experience with AI and some of the things that I try to use it for, and then I look at the impact of what potentially it could have- Yeah … on sports, on life and people like you that are creative and coming up with ideas, and this intersection of sports, technology, business.

What I’m reading in my spare time, these are the kinds of things that I like to read about and tinker with and try to figure out. And so the conversation has been great for me. I felt like I, I learn a ton whenever I have a conversation with somebody like you, who has the creativity and the courage to go out and start something.

So kudos to you for doing it. If you are listening- I appreciate that, Mike … and you’re a member of our… Yeah, absolutely. If you are a member of our audience and you’re looking for a way to improve your program, check out what Zack has built with 94Feet.ai. It’s just, again, you’re going to look at it, and I say I’m blown away anytime I do almost anything with AI.

You’ll be blown away with what you get back- … from what Zack has built, and I think it’s going to be a value add to any coach who checks it out. So again, Zack, kudos to you for building it. Kudos to your daughter and your son for helping you out. It’s fantastic. Give me your last word, and then I’ll jump back in and wrap it up.

[01:01:48] Zack Odell: Hey, man, check me out, fciv.ai. We love the traffic, we love the coaches, and feedback is paramount to the continual evolution of the software. Check it out. Give me a shout. I’m here for you.

[01:02:00] Mike Klinzing: Appreciate it. And again, Zack, can’t thank you enough for your time tonight, and I will catch everyone else on our next episode. Thanks.

[01:02:11] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads Podcast presented by Head Start Basketball.