It’s not often that a sports application’s first promotional video is that of a para-athlete, but that was the course set by Team Sportz. Team Sportz, is an app that allows athletes – disabled and not – to track their training progress and share their data with coaches and teammates.
There are other motivations at play, of course. Founder Francisco Baptista’s love of basketball is obvious. The UK-based self-taught software engineer points out a Kobe Bryant jersey and signed ball as we talk about his startup. How much does he like basketball? He was known to skip classes as a student in order to train.
“I think the short story is that I’ve played basketball all my life, I still play here in Hertfordshire, and as an amateur basketball player, as part of a team like everyone else, we saw the advent and rise of wearables and tracking technology, etc., and we tried to use some of that to sort of push one another into being a bit more active beyond the practice and the game.”
The idea for the app, now used amongst several amateur teams in basketball, field hockey, and soccer, was sparked five years ago. The first iteration was a wearable that could track indoor movement, but now a combination of AI, software, and an algorithm support athletes and coaches in drawing conclusions from the body’s movement.
Baptista says that the artificial intelligence portion is purely to locate the body’s movement and that the goal isn’t to hard code what an exercise looks like, he says that’s a coach’s domain, but instead to support “meaningful conversation” amongst team members in an industry where the major players are far more interested in professional athletes than they are your local recreational squad. The mission is about making this sort of developmental tool accessible.
“The biggest barrier that we tried to break is price and the reason why these things don't exist is because the businesses out there that build sports technology, they built it so that they serve the very few minorities, the NBA, the NFL, and the richest of the world. But the reality [is] the majority plays at the amateur level, 80%+ plays at amateur level and they can't afford that sort of technology and the gap is astounding.”
Another difference pointed to by the company is that they don’t hold any recordings of the exercises being done, choosing instead to focus on the data gleaned from those exercises that are then shared within the team environment.
“We often say that we are in the business of support performance, not sports entertainment and therefore that creates a clear boundary.”
That limitation, putting what constitutes an exercise in the hands of coaches via the app’s editor, is what Baptista feels allows the app to adapt and be accessible for athletes of all types, including in sports with exercises that may not be typical, such as those found in para-sport. That first piece of promotional material shows a wheelchair tennis player completing reps of sprints at home – where many athletes are having been forced out of their regular training locations.
Baptista says the pandemic allowed the app to find its way into people’s hands when it otherwise might not have.
“Coaches were really struggling to find solutions that could enable them to be part of the journey on keeping the players active whilst everyone was locked in their places. And that effectively enabled us to say, actually, this is the perfect case study for us.”
You can find more information at Team Sportz.
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