AI Is a Game Changer for Youth Sports—and for GameChanger
GameChanger president Sameer Ahuja redefined the then-decade-old company’s business over three hours in March 2020. Usage of the app, which helped parents and coaches track stats during youth baseball and softball events, had crashed to zero amid nationwide COVID-19 lockdowns. Meanwhile, GameChanger parent company Dick’s Sporting Goods was planning to furlough a majority of its 40,000 employees in the face of store closures.
One Friday morning that month, Ahuja called a member of executive leadership, asking for permission to develop video streaming functionality within the GameChanger platform. By that afternoon, the company’s product management and engineering leads were on board. Video streaming launched in beta that fall as kids returned to practices. If Zoom was going to be the future of office work (or at least play a significant role in whatever that future looked like), maybe a similar opportunity existed to help family members hoping to support kid competitors remotely.
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Three years later, GameChanger’s team has tripled as it nears its 4 millionth game streamed (for context, Major League Baseball has played about 250,000 games in its century-and-a-half history). It partnered with MLB this summer and was praised as “rapidly growing and profitable” by Dick’s CEO Lauren Hobart during a recent earnings call. Video proved particularly popular for lower level sports teams, where a cute clip is more valuable than any number of stats collected.
Now the company is putting an emphasis on growing its basketball business, with the longer-term goal of being present in every team sport. At the same time, it’s facing increasing competition in the youth sports video market.
After developing video knowhow, GameChanger has turned its attention to automation and computer vision technology in the hopes of getting as much data out of its streams as possible. The company is already rolling out a feature, AutoStream, that will enable automatic tracking of basketball play, swiveling the view from one end of the court to the other.
“The ultimate goal is what we call ‘set it and forget it,’” Ahuja said in an interview. “Even the creation of highlight reels (will be) automatic. It’s no longer a theoretical vision. All of this is doable.”
The future, then, looks clear. Nearly every recreation sporting event will be captured by smart cameras, tallying stats for each player. While pro sports have developed a model based around a few key matches drawing millions of viewers, grassroots competition is headed the other way, with millions of games airing but each only drawing a few viewers with deep connections to the athletes involved. Customized alerts when little Suzie is having a great game, and personalized streams that keep a spotlight on Tommy as he runs around the field seem like only matters of time.
“Artificial intelligence is at the heart of GameChanger’s vision for the future,” Ahuja said in a statement announcing AutoStream. “This is only the beginning of how we envision AI reshaping the way youth sports are experienced.”
One of the cool things about AI is it could make youth sports feel more like pro sports—with automated broadcasts, stats and coverage.
One of the scary things about AI is that it could make youth sports feel more like pro sports.
GameChanger is already aware of the many squabbles its tools have sparked, as certain parents take issue with the way the team’s designated scorer rules an error or a hit. Maybe fully automated record keeping would prevent some of those incidents. A related algorithm could even be developed to flag parents or coaches who too often raise their voices above a certain decibel threshold, though Ahuja said his platform isn’t interested in playing that active of a monitoring role for now.
And what of the advocates (to be generous) lobbying for more playing time that are now armed with detailed stats to back up their case? Will they push for computers to replace coaches? Analytics could ensure a coach’s bias doesn’t keep a potential star on the bench, but they could also give a leg up to the players whose parents have the time and understanding to get the most out of them.
Texas Tech associate professor Jimmy Sanderson dug into the potential impact GameChanger could have back in 2018, when the tool was mainly used for stats, publishing an academic look at “Quantifying Risk Management and Producing Neoliberal Responsible Citizenship Through the GameChanger App.”
As a youth baseball coach himself, he was wondering whether those sorts of platforms really should be used to track and manage a group of pre-teens—whether the emphasis on information had any impact on the fun.
Meanwhile, he kept using GameChanger.
“Don’t get me wrong, I can see issues with it,” Sanderson said in an interview. “I want to give my kid every possible competitive advantage that I can. So while I see flaws in it, I 100% believe it helped us in what we were trying to do.” (Sanderson’s son is currently playing college baseball, by the way.)
Sooner or later, a new digital era will require a renewed conversation about the ultimate point of youth sports. Machine learning models are best when applied to solving for a single challenge, but youth sports remain many things to many people. Teams exist to develop skills in a competitive environment, and also to develop people in a cooperative one.
Until a better metric emerges to measure automation’s impact on youth sports, retention seems like the most important thing to follow. Will well-timed reminders for family members to congratulate children on their career best game outweigh the impact of those youngsters seeing clips of peers outperforming them—and having the stats to show where they’re not stacking up?
As the U.S. Surgeon General investigates social media’s relationship with teenage mental health, we ought to ensure playing fields do more good than harm, especially with participation rates recently hitting historic lows.
“We think parents being involved, even through us, inspires the kids to play more,” Ahuja said. “We think the kids being inspired to play more is good for the kids. It’s good for their health—mental and physical.”
Hopefully, all that data GameChanger is collecting backs him up.
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