SportsBoard: The Future of Player Assessment

Goodbye, pen and paper. Sayonara, endless hours of crunching numbers by hand.

Hello, SportsBoard!

In an electronic-centered society, why not fuse technology and sports? Especially when its so addicting to let’s say, college students.

Over 170 college programs, including Duke basketball and the University of Texas football program, are now using the Mobile Player Assessment Solution application called Sportsboard during practices, recruiting visits and games. The application allows coaches to gather and evaluate Player Efficiency Ratings (PER) for each athlete. At the end of each practice or game the individual numbers are uploaded to a server and within minutes can be sent to each players mobile device or iPad so they can see their strengths and weaknesses from that day.

Sportsboard eliminates the idea that coaches have to slave away over clipboards and manually enter numbers into computers just to sit down later to look at everything they typed in. Instead, everything they need is in one program.

“Duke had two guys on the sidelines watching the practice game and they were calling out what was happening on the court. They had a guy use a clipboard basically tallying all the stats for all the players as they were happening. When the practice was over they were entering all the stats onto a spreadsheet and they would compute each players efficiency points ratings…we took a 2-3 hour process and made it into a 5 minute process, which ultimately enabled them to use the report in a much more timely way” said Gregg Jacobs, founder and CEO of West Shore Technologies, the company that produce SportsBoard.

The program, which has been called “the future of basketball practice’”by ESPN, is applicable to more than just football and basketball. SportsBoard currently has applications for twelve different sports that include: Soccer, Lacrosse, Rugby, Ice Hockey, Baseball and more, each one easily accessible through an application store, Jacobs says that “The teams that adopt this technology sooner are going to have a competitive advantage when it comes to putting the best talent on the court or on the field. Ultimately they are going to use data over gut instinct.”

Besides working with universities, SportsBoard is being used in over a dozen camps this summer, such as Stanford’s baseball and lacrosse camps.

“What we are impacting on camps is so much bigger than what we are doing in terms of impacting college coaches for recruiting or season. We are enabling these camp operators to assess the player give them a rating, video them…we are enabling them to completely professionalize what they did on paper or what they weren’t doing before” said Jacobs.

Overtime, Sportsboard will revolutionize sports in way no one would have imagined 15 years ago.  Sorry clipboards, your time has passed.