This app helps football

coaches make in-game

changes, gain strategic
advantages
BY TAYLOR SOPER on August 23, 2014 at 12:30 pm
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LegUP Analytics founder Anthony Blake.
The NFL is already ditching paper for tablets in a move to help players and coaches
become more efficient. Now one Seattle entrepreneur wants to do the same for high
school and college teams.
Anthony Blake is the founder of LegUP Analytics, a new startup that replaces the
existing pen and paper documentation process employed by most football teams to
record plays during the course of a game.
Were taking an outdated process and re-imagining it based on the expectations of the
modern coach and capabilities of current technology, said Blake, a former product
manager at Microsoft.
As a college student at the University of Michigan, Blake was the football teams student
manager. His job was to record each play for the offensive coordinator, who would
analyze the charts during the game to help make necessary strategic changes.
Blake soon noticed several issues with that
process.
The speed of the game made errors easy to make and costly to the pen and paper
tools usefulness, Blake explained.
Last year, as the head coach of Redmond Highs freshman football team, Blake set out
to improve the way his squad recorded stats. He built an excel model to collect the
detail of each play sequence and then aggregated the information over the course of
the season to provide analytics.
With LegUP Analytics, Blake is taking it one step further. The app gives coaches a way
to record the elements of each play sequence the situation, play call, and result
throughout the course of the game. Based on that information, the app
calculates a play-by-play recount of the teams playcalls and results, a drive summary, a
visual quarter-by-quarter overview of the game, and a box score.
The idea is to help coaches make adjustments more efficiently, and in turn help their
teams gain advantages.
As a sideline tool, coaches are still using the pen and paper documentation system,
Blake said. They receive very little in the way of help from it during the course of the
game.
LegUP plans to offer a paid app to youth football coaches this fall that will include basic
game capture tools. But the startup has even more ambitions plans down the road.
Philosophically, LegUP is
focused on elevating sports performance from the perspective of the coach and
coaching staff, Blake explained. We believe that a coachs performance begets team
performance. Our current tool and planned roadmap are built around the entire process
of leading a team through a game including decision making, personnel
management, locating/understanding trends and communication amongst coaches and
players.
And while the company is focused on youth and high school teams for now, it hopes to
crack the college market soon. Both the NCAA and NFL have regulations that prohibit
the use of an app like LegUP on the sidelines, but the tide seems to be changing.
The first major changes to this situation are just starting to happen now within the NFL
with the Microsoft Surface and Zebra Technologies deals, Blake said. We havent
heard anything from the NCAA yet, but I believe we are two or three years away from
an incredible opportunity.
Competition includes HUDL, a video management and analysis company,
and products that provide box score-styled services. Blake said that LegUP differs from
HUDL because it provides real-time tools versus data for training and study, while other
aspects of his app help gain an edge over similar software.
Our focus on meeting the needs of coaches during a live sporting event, combined with
the experience and usability of our product, helps us to compete favorably, he said.