When St. Bonaventure High standout softball player Kalene Egedi tried to walk on to the powerhouse Texas A&M team in 2011, the coach made what should have been a rather perfunctory request to see her high school stats and videos.
With the help of her father, Pete, they scoured the Internet for news clippings, box scores and highlight reels. Pete Egedi said the aggregating site, MaxPreps, had pages for her in six different places with six different spellings and all barren of helpful information.
“We couldn’t even find game schedules,” Pete Egedi said, calling the process “the most daunting task I’ve ever undertaken, to try and put that all together.”
Kalene ultimately halted her pursuit of a roster spot to focus on her studies, but Pete Egedi didn’t want her younger brother or any other amateur to suffer a similar trial. With the help of a programmer, Egedi started a scorekeeping and recordkeeping site for sports in the local Ventura, Calif., area.
Now several years later, a revamped version of his project — known as 805Stats for the SoCal area code of its origin — is launching an integrated online scoring, statistics and streaming platform targeting the youth and amateur sports market. 805Stats has collaborated with softball’s National Pro Fastpitch league for a few seasons and signed a five-year partnership with the U.S. Specialty Sports Association, a governing body with roots in softball that now oversees a variety of amateur sports. The company also provided stats to the semi-pro reincarnation of the American Basketball Association for a couple years.
“We’re trying to give everybody the same shake as the pros without having a 15-person production crew,” said Egedi, a co-founder and executive vice president.
The live scoring page — currently configured for baseball and softball but with planned rollouts of a half-dozen other sports soon — can be managed by a single operator inputting data such as the rudimentary updates (balls and strikes, outs, etc.) as well as the more advanced (pitch and batted ball locations), some of which can be auto-populated into the system when synced with the Flightscope radar tracker. Flightscope can also provide velocity, spin rate and other data points on the 805Stats scoring page.
805Stats, which has grown to 28 employees, has written its code in Unity, which CEO Granger Teeple says not only reduces cost but also facilitates further integrations.
Other data trackers can be incorporated seamlessly.
“Data from today’s day and age, with Blast and a lot of other companies, are on the practice field many times,” Egedi said. “We’re trying to bring it to the game field.”
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Games that are live streamed will be automatically tagged with pitch-by-pitch meta data, enabling highlights (for, say, a home run) to be attached automatically to a player’s online profile page.
The other sports planned for the new scoring software include soccer, lacrosse, basketball, football, ice hockey and volleyball, with the interface having a similar feel to help clients such as high schools or college who may want to contract the service for all its sports.
Among 805Stats’ other partners: Sportzcast, which automates scoreboard tools within venues, and yes, even MaxPreps, the premier high school sports compendium the Egedis consulted when looking for Kalene’s stats seven years ago. That process will now be much easier for any aspiring youth.
“Hats off to Pete on his tenacity,” Teeple said. “It’s quite a project when you’re trying to roll out massive databases that interact with multiple sports.”