The criticality discipline of nuclear engineering is a lot like scouting, sort of. In one, you need to project the state of radioactive materials and predict what might happen in all possible scenarios. In the other, you need to forecast the current skills and abilities of young athletes and find the future Hall of Famers. Both subjects are raw and dynamic with a lot of money on the line, although getting nuclear safety wrong poses bigger downsides.
Antonio Ardila, a former criticality safety engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has launched a social scouting app that applies some of the skills from his old profession to his new one. Cleatchaser is designed both to let recruits share video and metrics of their performance with coaches and fans—and to verify some of that data. Ardila harnesses a smartphone’s camera using advanced geometric principles. A recruit can upload footage of a 40-yard dash, and the app automatically calculates his or her time by comparing the athlete’s movement to a stationary reference point.
“I wanted to use what I learned from a geometric analysis to do some very innovative analysis based on a phone’s camera—capturing certain metrics based on how the camera is ingesting the information,” Ardila, the CEO and founder of the company, said.
Cleatchaser is a free app for iOS and Android that targets three segments of the recruiting and scouting landscape: the athletes themselves, verified scouts or coaches, and fans. The most popular videos appear on a featured page, and scouts will be able to search uploaded data to find athletes worth a closer look. For now, Cleatchaser will focus on the four major U.S. high school sports: football, basketball, baseball and soccer.
“We’re going to go into big-data analytics when we have the critical mass that we’re searching for,” Ardila said. “We’ll also release the dashboard setup that allows querying of the community’s metrics, whether they’ve been verified or unverified, so scouts can use that to say this guy really is worth following up with or not.”
The validation of metrics sets this service apart from competitors. The 40-yard dash is the first geometrically-computed stat, but others are possible. The height of a jump might come next, Ardila said, but clocking a fastball velocity would be extremely complex due to the baseball’s speed.
Ardila’s journey from nuclear engineer to sports tech entrepreneur took a wide detour. He said that, at 24, he was the youngest board-qualified criticality safety analyst in the country. But Los Alamos is a deliberately remote place to live and work and a far cry from Ardila’s native Miami. He left after three years.
He tried poker next, applying his quantitative abilities to another high-stakes game. Ardila won a few tournaments, including one on a cruise that had a $30,000 purse, but the traveling and long, late hours at casinos were difficult. His girlfriend (and now wife) urged him to do something else.
“She really wasn’t having it, no matter how I tried to convince her,” he said. “I met my match in her.”
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Ardila returned to a software company where he had spent one summer before starting at Los Alamos. He hired an engineer through UpWork to teach him database programing skills. That developer, Alexander Girin, became a friend. The two began discussing plans to collaborate on a startup, which led to Cleatchaser. Girin is now the back-end developer and Ardila’s partner in the venture.
As for the app name, Cleatchaser does carry a derogative connotation in some circles—meaning the sports equivalent of a groupie—but Ardila is unfazed by that. “I knew the connotation it had, but I kind of was bent on changing that perception,” Ardila said, adding: “Ultimately, I didn’t feel that enough people knew what it was for me to run away from it.”
He believes the name’s potential outweighs the negative. His considerations: the domain name was available; there were no similarly named apps in the Apple store to compete with on search results; and the name evoked the idea of athletes chasing a life in cleats, plus scouts and fans chasing the athletes.