Sporting KC forward Cameron Porter has quietly flown under the radar to become one of the world’s most tech-savvy athletes. Granted, the former Ivy League student is still new to Major League Soccer and competing in a lesser known U.S. league, but he has the forward-thinking mindset for how soccer can be leveraged away from the pitch.
Over the past six weeks, Porter started working as an independent contractor with MLS Digital and Director of Engineering Brian Aznar, and is perhaps now the only professional player among the Big Five in the U.S. wearing multiple professional hats in such a fashion.
Porter explained to SportTechie that to anyone looking in from the outside, it may be a little out of the ordinary. Yet, for someone like Porter who has constantly balanced athletics, work and academics — including majoring in computer science at Princeton — working both gigs is “a little less surprising thing once you get to know me.”
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“He’s a busy-minded, uber-intelligent person who always needs to keep his mind going,” goalkeeper Tim Melia told MLS.com about the 24-year-old Porter, who is one thesis away from officially graduating. “He’s one of those guys you try to keep after. He’s a really good soccer player. He’s very smart. He’s got a really bright future.”
As Porter navigated through Princeton, one of his soccer teammates Dylan Bowman spoke highly of an introductory coding course he had taken. Despite the general consensus on campus of it being a challenging course, he told Porter that it was one of the more rewarding classes he had enrolled in, Porter explained.
“A few of my friends and I got together, and we were like, ‘Let’s do this.’ So we took the introductory code class, and it was probably one of the more eye-opening experiences of my life,” Porter said. “It was really a whole new paradigm of thinking and solving problems. There was the instant gratification of knowing when you had solved something, when you built a solution or designed an algorithm to solve something efficiently and you knew it worked. Those things hooked us, and we were addicted.”
The one class, which Porter called the “most powerful course” for him at Princeton, completely flipped the script on a college career for Porter that saw him majoring in economics. During some independent work at Princeton — where he launched the Ivy Research Council, which helps organizations understand best practices in recruiting talent — Porter also studied steganography and how a developer is able to hide data images without disrupting the images. Moreover, the most interesting course he took was information securities and how systems could protect anonymity along with a further deep-dive into encryption coding.
He and his few buddies quickly realized they were computer science majors.
“It was almost a full 180,” said Porter, who is also now a regular podcast listener, with his favorite being A16z from private American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
“A little bit of it was playing catch up because we didn’t realize we had these interests going into school. We had to play catch up, and it meant a lot of late nights together coding…Definitely some fond memories there.”
Throughout this past offseason, Porter looked to find more structure with his free time despite dabbling in “one-off projects,” he said. Porter talked with a close mentor who suggested he reach out to the MLS office considering it probably had a software engineering team that worked around live video and streaming, Android apps and other back-end systems. More or less, it could serve as a potential destination for real-world experience and applications.
“I really hadn’t thought of (the MLS league office) but they would understand my situation, working remotely and time constraints during the season,” Porter said.
Following a few conversations and meetings in New York, Porter joined MLS Digital, albeit remotely. During the week, training with Sporting KC typically starts around 9 a.m. and ends around 1 p.m. Beginning at 2 p.m , Porter fires up the laptop and begins his five-hour day online “as soon as possible.”
Through mostly Slack and the occasional Google Hangouts, he can work from anywhere, even if it’s heading to an away match or in an airport terminal. He’s currently focused on “building out and testing APIs so that the end points we’re exposing are all working effectively.” In addition, Porter explained that with data being pulled in from different sources to the MLS website or its mobile apps, he’s making sure that that information is arriving in an efficient manner. For example, if a goal is scored during a match, that specific notification is being sent to the end user as quickly as possible. With his role, he’s consistently monitoring and trouble-shooting the flow of information from the back-end of to the end user as well.
Following the season, Porter plans to move New York for the offseason, spend more time with his girlfriend and yes, work from the MLS office. Given his current remote status, the ability to have that in-person connection is something he’s looking forward to but at the end of the day, as long as there’s a solid WiFi connection, anything can be accomplished.
“The beauty of being a software engineer is you always have the tools with you to work on things, and you can constantly be thinking of solutions to the problems you’re working on and then implement them when you have time,” Porter said.