Here’s your cool sports hardware demo of the week:
ShotTracker, the Kansas City-based startup whose team-focused offering can track and collect analytics from an entire basketball game in real-time, is demoing for all 31 games of the NAIA D1 Men’s National Championship tournament this week in Kansas City. It’s the first time automated, real-time stats have been available at a tournament.
Here’s how it works: Each player has a small sensor tied to their shoelace. The basketball also has a sensor embedded inside. Lastly, the court is surrounded by elevated sensors in the rafters which track the location of the sensors inside the ball and on each player’s shoe. The result is the ability to track the location all 10 players, plus the ball in real time where ever they are on the court.
While ShotTracker’s app lets you see how the players and ball move across the court in three-dimensions, they are also turning this data into real-time analytics. So users will see things like shot charts, shot attempts, makes, messes, turnovers, assists, steals and rebounds the second they occur.
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At this tournament coaches and teams have access to these statistics in real-time, as well as every fan in the audience via ShotTracker’s app. These are all statistics that previously had to be collected manually by a group of people watching the game – meaning they weren’t always available for teams with lower budgets.
ShotTracker originally was launched as a hardware device designed to help amateur players improve their shooting form. The team has since pivoted to focus on its ShotTracker Team product, which tracks and provides analytics in real time for basketball teams.
The company recently raised $5M in seed funding from Magic Johnson and former NBA Commissioner David Stern.