First Team Analytics, with Ryan Elmore and Will Palmquist

In this episode of the Entrepreneurship@DU Podcast, host Joshua Ross interviews DU alumni Will Palmquist and University of Denver faculty member Ryan Elmore. Together, they discuss their journey as co-founders of First Team Analytics, a sports analytics company focused on collegiate soccer. 

The conversation dives into the growing sports analytics industry, the challenges and opportunities of launching a startup, and how their student-professor relationship evolved into a successful business partnership. Will shares how his experience as a Division I soccer player shaped their focus on soccer analytics, while Ryan highlights the importance of adapting academic knowledge into entrepreneurial ventures. 

Listeners will gain insights into the key trends driving sports analytics, the unique value First Team Analytics offers to coaches, and lessons learned about product development, customer feedback, and building credibility in the sports domain. v

 Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Russ, and welcome to the entrepreneurship at DU Podcast.

Will Palmquist:

We’re a soccer analytics company, primarily focused on right now delivering the college clients, but with aspirations to break into professional leagues and other leagues around the world as well.

Joshua Ross:

Analytics and professional sports has become big business with a sports analytics market size valued at $3.8 billion in 2023. Teams and organizations invest millions of dollars annually and advanced data analytics to gain a competitive edge, optimize player performance and enhance fan engagement. As the industry continues to grow, analytics is reshaping how sports are played, managed and monetized.

Ryan Elmore:

Just get a product out there. Don’t wait until you have a refined product because you could be working on that forever. It’s really get it into the hands of somebody who wants to use it and get the feedback there.

Joshua Ross:

In this episode, I sit down with alum and former division one soccer player Will Palm and Ryan Elmore, associate Professor of business Information and Analytics at the University of Denver. We explore their startup first team analytics, the booming sports analytics industry, and their journey from a student faculty relationship to becoming co-founders and building a sports analytics business together. Currently focused on collegiate soccer.

Ryan Elmore:

Obviously he’s one of the best students that we’ve had here in the department, so working with him was not just sort of an undergraduate professor relationship. He had the initiative to really go deep in the problem. So that was nice.

Joshua Ross:

Here’s my conversation with Ryan and Will, will and Ryan, welcome to the podcast. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. We are discussing today two of my favorite topics, sports and entrepreneurship, so let’s get right into it. But what I’d like to do is level set and give our audience an overview of the analytics industry. If you wouldn’t mind just giving a short summary on what are sports analytics.

Ryan Elmore:

I think the short answer would be, have you seen Moneyball? Most people are familiar with either the book or the movie, and it’s basically just using statistics or analytics to gain a competitive advantage in the sport.

Joshua Ross:

But with sports franchisees spending millions and now college athletics spending millions on athletics, what are the key trends in demands that are driving this investment? What are they looking for?

Will Palmquist:

I think we’ve seen there are enough examples now in the media around sports of teams that have used this to really gain a competitive edge. It’s only natural that now, especially in an environment where there’s so much money in college athletics, NIL, whatever you need, every team needs to draw players and recruit players in a more efficient way to have an edge over their competition. And I think with analytics kind of starting to permeate and you hear about it so much more. In other sports, it used to be kind of baseball and Sabre metrics. Now you have NFL. Every coach is looking at a fourth down sheet backed by numbers with every decision, maybe not every coach, but a lot are, and it’s way more common now, and I think it’s only natural that that starts to go down to college. And I know we’re going to get to this, but soccer is kind of an interesting one because not as much money in college soccer as there is in college football and basketball and whatnot, but that doesn’t mean that coaches and fans don’t want to have an interaction. And now that they’ve been so exposed to analytics, whether it’s on broadcast or whatever, it’s like you expect that level of detail and that ability to analyze a game beyond just the viewership. And then you take within a team where you have to have that as a coach to hold onto your job or to recruit the best players and to really have an edge in your particular sport.

Joshua Ross:

So why focus on soccer and why focus on college soccer as your initial target market? What was the drive for that?

Will Palmquist:

The truth of the matter is I played college soccer here at the University of Denver. It’s a sport that I’m very familiar with, and I think that’s one thing that across sports, you’ll hear coaches, pundits, whoever kind of have, they’ll rip on some of the analytics that are permeating these different sports because someone, oh, they’re just a stats guy that’s never played the sport. And that’s unfair in a lot of cases, but really having experience on the field does help you look at it. And then having an interest in analytics has helped me look at it in a different way. It helped me while I played as well as in the business side of it and what we’re trying to do. So entering into college soccer, it was Ryan and I, we have a background which I think we’re going to get to later in a history, and I’ve learned a lot from him.

And it was an area where I had relationships, existing relationships. I knew there was a need. There were a lot of tools that we used while I was a player, but the information, you were inundated with information that wasn’t always that insightful. And it was kind of at its beginning with video and data analysis and we saw a true opportunity to add value in a sport where we had immediate connections and domain experience both of us have played and it really kind of tied all of our interests together and helped us, I think, get this thing going.

Ryan Elmore:

Yeah, I think to piggyback on what Will is saying is just that immediate credibility that will has of being an excellent division one goalkeeper and then being able to talk to the coaches and really mine all of his coaches’ connections to try to sell the product that we’re offering is huge.

Joshua Ross:

So then how did you two connect? And give me a little bit of background. I heard you both played soccer, I know you played at the University of Denver, Ryan, I was not aware that you’re a soccer player, so I also want to have in my mind what position you played, but I want to hear it from you.

Ryan Elmore:

Wow, okay. But I want to hear you

Joshua Ross:

Guess, oh, you are and you are a midi,

Ryan Elmore:

Pretty much more of a defensive midfielder,

Joshua Ross:

But you look like you have some technical skills and you look like you have a little meanness in you as well

Ryan Elmore:

Potentially. But I would say yeah, I was not known for my physicality. It was definitely more the technical skills.

Joshua Ross:

So how did you two connect and what made you decide to take this leap from professor student to business partners? Because kind of an interesting and unique route.

Ryan Elmore:

So Will took my class and then I think it was during your senior year you wanted to write a senior thesis. And so we worked on a project related to the NFL fourth downs, should coaches go for it. And there’s been a lot of research on that. We don’t need to necessarily get into it, but he wrote a pretty good thesis on just simulating when coaches should go for fourth downs. So then that was sort of the tail end of or start of covid I think, or maybe a year before. I’m not sure when it was. But anyway, he decided to stick around for another year, do a fifth year, four plus one I guess. And then he worked for both Ben Williams, another professor in the BIA department and me as a grad student working to publish the paper that he worked on as a senior.

So we had this working relationship and then it kind of developed into more of a friendship. We would just get together and talk about different sports because Will’s a huge sports fan, unfortunately a big Rockies fan. It’s tough. Yeah. Anyway, so we just kept in touch and talking about different projects and obviously he’s one of the best students that we’ve had here in the department. So working with him was not just sort of an undergraduate professor relationship. He had the initiative to really go deep in the problem. So that was nice. And as a professor, when you see students that are motivated to work on things, it makes you want to work with them.

Will Palmquist:

No, I believe it was that first quarter you taught sports analytics and that was really my first exposure to how those things you’re learning in class can translate to something, no offense to the other classes out there, but that’s quite a bit more entertaining and more fun and goes with my passions. And so we went through that process of conducting research and doing it on NFL and fort down simulations. And it ended up being just a great learning experience really, where I honed in on a lot of my skills programming and stats, and I learned more through that work with Ryan than I did in any classes that I really took at DU just because it was so hands-on and we were working on something that I’d stay up late just because it was fun to actually work on as we went along. I left DU after that fifth year that Ryan was talking about, finished out my soccer career because I redshirted my freshman year, had a fifth year during covid, then went on to play in the USL my first year in New Mexico, followed by two great years in Richmond.

Love that city if you ever have a chance to visit. And during that time, one thing that I realized was, okay, I’m playing professional soccer in the lower divisions of the US professional ranks. You have a lot of time on your hands. You don’t make a ton of money, which not that that’s important, but I knew I needed something to keep me busy and something that was kind of entrepreneurial and that we could try and build something that would be fun, but also create some value. And we started, I think our first idea was to maybe work on Korean baseball league or

Ryan Elmore:

It wasn’t,

Will Palmquist:

We were throwing around all these ideas of where could we add value that there’s maybe not a lot of analytics right now. So we were talking baseball, basketball internationally, whatever, and then it was like, why don’t we build something and show it to the coaches at du? That would be a great area to gain feedback immediately. And that’s really how we started and we owe a lot of thanks to them of building a prototype and getting a lot of early feedback from them and helping us get to where we are now.

Ryan Elmore:

Huge, huge shout out to them. I mean, they were definitely instrumental in really honing our product because we would just throw a million things into a dashboard and say, this is all super cool, but it’s really great to have the expert or industry expert, whatever you’re going into to tell you this is what’s important. And that’s what the DU coaches actually provided and I think they provided a lot more than that. I think as well,

Joshua Ross:

Customer validation is so key to the success of a product. You can have a belief in what you think that they want and what they need, but until you actually put it in front of them and they can see what’s possible and also see how they use it and what they need, you really have no idea.

Ryan Elmore:

And actually I think this is something that you and I had talked about really early on in our development. It was like, and this is something that you would read in all the entrepreneurship books as well, is just get a product out there. Don’t wait until you have a refined product because you could be working on that forever. It’s really get it into the hands of somebody who wants to use it and get the feedback there. So that was just instrumental in our development.

Joshua Ross:

So I’m just going to take a little sidebar for a second because I have to know when do you go for it? On fourth down?

Ryan Elmore:

Almost all the time. A lot more than people do,

Will Palmquist:

Although now they go forward a

Ryan Elmore:

Lot more Campbell for the Lions quite a lot more. He’s definitely going for it a lot. But yeah,

Will Palmquist:

That was the main conclusion is go for it.

Joshua Ross:

Spend a few minutes walking us through what first team analytics does.

Will Palmquist:

We’re a soccer analytics company primarily focused on right now delivering to college clients, but with aspirations to break into professional leagues and other leagues around the world as well. But what we’re doing is we’re taking all this data that there is in soccer at this point in time. A lot of it comes from video. There’s coaches, players are inundated with all sorts of data that isn’t always presented in the most insightful or kind of immediately impactful way. That was how we really started on this journey was I would get these reports when I was at DU and you didn’t always know what to do with them. And our kind of mission now is delivering these insights directly into coaches from recruiting to game and team and opposition analysis. So they really have the most important KPIs that they care about in front of them and can make decisions in a streamlined way that in the middle of a season when things are hectic, when you don’t have a lot of time, it can guide you in your decision making and gain you an edge and hopefully help you win games.

Joshua Ross:

But what kind of data is this? You’re talking about these things from recruiting to looking at endgame. What is it actually doing to move the needle? Because at the end of the day, and you said it earlier, it’s coaches need to be competitive. They need to win to keep their jobs. So that’s the end goal. How does this help them be competitive and successful?

Ryan Elmore:

I think one of the immediate benefits of using the product that we’re providing is first it’s going to save them time and scouting opposition. Because generally I think what most people would do is watch a lot of video, try to figure out what the opposing team’s tendencies are and then teach that to their team as they’re preparing for a game. Now what we do is you mentioned what are the data? What did the data look like? Essentially what we’re getting is roughly maybe 2000, 2,500 or 1800 to 2,500 events in a soccer match. So that’s anything from me passing the ball to will, maybe Will’s heading the ball, everything is coded timestamped in the data feed that we get using all of the summaries that we provide. We can show, well, these are the clear tendencies for a team that you’re playing. So you don’t have to spend hours just watching the video. I mean it’s not a replacement for video, but it’s a supplement to what they’re already doing. Now I think one of the things that you mentioned is the end product is to win games. So the teams still have to perform this is just to give them a little bit of an edge when they’re preparing their own teams, scouting additional teams, looking for players that might be available particularly now in the transfer portal. So that’s sort of what we’re providing.

Joshua Ross:

Does this often surprise coaches, especially the data that you provide them? So you look at the NBA, there’s all the vanity stats in terms of points, rebounds, steals, and then the other side field goal percentage and turnovers and then vanity stats and baseball hits. RBI runs, home runs, all that. But then there’s all these other stats that do not show up in that box score. And I’m wondering, is that the same in soccer?

Will Palmquist:

The answer is yes. That’s a pretty loaded question. That is where soccer is heading and it’s a much harder problem to solve in soccer, and that’s one area where I think we add value is you’ll always have your goals assist some of those different things. There are different metrics that we keep tabs and follow and come up with our own ideas on how we can better quantify the game of soccer. And this is a problem that every from city football group that has an entire department down to the college level is one of the big complaints in soccer about stats is, oh, it’s such a free flowing game. How do you value a central midfielder who maybe isn’t getting goals and assists but is involved in every buildup play? Truly instrumental, take your bussette. That’s one of the examples a lot of people give in soccer analytics is how do we come up with a number that values this player?

And that’s an ongoing process right now. It’s something that with more robust and richer data sets that continue to come out, we’re kind of teetering on the edge with computer vision and different things, which we can talk about the future of software analytics later, but we’re trying to give these advanced stats things outside of the vanity stats as you call them, to call coaches that don’t have an entire stats department like Liverpool and the biggest clubs in the world do now. And some of those metrics are things like one we heavily lean on is expected threat, which it takes the value of a possession or really your incremental probability, incremental increase in scoring chance back to a passer. And you can really assign value to guys that maybe they didn’t get the assist or maybe they didn’t get the shot on frame, but they’re involved consistently in a team’s effective chances on goal, take it a couple actions back or whatever it may be.

And there are other stats we do. You can take almost think of hockey assists. You can take expected goals, which is another one you’ll now see on the broadcast. Kind of back to the guys involved in the buildup play. So there are different ways we try and continue to answer this question in soccer and it’s moving forward, but really the big thing for us is giving these college coaches clear, insightful use of these metrics that they maybe haven’t been exposed to in a way that a light bulb goes off for them of like, oh yes, this guy is their best player even though he doesn’t show up in all their goal involvements, and that’s been one of our big value adds for them. And it’s really reassuring when you’re on calls with coaches and you have that like, oh yeah, that stat does pick up a player’s value more than your traditional stats that they’ve seen over the years.

Joshua Ross:

I wanted to understand a little bit about the journey you both have been on. You had this initial idea, you decided to work together now at the product, you have a production product that you’re selling out in the market. Walk me through a little bit about that journey and what are some of the things you’ve learned as entrepreneurs?

Ryan Elmore:

The journey, I mean I guess it was from my perspective, I would say one of the hardest lessons that I’ve realized would be how hard it is to sell stuff. And in particular, I think in the sporting domain, you have a lot of coaches that those coaches are the best at what they do. I mean otherwise they wouldn’t be leading a division one team. These guys know what and women know what they’re doing, so telling them, oh, this will probably help you is maybe a little bit of an ego hit to them when we first initially sit down. And I think that’s actually great why we have a former high level D one player here trying to do this and will because that gives us that little bit more credibility when we’re like, no, this really is something useful for both team and player development.

But yeah, I would just say selling stuff. I don’t have a business background, an entrepreneurship background, and I just thought once we got in front of coaches, I always thought they’ll be like, yeah, this is awesome. Sign me up. And it’s pretty humbling when you have a good conversation and they’re like, well, it’s cool, but we can’t sign up. A lot of that is what Will said earlier. Soccer, NCA soccer in particular is not the most lucrative market, so we are dealing with some pretty constrained budgets, but that’s one lesson that’s been pretty humbling for me.

Will Palmquist:

A couple for me, one to Ryan’s point, it is for me personally, kind of stepping outside of my comfort zone, figuring out when we bootstrap something like this, we’re the developers, we’re the salespeople and we’ve worn a lot of different hats naturally as you do as an entrepreneur and getting on these calls and figuring out what works and how you pitch your product in the most effective way takes time and reps. So kind of learning or understanding early on that some of those reps were pretty bad looking back

Ryan Elmore:

Very long.

Will Palmquist:

Yeah. Ryan, as you’ve probably gathered already, Ryan and I can be rambling and think we’re talking about the most interesting thing in the world and maybe they just need clear cut. Okay, I’ve only got 20 minutes. So we really grew a lot. I think in that way. That’s definitely one thing that now it’s like you start picking up on what are the things that we really need to focus on and hone in on and emphasize with our product. When you finally get a coach on the phone or get a coach on a video call and you have that opportunity, you want to make the most of it. Another one from a product side of things, we talked where our first prototype, which the minimum viable product thing, which was relayed to me a while ago, and I think when we first met as well of we followed that and it’s definitely something we’ve gotten better at, but at first I was way too worried about putting out this polished thing and we sat down with the DU coaches at different times and they were like, that’s a really cool looking plot.

That’s a really cool piece of information, but how do I use that? How am I actually going to translate this to the field? And starting to really lean on that feedback helped us build the products the way they are now, and I think it probably took us a little too long to figure that one out, but we did, so we’re on the right track at least. The other thing that’s always interesting with product market fit is the rise of the transfer portal for us really made an app that we have our kind of pride and joy app that had a lot of blood, sweat and tears poured into it and coaches are interested in it, but they’re not nearly as interested in that one as the one that really on a relative basis took a lot less time to develop. We threw it together and made just kind of a really easy way for them to screen players across NCAA with stats that matter and way easier to build. Now we’ve refined it. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into that to making sure it’s more marketable. But that was an interesting lesson of, okay, this thing that I’m attached to because I spent so many hours on it isn’t selling as well as the thing that really we made over a weekend.

Joshua Ross:

I read an interesting stat last year that at one point in time there were 3,500 female basketball players in the portal. How do you actually go through that portal and analyze each one of those players to figure out who fits? And so what you’re talking about, I’m assuming, is it allows coaches to very quickly kind of distill down to a smaller group and then they can get into the film and things like that.

Ryan Elmore:

Sounds like you get it. I mean that’s essentially what we’re doing is providing a platform where coaches could either put their own list of players in, they could find the most comparable players to the players that they’re interested in. Maybe they’re losing players and they want to replace that player so they can quickly search who’s close to this or who’s similar to the player that I’m losing. Or if you just wanted to compare players, maybe Will and I are going to compare two players that are central midfielders or something, one’s in the portal, maybe another one might be in the portal. We can just quickly scan all the stats that we have available, which is a crazy amount of metrics that we can compare on, and it’s just going to give you your nearest comp

Will Palmquist:

As a former player. Video will never lose its importance that is at every level college, post-college, whether it’s within your positional group or as a team scouting the opposition. You’ll always have that video piece. I think what both of our tools do, whether it’s the portal app or our team dashboard, it’s really a way for coaches to distill down and get to the key points that then they can go and take away from video. And kind of as a guiding, you have your data department proxy data department via our applications that then give you hopefully at least a glimpse of what kind of bigger clubs with bigger budgets that have people on staff. Specifically for this, we’re just trying to expose college coaches and give them at least some of that value that they may not have access to. And you can’t watch video and it’s hard to compare. You’re going to have the big schools that are dropping players that every coach is going to know about, but what if there’s a diamond in the rough that on a statistical level kind of checks all the boxes that you need? Now we’re going to dig in and watch film on a subset of players and really kind of figure out who we want. I think the portal app, it is been pretty cut and dry, how much time it can save coaches.

Joshua Ross:

So I’m going to switch gears a little bit just to find out a little bit about both you and your entrepreneurial journey. But so Ryan, to start with you, how do you balance teaching, right? You’re a professor at the University of Denver, you’ve got your university commitments, you’ve got a family and you also have this business. How do you balance all of that and then throw out any tips for our academics out there considering entrepreneurship?

Ryan Elmore:

So DU is the number one priority. Fortunately here at the university, we do have a little bit of time that we can spend on other projects as long as they’re not a direct competitor to what I’m doing in the classroom or doing in my own research, I don’t do soccer research, so I do a lot of sports related research, but soccer, I’ve kept intentionally separate because of first team analytics, but I think you just really have to prioritize things at this weekend or these weekdays In the evenings, I’m going to spend X hours working on my project with Will, and you just have to, I mean, I don’t sacrifice going to my son’s soccer games or spending time with my wife because all of those things are as important or more important than what I’m working on here. But at the end of the day, it’s just you have to really schedule time periods to focus on whatever you’re working on.

I would say for advice for faculty members, I think this has been one of the most rewarding periods of my academic life is doing this project. It’s always nice to write a research paper and publish a research paper, but at the end of the day, how many people are actually going to read that research paper and use that research paper? It’s not a super large number of people, to be honest. So academia can be a little bit disheartening at times because you’re like, oh, I put all this work into it and people don’t really see the value. This working with somebody who I was a student now, one of my good friends is just super rewarding to see people really appreciate what we’re putting out there. So I would tell the academics, if you can find something that you’re passionate about, definitely prioritize the time to go for it.

Joshua Ross:

Will, what about you, former professional athlete, you’re an entrepreneur, but you have a full-time job. How do you manage all of it?

Will Palmquist:

Yeah, I think a lot of it was for me, having an understanding that my interesting schedule that I had while I was playing soccer allowed me to pursue something that would be really hard for most people if I hadn’t gone and played soccer after college, which it was a great two and a half years, it was time for me to hang up the boots, the lower divisions of US soccer will take it out of you at a certain point. But for me, with that in mind, I knew that the day would come where I was going to be getting a full-time job and kind of put a bow on my soccer career. So a lot of that work with First Team and getting it to where it is today, I was doing kind of on a timeline of we need to get this thing in a really good spot and front load a lot of that work. And now I think we’re in a position where we have a great understanding of the business kind of to the time management piece. We know how to effectively use our time with full-time jobs, and you always have that prioritization that Ryan talked about, but we’re able to keep this thing going and keep making marginal improvements and adding value to our clients and to the company while having these other priorities.

Ryan Elmore:

In all seriousness, I mean, we wouldn’t have been able to do this had you not had this strange schedule because Will had a lot more time than I did. So early on he was just coding when he wasn’t playing soccer, which I’ll be forever grateful,

Will Palmquist:

Which for me was just, it was a good balance that I really enjoyed. I was playing soccer and then I still was kind of getting that intellectual stimulation in the back end of the day when doing something I really enjoyed.

Joshua Ross:

But I also that you have to have that industry expertise and truly understand the market and the problem you’re solving and you truly, as a professional soccer player, had that. So yeah, you had a lot of free time, which is great to work on the product, but if you didn’t truly understand the market and what you were solving, I don’t think you would’ve built something with the quality that you both have created.

Will Palmquist:

I’m going to give credit to a lot of those stats guys out there right now across a lot of sports who didn’t, maybe they didn’t play that particular sport at a high level because sometimes people on Twitter, wherever kind of be a little skeptical of the stats guys. There are so many out there who have a far deeper tactical knowledge than even someone who played in college and in the pros. But to your point, yeah, the everyday in practice in games, just as I started working on this, they added value to each other on both on the field and in our business because I started thinking about the game differently as we combed through numbers on college soccer and vice versa, situationally on the field. I would think about what do really good players on my team do that maybe are hard to capture in stats and how would you capture that? They played off of each other really nicely, and I think it did add to not only my enjoyment of both, but how we were able to build the product.

Joshua Ross:

What keeps both of you up at night? When you think about this business, what are the biggest risks in terms of success? Data costs? Yeah,

Will Palmquist:

Data costs is one. We want to be very kind of literal with a potential hurdle is just soccer data is still hard to collect. A lot of these games, the data feed we get in particular is manually tagged. The other software that helps that process be more efficient. But these games are tagged across professional down to college by humans still, and we’re working towards automatic tagging with computer vision, not us, but the industry. And we’ve already seen that’s been kind of an experience where over the last three years that just the costs of doing what we want to do have gone up quite a bit and they likely will. It’s an expensive area to be in just because soccer is a harder sport to gather data on. So it’s not as readily available as some of these other

Ryan Elmore:

Sports. Yeah, I mean that’s similar to what I was going to say. Not just data costs, but the company that buy the data from, they could come out and just either raise the costs. I mean, I don’t necessarily want to say this, but I guess I would. They could create a product that’s a direct competitor to what we’re doing, which would not be awesome. But I think the company mean, fortunately for us, I think the company that we get the data from is generally focused on professional leagues. They do this NCA work, which is great, and they provide that PDF that will had alluded to earlier in the talk. But for the most part, we’re a pretty niche market or niche company at this point because we’re really focused on the NCA market. Most of the other companies who are doing soccer analytics are wanting to break into the Premier League or MLS or somewhere else. They don’t really see NCA soccer as sort of where you invest everything in. So that’s good for us, I guess.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, so you’re taking that low hanging fruit that nobody’s really that interested in, but at some point in time, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is you’ve got to build that mode around what you’re doing, and so this company or other companies can’t kind of replicate it. So when you start to look at what you’re doing, you’ve talked about the transfer portal and the tool you built for that is what are some of the expansion plans in terms of your product evolving?

Will Palmquist:

How can we market some of these tools? We have existing tools to professional teams so that they have more access and more transparency on NCAA players. Having gone through that process of trying to go ideally to the MLS and getting the opportunity to play in the USL as well, which is growing, soccer’s growing in the United States at a rapid pace, I think there’s opportunity to grow into those US professional sports. Most directly.

Ryan Elmore:

Next future growth plans also include, we have another partner on the company who is also a DU professor who you definitely know, Matt Rutherford. So he’s come on board and he’s been super valuable in a number of different areas. One, he like enforces some better code practices for us. He’s a computer science professor, so he’s been great to have on there, but both of his kids are high level lacrosse players once at the University of Michigan once at Tufts. And so just trying to go, not that we are going to do this anytime soon because we don’t have the data, but eventually it’d be great if we could get lacrosse data at the sort of granularity that we obtain the soccer data at, and then build a product for lacrosse. I mean, that would be sort of a natural evolution if the data is there.

Joshua Ross:

Well, I look forward to watching your progression from the sidelines and really thank you both for your time tonight. I really enjoyed our conversation and thank you for making me a little bit smarter.

Ryan Elmore:

Well, thank you. Thank you. Had a great time.

Joshua Ross:

The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Marjorie Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, X at DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcasts.