LegUP Analytics founder Anthony Blake.
LegUP Analytics founder Anthony Blake.

The NFL is already ditching paper for tablets in a move to help players and coaches become more efficient. Now one Seattle entrepreneur wants to do the same for high school and college teams.

Anthony Blake is the founder of LegUP Analytics, a new startup that replaces the existing pen and paper documentation process employed by most football teams to record plays during the course of a game.

“We’re taking an outdated process and re-imagining it based on the expectations of the modern coach and capabilities of current technology,” said Blake, a former product manager at Microsoft.

As a college student at the University of Michigan, Blake was the football team’s student manager. His job was to record each play for the offensive coordinator, who would analyze the charts during the game to help make necessary strategic changes.

legup1Blake soon noticed several issues with that process.

“The speed of the game made errors easy to make and costly to the pen and paper tool’s usefulness,” Blake explained.

Last year, as the head coach of Redmond High’s freshman football team, Blake set out to improve the way his squad recorded stats. He built an excel model to collect the detail of each play sequence and then aggregated the information over the course of the season to provide analytics.

With LegUP Analytics, Blake is taking it one step further. The app gives coaches a way to record the elements of each play sequence — the situation, play call, and result — throughout the course of the game. Based on that information, the app calculates a play-by-play recount of the team’s playcalls and results, a drive summary, a visual quarter-by-quarter overview of the game, and a box score.

The idea is to help coaches make adjustments more efficiently, and in turn help their teams gain advantages.

“As a sideline tool, coaches are still using the pen and paper documentation system,” Blake said. “They receive very little in the way of help from it during the course of the game.”

LegUP plans to offer a paid app to youth football coaches this fall that will include basic game capture tools. But the startup has even more ambitions plans down the road.

legup2“Philosophically, LegUP is focused on elevating sports performance from the perspective of the coach and coaching staff,” Blake explained. “We believe that a coach’s performance begets team performance. Our current tool and planned roadmap are built around the entire process of leading a team through a game — including decision making, personnel management, locating/understanding trends and communication amongst coaches and players.”

And while the company is focused on youth and high school teams for now, it hopes to crack the college market soon. Both the NCAA and NFL have regulations that prohibit the use of an app like LegUP on the sidelines, but the tide seems to be changing.

“The first major changes to this situation are just starting to happen now within the NFL with the Microsoft Surface and Zebra Technologies deals,” Blake said. “We haven’t heard anything from the NCAA yet, but I believe we are two or three years away from an incredible opportunity.”

Competition includes HUDL, a video management and analysis company, and products that provide box score-styled services. Blake said that LegUP differs from HUDL because it provides real-time tools versus data for training and study, while other aspects of his app help gain an edge over similar software.

“Our focus on meeting the needs of coaches during a live sporting event, combined with the experience and usability of our product, helps us to compete favorably,” he said.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.