A simple app is helping youth baseball players preserve arm strength and avoid potential injuries later in their careers.
GameChanger provides a digital scorekeeping app to more than 125,000 amateur baseball teams around the world and is currently being used in the Little League World Series for the third consecutive year.
One key benefit of the app is helping coaches track every pitch thrown. GameChanger CEO and co-founder Ted Sullivan explained that recent research shows how overuse is a key driver of arm injuries to pitchers and eventual Tommy John surgery.
“One of the byproducts of keeping score is a real-time and archived count of every pitch thrown,” he said. “Now, coaches and parents can easily find how much their kids have thrown for all their competitions and eventually, as the kids age with the product, their entire careers.”
Along with being the official scorekeeping app of the Little League World Series, GameChanger is the first Pitch Smart-approved app by USA Baseball and MLB. Pitch Smart is an initiative to help young pitchers preserve their arms by avoiding excessive wear-and-tear.
“As part of our work with Pitch Smart, we’ve incorporated the initiative’s pitching limit guidelines directly into the app so coaches can quickly and easily reference the guidelines in-game,” noted Sullivan, a former minor league pitcher who has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
On top of scorekeeping, GameChanger also provides stat management and allows parents to see live play-by-play updates. Sullivan said his company’s main competition is the old school process of pencil and paper scorekeeping.
“We believe we’ve built a better solution: it’s easy to use, saves hours of stat calculation time, provides a coach with unparalleled insights into his/her team’s performance, and it’s free,” he said.
GameChanger processes upwards of 40,000 games per day during peak season. It offers its basic scorekeeping product for free, and charges a small monthly fee to parents or fans that want premium features like live game-streams and game recap stories.
The four-year-old company employs 50 at its New York City headquarters and last year raised a $6.8 million Series B round led by Seattle-based Trilogy Equity Partners. John Stanton, a Trilogy partner and wireless industry pioneer, sits on the company’s board.
