Attempting to build an entire sports-centric platform–like what Fancred is doing–is an ambitious proposition in its own right.
Something for the high school basketball scene, though, can draw remembrance from the days when LeBron James exploded onto the national radar. A time when digital media was at the nascent stages before its current state. This juncture illuminated high school hoops to the masses–disregarding the vague understanding and following for it.
Now, at the crux of another shift, comes an Atlanta-based startup with a name akin to the former and hopes to redefine the high school basketball landscape in a similar fashion as the latter: CourtCred.
They originally started out, back in fall of 2009, as a website that shared stories about the elite high school basketball players around the country. Over these last few years, CourtCred has pivoted forward to concentrate as a news medium, specifically the headlines news coverage surrounding the sport.
Last Thanksgiving Day, however, provided the instrumental epiphany to develop The Ranks app, to debut on November 11 via iOS. They were then covering the Jimmy Hicks’ HoopsGiving Classic in Houston, Texas. Corey Cooper, Founder of CourtCred, tells SportTechie that he recalls not having eaten breakfast; and a friend of his recommended that legendary coach John Lucas II would be able to help him out.
“When I got in the car, Lucas said, ‘I am familiar with CourtCred and I think it has great potential, but you need to go mobile,’” says Cooper.
“At that moment, I knew we needed to start working on a mobile product that would disrupt high school sports,” Cooper remembers.
Shortly thereafter, the CourtCred team delved into what exactly fans wanted from them often, which so happens to center around rankings. Cooper steadfastly believes that fans “love” rankings. Users voice their respective opinions about rankings on social media all the time. ESPN’s and Sports Illustrated’s NBA player rankings prior to the start of the season stand as the major examples out there, where the fervor generated by fans is a direct byproduct from such campaigns. CourtCred wants to introduce a filter that encourages fans’ opinions on this topic more so than by that of media outlets.
Cooper affirms the need for The Ranks app in the high school hoops marketplace: “Because this is the first time ever in high school sports that the fans’ opinion counts. You now have an unbiased ranking platform that includes input from all types of fans, with analytics to back it up.”
The Ranks app comprises of four main features: Top Players, People’s Choice, Petitions, and News.
The first of which highlights the overall best players around the country in a vertical stream. This hub can be arranged to be viewed either by alphabetical last name order, scout’s grade, or high school class. CourtCred has about 15 certified scouts working with them that give their professional input and assessment of a given player inside the app, rated out of 100 and by the same criteria as other scouts conduct their work. The scout’s grade is the notable point of emphasis here, besides the player’s full name, hometown, and school.
The People’s Choice feature purports the very essence of the app’s existence: allowing the fans, themselves, to determine who’s the best high school hooper in all of the land. This page can be sorted through player’s name, rating, or one-and-done. Users can personally vote their evaluation of players, with regards to the latter two buttons. The rating of a player is chosen from a scale of five basketballs, while the volume of its average factors into a player’s overall standing. A yellow line within a player’s profile represents the number of times users have selected a player to be one-and-done caliber, provided they reach the college level. It’s also worth noting that in each player’s profile, users can instantly opt-in to these players’ Twitter and Instagram accounts; and access their schedule and videos as well from MaxPreps and YouTube, respectively.
It’s the Petitions part, though, that truly takes user engagement to the next level. CourtCred made sure that this facet is highly visible and promoted in the app, a click away at the bottom of each page. No matter what class a player is in their high school career, fans–or even the player, himself–can self-enlist any player in order to be nominated to reach the coveted Watch List.
“If a player’s petition receives more than 100 signatures, we will have our scouts go out and watch the player. This is the best way for the basketball community to participate in discovering those ‘diamond in the rough’ talents,” explains Cooper.
Scouts are expected to attend one of these player’s game within three weeks and grade him accordingly, after they reached the 100 signatures mark. This visit will only transpire once during a player’s stay in high school; their respective grade out of 100 from the scouts can change if he improves later on.
As for News, this feed is aggregated from Zagsblog.com and CourtCred expects to pull from other sources in the near future.
All of these features housed in the app aim to combat the possibility of a player not receiving enough or the right exposure during its time in high school. Cooper acknowledges that there’s some good ranking systems that have been quite reliable through the years, but even the most credible rankings miss a ton of talent due to being closed off to the public.
“Scouts can’t see everyone,” states Cooper.
“I feel like The Ranks’ petition feature will allow the public to help solve the problem by introducing us to new talent,” Cooper continued.
According to NCAA research, 538,676 high school student-athletes played basketball across the country last year. Of this total, only 3.3 percent reach the NCAA level–that’s the least likelihood among six collegiate-eligible sports, including women’s basketball. Those that make the NCAA have just a 1.2 percent chance to get to the NBA or play professionally overseas. Thus, merely 0.03 percent exists for a high school basketball player to ultimately land in the pros.
The recent case study that Cooper points to that The Ranks could have helped a lot sooner is Joel Embiid. Although Embiid played for a marquee travel team, the Florida Rams, he didn’t receive plenty of minutes due to the presence of future University of Florida-bound Chris Walker. It took a stellar performance and the serendipitous attention of some scouts at Tom Topping’s The Workout before word spread about Embiid, a seven-footer who came into his senior season unranked. He could have potentially been under-recruited without anyone paying too much thought about it.
That said, this app figures to create buzz about these players well ahead of time and exponentially so.
Still, the aforementioned ranking activations being performed by major media outlets on Twitter could be trickled down to the high school level, if they or any other entity decides to follow-through with it.
In spite of Twitter serving as a great vehicle to inform fans about the latest in high school basketball recruiting, it has flaws in Cooper’s eyes: “The con is that Twitter is considered an unstructured data set of information; so, it is hard to take those opinions on players and turn that data into ratings.”
CourtCred will know when the disruption has fully formed when a sports fan ask someone else, “Who is the top high school basketball player?” and the response back is, “Let me check The Ranks and see what everybody is saying.”
They plan on taking a real grassroots campaign, going one gym at a time, to initially scale the app’s adoption rate. While this entire operation is self-funded at the moment, CourtCred just wants to let high school hoop fans know that their opinion counts in The Ranks.
CourtCred will directly be infiltrating high school basketball quickly, more so than STATS and its SportVU. Like any app, its own credibility will be predicated on the user activity inside of it–Israeli startup Numbeez and its NCAA’s prospects-focused product remains a cautionary tale for those with similar aspirations to strike this market.
Let the real Midnight Madness begin…