It’s easier than ever for parents and aspiring athletes to record themselves playing their favorite sport and capture highlights for the scrapbook and potential recruiters. But what is not so easy is sifting through all of the video and cutting up the perfect highlight reel to demonstrate athletic skills.
Enter SportXast.
SportXast is both the social network for sport lovers and the recruiting ground for amateur athletes. A free mobile application that captures game highlights of any sporting events, it allows fans and parents to follow live action, watch replays, and get to know top players, providing high school athletes with a platform to market themselves to college coaches.
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In an interview with SportTechie, SportXast CEO Molly Cernicek talks about the inspiration behind SportXast:
“There are probably more sports videos on parents’ computers than in ESPN archives, but many of these parents stop far short of being capable to edit and highlight their favorite parts of the video. We wanted to create an app to capture and share game highlights from field- or court-side unlike anything available.”
With SportXast, parents can take video highlights in eight-second clips, which Cernicek says is “enough to capture a game-changing play in most sports.”
“Being based in New Mexico,” She explains, “there is a lot of territory with minimal or zero cell coverage. Every second of video captured is close to 1mb. Our clips stream to the cloud and we want them to reach the server from a 3G zone where fans are are heavily using their phones.
Instead of half hour footage for one goal or one touch down, eight-second highlights of dramatic moments can be shared on social networks instantaneously. Facebook’s popular Sport pages, like the Sport Bible and Tab3Live, publishes under ten second highlights from high-profile sports events and occasional clips of amateur matches. So SportXast’s features fit into the social media trend of short viral sports videos made famous by Vine and other social platforms.
The Athlete Channel, a $9 a month subscription-based channel which launched in February, allows athletes to directly introduce and promote themselves to the colleges of their dreams. SportXast’s newest feature works like a sport-themed LinkedIn – a personalized page on which players can organize video highlights of their greatest moments, conversations with friends and family, and key exchanges with coaches.
SportXast currently has two target markets: youth sports clubs and media companies to attract the attention of the local sports media. Cernicek says the goal of the Athletic Channel is to promote club athletes in locations to which college coaches rarely travel for recruitment.
“We believe that 10-14 million athletes at some point between 7th and 12th grade may have an aspiration to play a college sport,” Cernicek explains. “We see additional opportunities for younger and more recreational players as well.
Though it is still in its formative phase, SportXast’s focus on short-video highlights as a means of self-promotion can change not only the landscape of college recruitment but also the way we experience sports.
With SportXast, perhaps an eight-second clip of a goal or a skill demonstration can send a kid to the college of his or her dreams.