What is Tapp Sports?

Tapp Sports is an athlete evaluation tool that helps coaches input and analyze player performance data. Using Tapp's customizable evaluation templates, coaches can save hours each day spent aggregating, formatting, and comprehending data.

What was my role?

In January of 2020, I joined three friends to co-found Tapp Sports, where I served as the CTO. I led our technical team in developing a comprehensive sports tech platform, including a customizable web application, native iOS mobile app, robust API, and a powerful data processing engine. I also took on product management responsibilities, drafting UX designs, planning development sprints, and conducting user interviews.

What did I accomplish?

Company

Throughout my time at Tapp Sports, we worked with over 20 baseball teams, 500 athletes, and collected 100,000+ data points. I am proud to see how our work helped athletes quantify day-to-day performance, tracking their improvement over time. We also received gratitude from coaches who were able to spend less time managing data and more time coaching.

“Compared to last year, this app has saved me hundreds of hours staring at excel sheets and our players have become much more competitive during practice.”

In 2023, after years of dedicated effort, Tapp Sports was acquired by Play'N Sports.

Community

Another significant accomplishment from my work at Tapp Sports is the lasting impact we made on the startup community in Lincoln, NE. We were introduced to the community after being accepted into a startup accelerator program called gBETA run by gener8tor, a nationally ranked venture capital firm. This program helped us connect with other Nebraska-based startup founders and form a new entrepreneurial program for students at the Raikes School called Startup Studio.

At the time, my co-founders and I were students in the Raikes School, a highly selective honors college within the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. With a strong focus in computer science and business, the Raikes School offers students an opportunity to work with established software companies through a class called Design Studio. This program is excellent, but my team wanted to pursue our own startup, Tapp Sports, instead of working for an established company. After pitching our idea to the school administration team and board of directors, we worked together to form a new program called Startup Studio.

This accomplishment was not only important for us, but it also paved the way for other student-led startups to pursue their ideas with the full support and mentorship of Raikes School faculty members and the Nebraska startup community. I also dedicated time to work with local high school students, using my experience from Tapp Sports to teach them how to build software products and work iteratively, including user feedback throughout the process.

What did I learn?

Software Engineering

I learned how to build the technical stack for Tapp Sports on the fly, teaching myself new technologies for each layer. It began with creating a React web application and then a React Native mobile app. I also worked on Node/TypeScript and Python-based cloud functions, managed a NoSQL database, and implemented CI/CD and QA pipelines. Learning to build each each piece individually helped me understand the system at a high level and architect a robust, scalable product.

Product Management

Communicating directly with our users was a critical step throughout the development process, and it taught me many lessons in effective product management. It showed me how to lead a software development team using agile methods, transforming user feedback into actionable tasks. Listening to our power users and implementing their feedback made our app more intuitive and user-friendly, while also forming strong relationships with customers who were eager to help us succeed.

Life Lessons

Dealing with failure was tough. From losing pitch competitions to navigating through negative feedback and challenging team dynamics, each setback presented a learning experience. These challenges built resilience within our team and taught me the importance of taking risks and learning from mistakes:

• Losing pitch competitions helped us synthesize and communicate our ideas and vision for the company.
• Negative feedback allowed us to discover and resolve the largest pain points in our product.
• Difficult team dynamics taught us the value of open and honest communication, tackling problems together instead of ignoring them.

These lessons were instrumental in building Tapp Sports and have prepared me to effectively navigate my future ventures.

Press

Gallery

Practice session leaderboard

Pitching session heatmap & analysis

Data graphics generated by TappMy team and I presenting Tapp at the ABCA trade show

Learn More at tappsports.com