Summer recruiting season has begun, tournaments are kicking off and the volume of college coaches asking us to set up SportsBoard for recruiting is spiking.

But we’re also starting to see another trend, the escalation of testing events appearing as stand-alone events or on the front-end of recruiting tournaments.

• Softball: National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA), Diamond 9 Events, Premier Girls Fastpitch have tested a variety of players’ skills for several years, but they are now digitally capturing and distributing testing data to athletes using SportsBoard.


• Baseball: Stanford Baseball Camp and Under-Armour Top 96 Camps have been using SportsBoard for several years as well. Some of our baseball and softball partners are integrating the use of Diamond Kinetics’ SwingTracker and Zepp’s sensor-based technology to capture and deliver swing metric data without a single keystroke.


• Football: Testing has been part of the football culture for years, but this year SportsBoard became involved-- Northwestern University’s football camp used SportsBoard instead of laptop computers to collect and distribute testing data.

• Ice Hockey: Rocky Mountain Hockey School, Minnesota Hockey Camps, and Okanagan Hockey School have all been using SportsBoard for several years. But this summer, they are starting to focus more on age-based performance measurables to educate athletes and parents about hockey-specific skills.

Why is this happening? Two reasons:

1. Time is money--the faster an event publishes testing data for college coaches, the quicker the college coaches can act
upon it.

2. There is a real thirst for objective performance data for athletes at all ages. The hype around obtaining a college scholarship is at an all-time high, and athletes are getting recruited at younger ages than ever before.

Getting noticed at tournaments isn’t easy because college coaches can’t be everywhere, but if an athlete’s 40-yd dash, shuttle time or pop time is exceptional, then college coaches can find them quite easily in the testing reports these event operators publish. And that means that an athlete’s probability of being identified, and ultimately recruited, will rise.

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