Realplay: Helping Athletes Capture Their Best Moments
There is one thing you learn very quickly when first meeting Justin Real MBA ’17; he is obsessed with baseball. During his baseball career he experienced the stress of spending the end of high school competing for the attention of college team scouts. This is where the idea for Realplay came, helping high school and college athletes gain a competitive advantage in baseball and softball.
The Idea
Realplay is an AI powered technology company that films, edits and curates game videos for coaches, players and scouts. They provide high quality professional video and personalized profiles for each player to send to scouts and to use as a continuous performance improvement. The software, developed by Realplay’s experienced CTO Andreas Randow can do the job of watching baseball, collecting all the important data, and putting that data online in an easy to access user friendly platform..
Real came to Babson with no intentions of becoming an entrepreneur, but while in the MBA program he decided to combine his love for baseball and his entrepreneurial skills he was learning in the classroom into a venture.
“So I went to Spring Training determined to find out the answer to the question ‘how do you gain a competitive advantage in the game of baseball,’” says Real.
The answer was consistent across the board, you don’t. You just try and be a little bit better than everyone else. So Real decided to capture the most crucial moments of these players in action, so all that hard work can finally pay off.
Competitive Advantage
“We agree with many of the other companies out there that say that using video online for athletic improvement is beneficial for the athlete, coach and recruiter. Our difference is we don’t ask the player, coach or recruiter to be a cameraman or a data manager, a promoter, agent or anything other what they already are; a player, a coach, or a recruiter,” says Real.
Realplay lets the players, coaches and recruiters focus on their tasks at hand without having to worry about if the footage is being captured properly. Realplay also doesn’t just focus on working for one player, Real contracts with full leagues to film every home game so the entire league can have access to the footage, no matter the socio economic background of the athlete.
The Babson Community
Every aspect of the creation of Realplay has involved resources and support from Babson. “I have run every operation out of one Babson building or the other. Starting off in the library, where we filled up the library desktops with videos off of a camera we borrowed from the media department.” says Real. “We were a part of the Butler Launch Pad where the community workspace in the Blank Center allowed us to really test out our software, train our people, and operate successfully,”
Justin attributes his ability to pitch and bring his business to the level where he can be competitive in gaining funding to Babson professors Ruben Mancha, Jerome Taillard, Bob Turner, Richard Wang, and Heidi Neck.
The Future
In the immediate future, Realplay is looking to finalize a large agreement with a local league to film every home baseball and softball game in the 2018 season. The company is looking to raise an angel round of funding to grow and scale beyond next spring.
Real knows that the technology is effective, knows that there is a need and that customers want his product, so the future is incredibly bright. He is ready to, play ball!