owned by retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods since 2016. About 11,000 Oregon teams use GameChanger, according to the company. It’s available for free on iOS, Android and the web, though users can pay $74.99 a year for a premium subscription, which gets them access to highlight clips, season statistics and “spray charts” of the path of every ball put into play. GameChanger’s reach extends all the way to Major League Baseball, which announced a multiyear partnership with the company in June. In addition to MLB, the app is wriggling its way into baseball recruiting, journalism and the 19 non-baseball and softball sports now listed on the app, including basketball, football and soccer. “In two years, families in six or seven of the major team sports will all use GameChanger the way they use it in baseball and softball today,” GameChanger president Sameer Ahuja tells OB. “That’s ambitious, but I am hoping we get there.” A huja’s familiarity with GameChanger began after he started coaching his daughter’s kindergarten softball team in Westchester County, N.Y., in 2014. “At that age it’s mostly just having fun with them, but it was literally the best part of my week,” he says. “I really took to this coaching thing.” The app kept the team connected, especially sharing photos of the children with the busy parents who couldn’t make it to every game. In 2017 he got an offer to join the company. “I just kind of jumped in and the rest is history,” he says. Ahuja worked his way up to president in 2021. Ahuja says he may be a lifer at the company because working there is both interesting and uplifting. (“This is about as wholesome as it gets,” he says.) He loves being known in his community as “The GameChanger Guy,” because of the affection people have for the app. Once, on a family vacation, he wore a GameChanger T-shirt to the airport, and strangers took photos with him when they learned he was the company president. His daughters, now 13 and 10, were appropriately mortified. GameChanger merchandise is available at, of course, company parent Dick’s Sporting Goods. One straightforward T-shirt says “Leave Me Alone, I’m Scoring” on the back. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, GameChanger had 45 employees working at the company headquarters in New York, according to Ahuja. Now they have 160 employees working in 30-plus states (three engineers work from Oregon). What changed? In a word: video. After introducing video in 2020, GameChanger is now the largest streamer in youth sports in the country. Users can watch games like they’re on TV, albeit with poorer video quality than a professional broadcast and only one camera angle, since the filming is typically done with a parent’s phone mounted to the fence behind home plate. “Customers reach out to us and say this is more valuable to them than their Netflix subscription, which is so cool to hear,” Ahuja says. Jeff Passan, ESPN’s senior MLB Insider, is one such customer. A Kansas City, Kan.- based baseball dad, Passan has purchased Wi-Fi on a plane to watch his son pitch at a high school baseball game from 30,000 feet in the air. He first used GameChanger this past spring. “I was kind of hooked from the jump,” he says. “As a baseball nerd and as someone who grew up loving nothing more than the box-score agate page … the idea that this could be applied to youth sports kind of blew my mind.” Passan says he is used to the “spectacular” MLB app with its bevy of information about pitch velocity and a hitter’s hot and cold zones. MLB’s app makes GameChanger look like, well, Little League, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Passan says. It helps parents get a better grasp of the sport. “The bare-bones nature of GameChanger is a feature, not a bug,” he says. “As much as it is a tool for following, it’s also a really good teaching tool for someone.” Despite a two-decade career in baseball journalism, Passan has not yet been invited to score his son’s varsity games on GameChanger, only the JV ones. The parents take it so seriously in his community that they often lobby the scorer to count errors as hits to improve their children’s batting averages. (Passan doesn’t budge: “I’m pretty strict.”) Before games, he used the app to scout opponents so he could warn his son and his teammates which hitters to watch out for. He’s not the only one using the technology this way, he suspects. Now that MLB is partnered with GameChanger, Passan sees potential for MLB teams to more easily scout which youth players they want in their pipeline — especially those from small schools that might be overlooked by recruiters. GameChanger touts its highlight clips as a tool for youth to attract the attention of recruiters, but the app hasn’t reached up to the college level yet, at least not in Oregon: coaches at Oregon State University, Portland State University and University of Portland all declined interview requests due to lack of familiarity with GameChanger. The GameChanger app livestreams a baseball game at Sckavone Stadium in Westmoreland Park, Portland. 38
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