By Simon Gerzberg ’21, founder, ShotQuality
During my first and sophomore years at Colgate, I worked as a data analyst/manager for the Colgate basketball team. I was tasked with multiple statistics-based projects for the coaching staff to find competitive advantages for the team.
From a basketball philosophy standpoint, my biggest passion with these projects was rooted in finding stats that hadn’t been quantified before. For example, the simple stats (box-score) that had been tracked in the past were points, rebound, and assists. Those represent the low-hanging stats in the game but don’t bring much value and insight to coaches trying to evaluate players’ performance, because they fail to depict everything else that goes into the game. And it’s everything else that is my passion.
Why doesn’t the box score show who made passes to miss baskets? Why doesn’t the box score show which teams get higher-quality shots in the game? These questions were the seeds that led to the start of my work on ShotQuality.
The concept of ShotQuality began when I entered the Colgate men’s basketball coaches office in October 2019 and talked to Assistant Men’s Basketball Coach Dave Klatsky. I asked him if there were any new projects on which I could work. It turned out that there was no video coordinator at that time. Coach Klatsky described the work as “calculating the expected value/shot quality of each play during the games.” I was enamored with the idea of this project. I went to practice the next day and started practicing the method.
“Okay, so when Tucker Richardson takes an off-the-dribble, open three-pointer that has around a 39% chance of going in, the expected value would be 1.17,” I thought to myself.
Doing this same calculation on every play, I started to get pretty good at finding the precise number. But Coach Klatsky was still so much better at doing so and was constantly finding subjective errors I’d made during the games. It was fun doing these calculations in the beginning, but it soon became exhaustive and monotonous — to the point that it led me to dread watching Colgate basketball. So, a month later (during Thanksgiving break), in November of 2019, I decided to search for a more streamlined and effective way to do the calculations.
I started in Excel, building out an automation process and learning different formulas like vlookup and match-index. If I could solve the quality-of-shot issue, then I’d once again enjoy watching my school’s basketball team. By the end of break, I had built an automated model to successfully calculate the quality of shots for all the Colgate games without any human error.
I went into the coaching staff’s office the week we returned from break, and I remember how nervous I was to show him. “Would Coach Klatsky want to move away from the model he built five years ago of calculating the quality of shots by hand?” I wondered. As I showed the coaching staff (Coach Klatsky and a few other coaches), I remember the absolute disbelief on their faces that I built this program. At that moment, I realized that I had created something real.
Fast forward a few months to February 2020, when I began trying to convert the automation of shot quality for all of college basketball. The first thing I needed to do was learn this daunting program called RStudio. Writing an essay or completing a math assignment — that is one type of challenge for me. But this didn’t feel challenging because of the depth of my enjoyment as I tried to tackle it. It was fun for me. I’d check the clock, and time would just fly by hour after hour…
By November 2020, a year after I started the process in Excel, I had acquired 25 NCAA teams as paying subscribers of ShotQuality.com, including Indiana University, University of Texas, UConn, Arizona, and other top teams. I never would have believed this growth was possible just a year after the idea’s conception. But remembering the look of disbelief on the coaches’ faces, I also can’t imagine where it’ll be a year from today.
As a participant in this year’s Entrepreneurs Fund Summer Accelerator, my biggest accomplishment was building out the ShotQuality team. Everything at the beginning (sales, data collection, product development, social media) was handled by me, while I also employed one web developer. Now, we have four different divisions of ShotQuality: sales, data science, web development, and social media.
I’m currently focused on sales and product development. I’m calling returning customers each day and finding out what aspects of the website they liked and didn’t like last year and then making product adjustments based on their advice. We also just recently introduced our college women’s data, so we are now able to increase our customer market from 350 to 700. With the introduction of sales reps, our goal is to sign up at least 70 teams this season.
The other aspect that the summer accelerator has been immensely helpful for me has been collaborating with other entrepreneurs going through similar struggles with their ventures. Receiving guidance on some of the business aspects, such as creating slide decks, building a CRM, and preparing cost/revenue analysis has been extremely beneficial. I’m excited to continue growing the existing business while expanding into different markets this season with NCAA men, women, and even sports betting.
The funding we received as part of the summer accelerator was integral to building and paying our team members. An ongoing area with which I need help is around making big-picture business decisions, as a lot of my focus is on the day-day product development and sales — any insight into the bigger picture with ShotQuality would be helpful.