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b'This week\'s guest is an old friend of mine with an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for collegiate athletics. Craig Ridley, CEO, and Co-Founder of ROUTE Analytics Inc. joins us to discuss some\\xa0game-changing innovation\\xa0efforts in the world of college sports recruitment. On today\'s show, we will discuss sports tech innovation and what ROUTE is doing to help young student-athletes make their dreams come true.
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\\nROUTE
\\nWhat is ROUTE? Craig says ROUTE Analytics is the convergence of three of his many passions. It\'s sports, technology, and innovation through\\xa0data science. We help high school athletes find their best path to play collegiate sports. We are grounded in the sport of football for three reasons: It is the most popular American sport, it is the most complex in terms of recruiting, and it is the most lucrative. There are many challenges for the parents, players, and coaches, in the recruiting process.
\\nWhat is the process of getting an athlete noticed by colleges today? Craig says it\'s more competitive than ever, and much of the lift falls on the athletes and the parents. That\\xa0process\\xa0begins earlier than ever, and the student-athletes and their families need to find the best opportunities to play. Collegiate athletic organizations such as the NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA all have varying restrictions on college coaches and student-athletes contacting each other. That is where ROUTE comes into play.
\\nWhat kickstarted ROUTE? My son played football as a wide receiver in high school and wanted to play Division 1 football, but his coach told him that he was a Div. II/Div. III player. Through the recruiting process, we realized it wasn\'t that simple. Long story short, we took a sports tech innovation approach to the process and my son was able to get recruited to play at West Virginia University.
\\nThe Birth of ROUTE
\\nCraig says that a dream without a plan is a wish. We put up a plan to help my son achieve his goal. When the coach told us that he was a D2/D3 player, we were looking at about 417 schools and a total of 672 schools with football programs in the NCAA. We went to a football camp at the University of Maryland and realized that with 350 kids at the camp, the coaches were unable to evaluate all the kid\'s talents. Realistically, you can only do about five football camps a summer with the five weeks in between football seasons.
\\nWe came back from that camp and got smarter with our approach. I started to build a spreadsheet and went to athletic and academic websites, journaling information and narrowing down the schools to target. That is the approach that we took to get my son to his dream. After navigating that process, I had parents asking me for help, but I could only help one family at a time. With my sports tech innovation background, I wondered if there was a way to help navigate this process more efficiently. With regards to ROUTE, what has been the response from coaches and schools? Craig says the coaches love it because it makes their jobs easier. We provide the\\xa0research and analytics\\xa0and the predicted outcomes, simplifying the process.
\\nSpreadsheet to Business
\\nHow did you go from a spreadsheet to launching a business? Craig says he started by looking for a great data scientist. I was blessed to find three of them and with some tremendous diverse experience. From there, we built a prototype and took it to the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA). The coaches at the show said they had never seen anything like it and encouraged us to build it. I put the initial capital in to go from prototype to beta,'