All right, Mike, welcome to the show.

Thanks for joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Excited to be here.

Why don't you give us a little bit about your background and then founding.

Yeah, so my background's in sports and in coaching.

Pitched at the University of Dayton.

Had a chance to sign a pro contract, didn't really work out.

Had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

College coach that I built a good relationship with.

Got me a coaching job, a GA job, and got into coaching and was a Division 3 and Division 1 pitching coach at a couple of different institutions.

And you know what was funny is that when I got.

When I was kind of going into the baseball world, I thought, okay, I'm going to spend the rest of my life in baseball as a coach.

And then I got my first GA job.

And part of the job was I had to go to grad school.

And there weren't a lot of grad schools really interested in hiring or admitting a 2.3 GPA history major from the University of Dayton.

And so I was talking to our athletic director one day and I'm like, I gotta.

I gotta figure something out.

And he goes, yeah, because he if you don't get into school or go to grad school, we can't keep you.

You have to get into a program.

And I was at Eastern Illinois, and I walked around to all of the different grad programs, the ones I was interested in anyways, the technical ones.

And I said, well, academically I'm probably going to be borderline to even qualify, but I'll tell you what, if you can give me an aptitude test, I was already hired as an assistant coach.

If you give me a competency and aptitude test and I can figure out a way to pass it, let me into your program.

And the electrical engineering and computer science teams both did that, and I passed both of them and I got into their and left Eastern Illinois with a master's degree in technology and computer science.

And from there it was just kind of okay.

How do I actually use this?

Right?

And long story short, my wife and I, we started having kids, we moved back to Minnesota.

I built up some money and didn't have to work for a little bit for some other ventures that I was a part of.

A buddy of mine that I played high school football with was coaching at a junior college here in Rochester, and I went out and watch them practice one day, and practice was awesome until they got to the part of practice where they started to prepare for the upcoming opponent.

And then it was just like screaming and frantic chaos and people running around with big note cards and pads of paper and kids getting yelled at.

And at the end of practice, I walked up to my buddy.

I'm like, what are you guys doing?

How has this not improved since 1995 when we played high school football?

And so I came back a couple of different times watching them practice, and I realized that all they were trying to do is get information from people who had it to people who needed it so they could execute more efficiently.

I went to a couple other high school football practices in the area and realized that this is actually a real problem.

From there, I was like, well, if this is a problem at multiple schools, there's probably a problem in a broader audience.

So maybe this could be a business, maybe this could be something.

But I wanted to kind of validate what that something was going to be at the time.

I took a job driving limousine, and I was taking people from Mayo Clinic to the Minneapolis airport back.

And the job was great because it gave me like this entire window of an hour and a half there and back to just think, think about that problem.

Think about what they were trying to solve.

Think about what a business could be and what that product option could be, and what.

How could you actually solve that problem in a contact sport?

And as I was making a couple of those trips, it dawned on me.

Quarterbacks are already kind of wearing, you know, a wrist coach that has plays laid out, but they're all in text, and it's just them, generally they're trying to run plays that the opponents are going to run.

Why don't we just put some type of display on the player and let's see, let's just send them the actual card that they're trying to look at from the coach and let's see what that would do.

So I went to Best Buy.

I bought a couple prepaid cell phones.

I had an old crappy Toshiba laptop that I turned into an SQL Server and a really bulky home router.

And I pieced it all together, took it out to my buddy's practice a couple weeks later and said, okay, let's.

We're going to load your plays into this, and then we're going to hit send.

On this computer, this big old laptop, you're going to hit send and it's going to send it out to a couple of these prepaid phones, and we're going to try it during a seven on seven period.

They're like, okay, fine, let's just try this and we did it.

And the players stayed on the line of scrimmage and he looked at me, and their head coach looked at me and was like, how do we buy this?

And I was like, well, that's a great question, because I don't know how to even make it really.

But that was the origin.

That's the most great product start, by the way.

Yeah, but that's how we got started.

Like, that was the origin of go route was that a buddy of mine had a problem.

I thought through how to solve it.

I figured out a way to solve it.

And with one team seeing that there was an actual need, we got our jump.

Okay, so the need here is obviously communication between coaches and players, which certainly been a trouble spot for sports for years.

So you stumble into this.

I don't say stumble into it.

You have the idea.

No, that's accurate.

That is accurate.

You identify it, you piece it together, Somebody tries it, you get that like, instant product market fit with Your market of 1.

What are the next steps?

And then maybe, just maybe before you get into that, explain in like 30 seconds kind of what Goroute is and does today.

And then we'll kind of go back to the origin just to, like, table set for everybody.

Absolutely.

So Goroute is a visual wearable communications platform.

What we do is we get information from A to B and allow coaches and players to communicate visually with context.

Okay, so whether that's a football play, where you're sending in a full football diagram and you might be the X receiver, and on your display you'll touch you're the X.

And then when the card comes in, it actually highlights the X for you and shows you what you're supposed to do and gives you a coaching tip.

If you're a baseball player, you might say, I'm a shortstop.

I touch shortstop on my watch.

And not only do you get the pitch call, but you get a scouting report that also tells you about the hitter or about the defensive alignment or positioning that you're supposed to do.

So everything we do is visual.

And the reason we went with a visual medium is because very similar to my buddy who is coaching at the junior college level, what I started to really obviously understand and notice because I had young children is that I could say something to them three, four times and they very, very, very, very likely don't comprehend everything.

But if I have something and they put something on a display or I show them something, they immediately pick it up.

It's how they understand, it's how they learn.

It's how they're used to engaging, interacting with the world.

And it kind of dawned on me that the people that we're servicing, most of them have never lived their lives without a phone or a tablet in their hand anyway.

So if they're visual by nature, the information being communicated to them when it's the most hectic, also be visual.

And that was kind of the medium that we decided to jump off to.

So yeah, we're, we're a visual communications coach, the player communications company.

We work with more than 4,000 plus schools around the country and in four different countries.

We're in both football, baseball and softball space.

And we work with teams from Alabama football to an 8U travel softball team and everything and anybody.

And in between, anybody who's wanting to simplify and maximize their communication on the field, whether it's football, baseball or softball, we're trying to work with.

So I love this and I also have so many questions.

When I was looking at your website, I'm just going to go through the order in which they popped in my head.

All right, so first one is like legal is the wrong word.

Right?

But like what are the rules that allow the this type of technology?

From my view, and I'm coming at this from like a, like a layperson's perspective, I always assumed like, you know, certain types of communication, especially at the pro level obviously are outlawed and all that.

So at the different levels, youth, high school, college, pro, what is allowed and what's not.

Right.

And where do you guys sort of slot into that?

Maybe start there.

Because that was the first thing that jumped out at me.

I'm like, this is awesome, makes sense.

But I just kind of maybe wrongly assume that players on the field couldn't always have this tech.

And I guess I hadn't thought hard enough about it.

Yeah, well, I mean, unless you had a reason to, there's no reason to think too hard about it.

Right.

But at the college level, baseball and softball, all nine players on the field can wear a wearable display and can receive one way communication.

So from the dugout to the players, there's no communication.

Going back at the high school level.

Did that communication contain anything?

Yes.

Okay, well, technically it's supposed to be the play call.

We've kind of pushed the boundaries of that a little bit.

We kind of, when we first launched the product went like way past what the NCAA was thinking about because the way we built our technology, we came at it from such a different perspective and we brought it from our football practice product.

Like we have the ability to display heat maps and spray charts and all that other stuff for individual players.

And the NCAA was like, well, that's the.

That's like nine steps too far.

So we got it down to we can send in pitch calls and play calls and defensive shifts and notes about the hitter or about what the coaches want from a positioning perspective.

So they can.

At the college level, they can do that at the high school level.

It' much more restrictive on the baseball softball side because at the high school level, they're only allowing the dugout to the catcher.

They're not allowing anybody else on the field.

This past year, the state of North Carolina approved the waiver and they were pitcher, catcher.

And what they noticed that Jason Mills was the one that put that through.

And what they noticed is that with the pitcher catcher communication, they reduced the games by around a half hour, which was a major, major time savings throughout the course of the season.

Right.

Especially with a shortage of umpires.

But at the youth level, it's kind of an open opportunity.

It's a wild west.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perfect game.

Pbr, the Alliance PGF Triple Crown, you can kind of do whatever you want.

There's really no restrictions.

Just depends on what the teams want to adopt or utilize.

And then on the football side, we've done trials with the NCAA for our wearable very successfully.

Last year, the Liberty League, a D3 league in New York and Pennsylvania.

And then this past season, or right now, we're going through high school football.

This is the first season of high school football, and it's only allowed in the state of Texas.

And so right now we' we're servicing the state of Texas with that, with the hopes that the rest of the high school, the NFHS and the high school 49 other states will start to expand and pick it up over the next year or two.

Fascinating.

So I was watching.

I'm a big Phillies fan, for better or worse, and sat through the Dodgers series.

Yeah.

But one of the things I noticed the Dodgers were doing a lot seemed to me more than other teams, maybe just because it was the playoffs.

I mean, their pitcher, one of their pitchers, forget who it was, kept taking out a car, a index card from his back pocket on the mound during pitch clock time frame.

And looking at it wasn't pitchcom.

He was looking at some sort of scouting report.

And I was like, I've seen outfielders do that.

You see infielders pick up their hat.

I had never seen a pitcher do it while his foot was on the rubber.

So it Feels like, you know, even at the highest levels, you're using these antiquated, you know, styles of relaying, communication.

So definitely onto something there is it.

Do you see a world in which at the pro level this gets tested and brought on?

And then that probably begs the next obvious question on my end is like, okay, I assume pitchcom is like the big competitor out there, at least in the baseball space.

Yeah, they are.

And yes, I think you're already seeing it.

We've already been in communication with some organizations, some teams.

I won't go into who.

But there's a big push because there's so much analytical data now in the game.

It's very hard for Tetris to focus on trying to catch a 98 mile an hour fastball or 88 mile an hour slider or cutter, and then also try to think about in this specific count, what is a scouting report supposed to say about this specific instance.

And so I know the Marlins were kind of at the forefront of this, where they were trying to now want to start calling from the dugout specifically.

Our system is built very much to do that and to provide them the ability to ingest all of that data.

You know, one of the, one of the issues with our, with our competitors, if you will, is we see the world differently than they do in a lot of different ways.

But the biggest thing that we saw different was in the tech itself with some of our competitors.

The technology you buy today will be the exact same technology you'll own six years from now.

It has no ability to change or update or upgrade unless you rebuy it.

With our technology, the way it's built with Goroute Connect, the way we transfer information and data, our system's constantly evolving.

Our systems are changing rapidly.

On an ongoing basis, we're having new integration partners with Aware or trackman or other organizations that we're talking with and working with that can ingest and push our data out to other people.

And the other systems that are using kind of antiquated, outdated radio technologies, they don't have the capability to do that without a lot of, without a lot of steps.

We.

Because we see the problem differently, right?

And I think this is really, really important is when you talk about communication, I think there's really two ways you can think about it.

You can think about, well, we're just going to relay this one bit of information because that's what.

That's the key piece of information.

Or as I mentioned earlier, you can relay information with contact.

So if I'm the shortstop and I call fastball away.

Well, fastball away for the shortstop doesn't just mean fastball away.

It means I've got to make an adjustment to where I'm positioned to where I'm moving.

Tells the third baseman, I've got to do something.

Tells the center fielder, I've got to do something.

Tells the right guard, I've got to do something.

When we call pitch left, it tells the, tells the center that we're going to pull or we're going to, you know, we're going to get to the second level.

There's all this other context around a specific call.

Because of our background in other sports and because more than 80% of the people that work at Go Route have been former college coaches, we understand the value of what that context means.

And so when we build products, we try to wrap in not just the call, but all these other context that wraps around it to give the team.

That's what we call our diamond product, Go Route Diamond.

Because it isn't just pitcher, catcher, it's literally the entire diamond.

We have the control of the entire stratosphere of what's happening around each individual pitch that's thrown.

So as an example then if I'm on the mound, okay, out calls for a fastball, will it then show the other players in the field that, you know, I got a right handed batter that they should shade the opposite way because vice versa.

So they're going to see their context, specifically direction based on the play call, same as the guard.

So like in football, you're going to have 11 different guys see 11 different things based on one play call.

Correct.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

Because if you think about it, the, the X receiver doesn't need to know what the Z is doing.

He doesn't care.

Right.

He just needs to know what he needs to do and he needs to have a context around.

Okay, this is the route tree I'm running.

The center fielder doesn't care what the third baseman's doing, right.

Where am I supposed to be positioned?

What are the chances the ball is going to go to the left center gap or right center gap?

What is, you know, do I have to get one step one way or the other?

What is my shading responsibility?

And then, you know, from the pitcher's perspective, okay, they're calling fastball in.

Well, now I know behind me, my defense is also seeing what that call is and they know what their alignment or adjustment supposed to be.

So all I have to do now.

Is just execute, talk about the product itself.

It's A looking at the website, it's a watch.

It looks, for lack of a better description, similar to an Apple watch in terms of size and shape.

Describe that piece and then what the coach sees.

Yeah, so you're very.

You're right.

The watch itself is very similar to an Apple watch.

It's an inch and a half by an inch and a half full color display.

But actually most people don't know this, but it's actually classified as a medical device.

So the manufacturer that we work with specifically is a medical device company.

And the reason we work with them is because their core business is around making sure that if somebody slips and falls or gets hurt, that their, their equipment has the ability to connect and reliably reach out to emergency services when they need them.

Well, in the coach, you know, coach to player, communication, space, reliability and connectivity are very, very core to our business.

So it made a lot of sense.

Right.

There's a lot of mutual concepts there that we shared.

And so on the display itself, the coaches or the players.

Let's talk about the display.

On the watch itself, the players have complete control of their VIS experience.

So they can turn it into light mode or dark mode.

They can select their individual position, they can select their side of the ball.

And then once they kind of go through that process of selecting and it's like two touches and they're done from there.

The coaches have a tablet, and on that tablet they build out all of their either offensive defensive play calls for football or their offensive pitch call, you know, their defensive pitch calls or their offensive, you know, third base coaching box strategies.

They, they build them out in their own terminology.

So if they, if they want to go, you know, 1, 3, and that's fastball in 13's fastball in, or they could just type out fastball in whatever they want to use as their terminology, they can build and they can do it in various different languages.

They're not restricted to just one thing, but the coaches can build their system the way they want it to, say, communicate the way the language they want to use, the verbiage they want to use, and they can organize it based upon a variety of different things, based on pitch type, based on pitcher, based on situation.

So they have complete control.

And on that tablet, all they have to do is to simply touch the option.

And as soon as they touch the option, the information is immediately transmitted and relayed to the player devices on the field in real time.

What about.

So what about durability?

I mean, obviously baseball, you hit with the ball, football A lot of contact.

What is it?

How strong is it?

Yeah.

So we have more than 50,000 units out across the country.

And like I said, in four different countries, I think this year alone, I think between football, college, high school, baseball, everything in between, I think we replaced three.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's with, you know, rain.

That's with obviously dust, dirt, whatever, helmets banging into them.

Yeah, It's.

They're very, very durable.

You missed a shot there to take a dig at pitchcom for all the stoppages with where the coach comes running out with a.

With another one.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

This.

Very wholeheartedly.

We very much never pay attention to what our competitors do or what they're doing or what they're good at or what they're bad at.

To be honest with you.

I don't care.

I don't take shots of competitors because we don't care about them.

We really only ever care about what's staring back at us in the mirror.

What are we doing?

How are we servicing our customers?

How are we marketing and selling?

How are we growing?

They spend a lot more time on us than we do on them.

Yeah.

I don't mean to keep.

I Not trying to keep bringing them up.

It's just from my reference point, it's like a baseball fan.

That's the one you see.

Everyone sees it.

Yeah.

Because of basically baseball.

Yeah.

It's the most visible one.

So you have baseball and football makes a lot of sense.

You have kind of stoppages in both of those.

Between.

Between.

Every play makes it easy for the.

The athlete and coaches to interact.

What about the other sports that are a bit more fluid?

Soccer, hockey, basketball.

You guys think about getting into them.

What are the.

Some of the unique challenges or opportunities of those or.

Or other sports?

Yeah.

So flow sports, obviously there are unique challenges.

Right.

Because as you mentioned, there's no stoppages.

We have had conversations with a handful of different organizations on different sports.

We've done some trials, we've pick some learning along the way.

We've spoken with a lot of universities who have, you know, more of the flow sports components, and they've wanted us to get involved because at the end of the day, whether it's there's a stoppage or not, a lot of these teams, whether that be soccer or basketball, lacrosse or hockey, there are points in the game where the coaches and the bench are still trying to relay information.

They're still trying to communicate.

It's just not on a consistent pitch by pitch or, you know, Snap by snap basis, right?

We're trying to figure out what that actually looks like in that world.

Like, where are those stoppages?

Where does communication really, really become prevalent?

Where is it necessary?

And is it more of a distraction than it is an enhancement?

And we're kind of going through that.

So at the moment, we don't really have any, any aspirations of expanding only because we've got so much room in front of us.

Baseball, softball and football.

I mean, right now in football, right, we, we've got one of the 50 states at the high school level.

There's 49 more states to go.

There's so much growth opportunity in front of us in the sports that we're in.

We're just trying to be really, really good.

And you know, at least from my perspective too, one of the things that's kind of a core competency at our business is I'm not real big on trying to be surface at level.

Like there's a lot some organizations use that strategy where they're going to try to be in everything at once and they're going to go and they're going to bounce, right?

Yeah.

Inch deep, mile wide, right.

I prefer to be very, very vertical.

I want to get as deep in as we possibly can in each of the sports that we're working in.

Because I think that's where you truly find the best possible solutions for the end user.

It's that you don't just build something once and then kind of leave it, let feedback go and then you kind of enhance it here and there.

You really get engrossed in it and then you try to figure out the best way to build the best possible product and user experience.

And we're very much about doing that here.

Seems like it's such a popular answer for so many people I've talked to in around youth sports in particular, is that it's so hard for anyone, especially in the tech space.

It's so hard to address all of the edge cases in all of the sports with a single tech solution and a lot of investors and money pouring in, think it's going to be very easy to consolidate a otherwise fragmented space.

But that answer I hear just over and over again.

It's like every sport, even regions, different levels, all have these different use cases, whether it's tech, registration platforms, anything, that it's so hard to go to be really successful if you're that inch deep but a mile wide.

So that definitely resonates with me.

What about Flag?

Do you guys consider Flag under the football Umbrella.

I mean, it's so hot.

Yeah, actually we're doing a lot in flag football.

We're doing a lot right now in the state of Georgia.

That's obviously been a big spot because they've just allowed it to be a varsity sport.

Obviously the NFL has made major investments in flag football and so we're spending a ton of time on our in football right now.

Not just on growing the 11 man game, but then really paying attention to flag football.

You know, we see it as potentially a pretty significant growth driver.

We anticipate that all 50 states over the next couple of years will make it a varsity sport.

And when that happens, you know they're, you're only going to see that opportunity expand.

So we're trying to get on the ground floor right now and we have a lot of conversations with the NFL franchises that have those, those initiatives currently in place, trying to figure out what their, what their needs really are and what they're trying to achieve and then seeing how we can align and be partners with them.

Talk to me about the data piece.

I'm looking at your website.

I see game changing analytics and I got, I got a heat map of the strike zone.

Obvious, you can chart pitches.

It looks like there's some AI analysis on top of that.

Talk about what you do today and then some of the opportunities to use that data for coaches, players in the future.

And will you have an API that plugs, you know, there's all these streamers out there.

Will there be an API that allows your data to plug in either in real time or after the fact?

Yeah, yeah.

So that, that, that's exactly.

Our strategy is we are, we have open APIs right now that we're looking to just hook into a lot of different partners because we're providing tip of the spear data.

Right.

What's really interesting is that when, that when, especially in the diamond space, when a coach hits fastball away.

Now you know the intent of that call was to throw fastball away and now we want to measure the outcome.

Maybe it was fastball in and now they missed by 17 inches.

Well, there's a whole story told in that 17 inches.

And we think that if you can capture that for coaches and teams, the player development insights, the strategy insights, the understanding what you can and can't call from a, from a game strategy perspective, there's so many more variables that come out of that.

It's like sabermetrics, times xyz, because now you're taking the intended versus the reality.

The variance of that is the beauty of the game.

So much of life is expectation versus reality.

So particularly in sports, how do you guys.

How are you guys tracking where the pitch actually ends up?

Do you have fixed cameras to see where it lands?

So we're not, we're doing that with partners like trackman and Aware and other organizations.

So yeah, we are really only focused on getting the data called and then we're sending that data to other people who are really great at that specific segment.

Yeah, you're basically adding like this like toggle switch variable on sabermetrics.

Right.

They have all the results and now you could toggle for where it was supposed to be and what may have happened if they hit the target or vice versa.

Right.

And you think about it, right.

At least from a coaching perspective.

And this is how we approach most things.

If I call fastball away and over the course of a season, I start to see that this individual pitcher just cannot hit that spot and he's constantly missing over the middle.

Is there something mechanically that's wrong?

Is there an arm drag?

Is his elbow too low?

Is the, you know, balls kind of coming back running back arm side?

Like, it gives me some player development ideas as to why can't they execute that specific call or why are they always missing in this specific location?

Maybe the individual's hurt and they just don't realize it.

Like there's more effect, causal effect that comes from that than just, well, we wanted to go here and it ended up here.

That's, that's one piece of it.

But like there's this entire development and player enhancement component of it too, that is really secondary to these outcomes, but I think is just as interesting.

Yeah, super, super interesting.

I love that, like, love this.

It seems like you guys have to constantly keep an eye out then for.

Especially at the higher levels in terms of what's allowed and what's not.

Like you said, there was a trial in D3 football and hopefully it works its way up the stack.

But sometimes that long tail of youth sports is obviously a larger tam.

So where do you guys focus in terms of go to market?

You're addressing all levels now.

What is your sweet spot of the distribution curve there that you're safe, there's a large enough market and then you have the pro on the fringes and, and other, you know, the other side of it as well.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think if you look on the football space, D2, D3, juco, naia and then high school football, that's, that's pretty much the sum capacity of Our market, we really don't do much in the youth football space other than flag football and 7 on 7 stuff that we're now really kind of involved with.

And that's kind of been evolving over the last 18 months or so on the.

On the football side, on the baseball side, D2 and below.

And the college level is a really big sweet spot for us.

And then about 35%, almost 40% of our diamond business is in the youth space.

It's a massive, massive market opportunity for us.

And a lot of that has to come with the fact that there's two things.

One, when you buy a product from us, you're using the exact same product that Boston College softball is using or Syracuse softball is using.

If you're an 8U softball team, you're using the exact same product and you're paying roughly the exact same price.

So we're able to go up and down the market and be very fluid with that.

We don't have a bunch of variations and take this away and pull that in and give you this and give you that.

There's a real good chance that Syracuse softball and the 9U softball team have very similar communication issues.

They're more complex in the Syracuse side, right?

Because they're a little bit more complex from a player and game perspective.

But.

But at the end of the day, the core communication issue is still a core communication issue.

Getting information from somebody who has it to somebody who needs it so they can execute.

That doesn't really change up and down the market segment.

Where it changes is all the additional context.

Right now, Syracuse can use it a lot more and get a lot more context in.

And a youth team might not utilize all those features for additional context, but they're available to them if they choose to.

And so from us, the go to market strategy has been very much understanding where our sweet spot is at the football level.

It's very, very on the diamond side.

It was very much in our first 18 months of like, wow, the youth space is a massive, massive opportunity.

But you never know, right?

And I'll say this.

We got into the diamond space begrudgingly, so people on my staff had to like, kick me yelling and screaming to do the diamond business.

Because when I was in coaching, my first job at Eastern Illinois as a graduate assistant, I was in charge of the pitching staff.

And I had to go out and raise $75,000 so we could go to our road games because we didn't have any budget.

Right?

And in my mind, that was still very much the college Baseball landscape.

And I was very uncertain about what the economics would look like or is it, you know, are we going to be fighting against an uphill battle on this?

And I should have realized, right, because I have, I have a 17 year old, a 15 year old and a 13 year old all playing travel youth sports and writing those checks every year of what we're paying.

I should have realized that the economics were definitely there at the youth level, maybe even so much so that even more than maybe some of the high schools and some of the smaller college levels, the youth sports have way more economic.

And so once we kind of did a real good market analysis, it was like, okay, let's go ahead and try this out.

And I've just been surprised by how adaptable and adoptable the youth space has been to accepting and wanting these types of technologies because they are craving them.

And I think we're successful because our product is very easy to use, doesn't require a ton of setup, it's reliable and it allows coaches to do what they want to do, whether that's really, really small or really, really big, and kind of gives them that flexibility to be in between.

And the market is just so big that if there's one segment or area or piece of it that doesn't want it, there might be, there's a whole nother piece that does.

Whereas with college and pro and the higher you go, you know, the, the smaller, smaller the opportunity is.

And if there's one, one entry point that gets closed, then your, you know, doors kind of shut.

Correct.

You could also probably make the argument, I would say on the youth level certainly maybe not down to like the really, really young, you know, t ball age.

But there's like this, there's this gap in knowledge that the players have between eight and 14, the college and pro players have and there is a need for more coaching.

Why?

While players are on the field, right.

Like the average college baseball player knows if fastball is coming, like hey, I'm going to shave the opposite way.

Like it's instinctual to them.

But if I'm like a 13 year old, I don't instinctively know that.

And I could see it and say, okay, like this is going to be an off speed pitch.

I want to when I go to the pole side.

So there's almost in my view larger use case to coach this kind of, you know, early teenage player on the field because they need it.

They're literally learning on, you know, on the fly.

Well, and to that point as well, like I was just down in Jupiter this past weekend at the Perfect Game, WWBA Worlds.

You know, my son went in and played on a team.

He never played with any of those players before, didn't know any of them.

Right.

And, you know, I've talked to the coaches and we were able to just go ahead and.

Here, go put my.

Go and use our stuff.

Go ahead and roll it out, Use it.

And you know what?

Instead of having to go through all the signs and everything else that they had to go through that these players aren't going to figure out or not going to pay attention to because they don't know each other.

And you're trying to get everybody.

It's like organizing cattle, right?

It's just like herding all these people together.

You just hit a button, everybody can see, steal second, sack one, sack three, hit and run, right?

Fastball away.

It just simplifies the game.

And I think more than anything for the players especially and the coaches is coaches a lot of times have a tendency to want to make sure that the players, they know everything about something.

Right.

And they try to relay so much information to get them to understand something.

And the players are trying to think about, what do I have to do right here?

And then try to simplify.

Right.

I think what these types of communications end up doing is allows the coaches to communicate the right bit of information to the player who needs just enough information to do what they're supposed to do, and allows that player to then just focus on execution.

And I think when you get to that level and the players adopt at that level and then they kind of buy into that, players relax.

The coaches are more confident what the players are going to do, and I think you get a better outcome.

Less shouting from the sidelines.

Yeah, yeah.

Because no kid wants to do it.

Wrong.

Yeah, right.

They all want to be successful.

So this just allows that success to happen without the anxiety of being overly verbose from that from the dugout or overly verbose from the side.

You talked about the economics of it all a minute ago.

How do you guys price it?

So we price it by device.

Okay.

So, yeah, it's very simple.

And again, it's complete custom.

So they can buy one device, they can buy 30 devices.

And the price obviously then varies up and down that chain for them.

And the more you buy, the cheaper the device cost gets.

Right.

So like all those different economics that are economies of scale, but we make it affordable to the point where, again, an 8U travel team can buy it, an NAI school can buy it, or a Division 1 baseball or softball team can buy it.

And our goal is not to break anybody's bank.

Our goal is to provide a really great product and have them have a great experience so they stay with us year over year.

You guys can win, I assume on like the long term subscription for the data piece?

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Yeah.

So you kind of use that as a way to subsidize the product, the cost of the physical product.

Correct.

Yep.

On the product itself.

I mean, obviously there are other smartwatches out there, Apple Watch, Samsung, whatever, that could theoretically do the same thing.

Talk about why you chose to go into a dedicated product which is a whole nother level of development risk.

And is there a world in which you would ever just run the software piece of it, the app piece of it to port with those existing wearables?

I have an idea as to why you don't, but I'll kind of let you answer it.

Yeah, so I won't own the business anymore if we decided to go that strategy.

One, there's really two reasons.

One, coaches don't want to be IT professionals.

Apple watches, Android watches, other things that are out there, right.

More of them require you to be paired to something else.

So you have to sign them up to a certain account.

And like that whole strategy is just very, very wonky.

How do you tell every kid you need to buy a $700 Apple Watch and then come to the ballpark?

Right.

And then God forbid something happened to it.

Who's, who's liable for replacing that watch?

Because mom and dad aren't going to buy three or four Apple watches in the course of a baseball season.

It.

Right.

So that's one, that's, that's part one.

But part two is that providing a fully enclosed, fully baked system, devices, software, network allows us to really manage the entire user experience.

Allows us to give the customer and the coach that really single touch analysis of okay, I just have my software, I build my stuff, I turn the watch on, I don't have to do anything else.

I hit send and it shows up.

I don't have to worry about routing and pairing and setting up things and all this other stuff.

It's just, it brings everything about in a very clean, tight kit and it makes things very, very simple for the teams.

The other thing too is that we provide 100% warranty.

So we remove and de risk the app.

This for the coaches.

Right.

So part of the subscription model that we, we deploy is that if something goes wrong with one of the watches, we switch it out for you, no additional cost.

You just get a brand new one in the mail within 24 to 48 hours.

There's, we just try to keep things very, very simple.

And when you piecemeal it together, the complexity of trying to figure out who brought what watch, who's got what, download that software, pair it all up, send something out, does it connect, does it pair well?

This Android watch doesn't have a great antenna, so you can't wear that one in the outfield.

This one doesn't really work.

And these like it just.

There's so many questions that you have to answer when you do that.

Trust me, I would love to just be a software company, but the reality is, is that for us to be successful long term, we have to provide the entire, the entire suite of offerings in one suit.

One sol otherwise coaches just simply aren't going to have the time to adopt it.

Do the other devices, I mean my actual thought there was, you know, the other devices are two way communication devices and that opens up all sorts of integrity.

And again, depending on the level in the league, it varies.

So is that a piece of it?

And then maybe just speak about, you know, that integrity piece in general.

I know everyone thinks of like the Houston Astros and things like that.

And then how you guys think about that and security, you know, just on the, on the communication, like the two way or the one way communication itself?

Yeah, I mean obviously those app, those consumer grade products, right, they're made for two way communication.

You're meant to be able to respond to a text message or answer a phone call and then be able to talk back, right?

So yeah, that, that was almost an eliminating factor right out of the gate was because of that.

Unless you could get to like some MDM that would just lock the device down and then you could load some type of kiosk software on it that would basically bridge it to just be a one way communication system.

And again, going through all of those steps for an individual product, for somebody's device that's a consumer product, that's their own device, is a bridge too far.

They would never do that anyway.

So yes, you're absolutely right.

The two way communication was an immediate removal factor.

But the other piece to it, you know, when you, when you reference the, you know, the Astros or some of the things that have happened in college football or what have you, is security is critical.

It is paramount.

The, the transmission, right, Our, our software, our devices, they encrypt, they, they come from the tablet encrypted, they go through the Network encrypted.

They hit our server, hit the authentication key, hit the player device, and de encrypt down on the player device.

So they are, from the start to the end, they're all encrypted.

And then the encryption key gets sent back and the encryption key gets reset within 24 hours of the organization.

So when you go to play the next game, you got a whole new set of encryption keys that are built into your system every single time you take them out to the field.

So there's this constant turning of protection.

Whether that's your D1 team or you're an 8U softball team.

We value how your data is secured all the way through the process.

And so again, providing a full comprehensive suite, watch, tablet network, everything allows us to kind of ensure and protect that when you have to piecemeal it together without consumer products, you just don't.

You lose a lot of that granularity.

You said earlier you were kind of, I guess initially surprised at the reaction of youth baseball in particular.

Baseball and softball.

What is some of the feedback you get from obviously with the youth sports podcast here, but what is some of the feedback you're getting from the youth sport operators and coaches in terms of what they love about this, what, what specific need it's addressing or problem it's solving.

And then maybe talk just about what you're seeing in the youth landscape overall when it comes to this, like technology in general.

There's so I've seen so many of these AI tracking cameras and live streaming and all of this, like just give your big picture thoughts there.

Yeah.

So the feedback we get more times than not has been our kids love it, but coaches love it because it's simple to use.

Not that we're in any way comparison to this, but we, we try to at least think about it this way.

It's like, why do people love Apple products?

Because as soon as you buy an Apple product, you turn it on, you put your Apple ID in and everything's there and it works.

You just don't have to think about it.

Right.

The experiences is so different.

And not to shirt Google.

I think Google's come a long way in that process.

Somebody listens from that.

I don't want to get a letter in the mail.

I'm a big Apple guy.

I actually set up my new iPhone yesterday.

I have gotten hit up for 50 different passwords for all of my home security cameras.

It's like you realize how much of your life is software when you have to reenter your password.

No Doubt, Yeah, no doubt.

But I mean, I think, you know, that that's been the biggest driver of it, is just how simple it is to use that.

The kids can get it and understand it so fast that there's the learning curve for them is, is one practice, it's one game for them to go through it.

And they're like, our kids knew exactly what to do, how to do it, where to go, you know, what position to select.

And again, I think it came back to that whole idea of like, it gives the kids enough information to know how to do something, but it allows them to also then execute and just be kids and play, whether you're at the B1 level or the youth level.

And.

And I think that's where the most fun happens is when they can remove all the anxiety about what am I supposed to do?

And they just know what they're supposed to do and go do it.

And that's been really the biggest piece of feedback is just the simplicity of it, how easy it is to adopt, how much the kids enjoy getting the information and how much simpler it makes the game.

Like just how much less they feel like they have to be running around telling Johnny, take three steps to the right and this person come in and tell their center fielder to actually look this way because they're staring over the fence at a string of bees and hives in a tree somewhere.

So, you know, I think, I think all of those pieces are, you know, have kind of come together.

And I mean, you can look on our website and see just, you know, testimony after testimony from youth teams talking about the value prop that it provides to them, not just from a strategy perspective, but just from a.

Just from an organization perspective.

It allows them to just be much more fluid in how they approach their game.

When you talk about the sports tech landscape, especially at the youth space, right.

I think, in my opinion, I think there's like three different moats that are really kind of showing up.

There's the big private equity moat who are trying to come in and make bets, right.

So there's a lot of money flowing in, a lot of M and A, a lot of people doing that, trying to determine who are the winners and losers.

But then there's on the technology side specifically, I think there's the off the field stuff.

And that wraps into what you were talking about earlier, like team organization, team communication, mom and dad streaming, grandma and grandpa, being able to watch games, some type of analytics.

And then you've got the, like the training stuff, like the blast motions and the diamond kinetics and all those pieces that are all in there.

And then I think you've got a completely separate piece of technology which is the actual part that happens on the field.

And I think that divide is so different, it's so interesting.

And I think that's where P.E.

misses a lot.

Right.

Because they're thinking about how do, how do we coalesce some brand to do all of the things.

Well, there's a pretty significant divider between wanting to communicate with mom, dad, grandma and grandpa to stream games and keep stats and what happens on the field like the actual communication, the player engagement, the different tracking and some of those things.

And I think that divide is actually widening pretty large right now.

I think you're going to see over the next couple of years a continued push on the off the field stuff when it comes to organization and management.

And I think you're going to see lesser growth on the on field stuff from like the volume of companies that are going to come in and try to do it.

Because there's, you know, it's not just software.

Right.

You got to have other pieces to it and that.

Right.

Wrong or indifference.

It's closer to equipment in some ways.

Right, exactly.

And so I think when you kind of get to that moat of having to provide equipment and technology and tools, not just software, it creates a pretty significant barrier to entry for a lot of organizations.

Right.

So I think you'll see continued investment and growth and iteration and innovation from a software side on the off field stuff, your tracking cameras, your streaming services, your player communication applications for game management, schedule management, payment systems, all that stuff.

But when you get to the on field stuff, I think you're going to see companies like go route companies like Catapult, Player Health, those types of organizations, you'll start to see some of those companies go a little bit deeper and make bigger investments and try to widen that field out.

Because I do firmly believe that over the next five years more than 24 million athletes are gonna be wearing some form of player coach to player communication on the field during practice and competition.

I don't think it's slowing down, I think it's really speeding up.

But I don't think there's a lot of companies who are willing to take the year, year and a half step it's going to take to really get over that hump to get into the space.

Yeah, it's not the quick win that software can be.

Correct.

Fascinating stuff.

Last one, what's sort of on the roadmap in the short Term for you guys, any new features, anything you're excited about end of this year, early next year?

We're really excited about some of the integration stuff we have coming.

On the football side, we have some stuff coming in with a company called QuickProDraw, which is a drawing tool that's going to be a really easy integration that's going to come into our system.

We're really excited about some of the things that we're doing with Aware Technologies right now.

We have a couple other partnerships that will be announcing later in the fourth quarter.

I really can't talk about at the moment, but it's going to be very much around analytics and ball tracking and ball analysis and pitch analysis and some video components that are all going to be sunk with our data and all centralized in a very singular location for a player to go in and touch up, watch a video and see all the different analytics that are necessary and then the actual intended and actual outcomes of what was being done.

So we're really excited about some of those things.

The other piece to it too is we'll have in the first quarter of next year we will have some AI generators that'll happen in our system that'll allow coaches to set up their systems even more efficiently.

We just launched goroute Connect, which is our open API system that allows us to connect and plug into a bunch of other integration opportunities.

So that's been taking off.

We've already seen a lot of different companies already grabbing into our open API systems and connecting in and wanting data from us, which is really awesome.

And then we just also launched in August, we just launched our mqt, which is a sending protocol and that's been tremendous for us.

We've seen sub 1/2 latencies across the board and that's in middle of a high school football game in the state of Texas when there's 12,000, 15,000 people there, no latency at all.

Players are getting where they need to go, how they need to get there fast and reliably.

We just started rolling it out to our diamond customers in the last month and that'll be a continuous process through the first part of the season.

It's all cellular based, right?

Yes, correct.

Yep, yep.

And that's what gives us the flexibility to make all these adjustments live in real time.

Right?

Is that we're constantly iterating because we have a dynamic network that allows us to do that.

You said AI generation.

Is that like AI play calling?

So it's gonna be like AI referencing.

Like one of the things that we're working through right now is for next year for gridiron.

Specifically, we're testing out the learning engine.

So as you start to call plays in a game, it'll start to kind of reorganize your call sheet to better help you understand which calls you've called before that have been successful in similar situations.

Gotcha.

I mean, it feels like you can eventually end up, you know, even in baseball where you're.

It's calling pitches for you, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I think the analytics people want that to be the case.

I think the old baseball heads, you know, the old, the old guys are going to want it to not be that way.

You know, I think there's a, I think it's a good blend, right.

Of like, yeah, you should throw a curveball here, but this guy's fastball's three miles an hour harder today than it was yesterday or the other day.

Maybe we should just stick with the fastball.

Yeah.

And so you still need that human element to override.

Right.

But I think with so much data out there, there's so many more possibilities coming forward to us that, you know, I'm really, I'm really excited about what we've got coming in the future.

How do the, the old baseball guys relate to this?

I've been around like old, former, older former pro guys and you know, they, they don't like anything analytics.

Some of them have married, come to accept it.

But how do they react to just tech like this being a part of the game versus the old school?

Two fingers between the legs.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, look, I think at this point, what, five years, four years in since pitchcom launched at the major league level.

I think it's just become part of the game now.

I think it's, I think coach to player communications just.

The NFL's been doing it since the late 70s, early 80s with the Unhelman.

So it's certainly been around.

I think what it is, is it's.

Once you get coaches to understand that it's not really an adjustment, it's just an augmentation.

Like if they can wrap their mind around, you're calling the pitch still, instead of going through all this and your catcher missing the sign or the indicator or whatever, all you're doing is hitting a button and you're still doing the exact same thing.

It's just no longer the catcher being relied to do it.

And it's so important to get their.

Mind around and it's so important for pace of play too.

I mean, the pitch count.

Baseball went hand in hand with the pitch clock.

And in football, you saw 40 seconds between plays.

You could see a world where eventually, even in football, you're like, how can we reduce?

How can we take 10 seconds off between these plays?

Because we can get the play calls in more efficient and the guys don't have to huddle and communicate.

Yeah.

I love the context aware for every player.

That's awesome.

Where you can have 11 guys getting individual.

Yeah, individual assignments for every play call.

That's great.

All right, listen, Mike, this was awesome.

Love what you guys are building.

Why don't you plug it for our audience?

Where can they find goroute?

How could they learn more?

How could they find you if they Want to?

On LinkedIn or something like that?

Yeah.

So you can find us at goroute.com g-o R-O-U t no e dot com.

You can find us on Twitter or X, whichever you want to call it.

Okay.

Out.

And then you can find me personally on LinkedIn.

I'd love to connect with anybody that wants to connect.

My account on LinkedIn is just Mikeroli R O L I H. So look forward to connecting with people.

Awesome.

Mike, thanks so much for joining.

Great learning about go route and look forward to talking to you soon.

Yeah, thanks so much.